In a Greek restaurant in north London, the author Ali Smith is being fussed over by staff who clearly adore the fact that she is a regular customer. How nice to have her literary fame acknowledged in such a sweet way, I think to myself.
And yet three hours later, when Smith has said her goodbyes and I am paying the bill, a puzzled waiter asks me why I was interviewing her. “Is she well known in some way?”
I realise the staff have no idea who she is: one of the country’s most celebrated novelists, thrice shortlisted for the Man Booker prize. The truth is simpler. They treat her royally because they think she is a lovely person. Smith, 53, lives in Cambridge with her longtime partner, the filmmaker Sarah Wood, but is in London today for some meetings and to see a play. She is a pocketful of energy, eyes of duckegg blue on the lookout for mischief from behind a wayward fringe. Her voice — the Invernesian twang still identifiable — is never far from a helpless giggle.
Full disclosure: Smith and I are pals from university. We studied English together in Aberdeen in the early 1980s. We started a magazine together, passed daft notes to each other in lectures and went to Mass together. There is a photograph of us busking on Union Street wearing grandad shirts and braces, the product of a youthful fondness for Dexy’s Midnight Runners. Smith is wearing a flat cap and playing a mouth organ.
The girl I remember from that time is remarkably like the woman in the Greek restaurant today eating dolmadaki. Playful and pixie-like, but with a tensile mind that everyone, staff and students alike, could tell was exceptional. She was still “Alison” then. “Ali” was still to emerge; intellectually, creatively, sexually. She dresses now pretty much the same way she did when she was 18, in baggy tops with overlong sleeves, and has exactly the same haircut.
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When she looks back at the teenager who turned up at Johnston Hall student residences in Aberdeen in the autumn of 1980, what does she see? “One of our cats came in yesterday with a baby bird in its mouth and I looked something like that,” she says. “My hair all sticking up like feathers and not quite being able to fly, and bones all rickety. I see that waiting, fledgling person.
“You know there’s a Pet Shop Boys song where they say: ‘I never dreamt that I would get to be the creature that I always meant to be’? The gift of a grant meant I could get to be the creature I was meant to be — or at least go towards it.”
Smith’s first novel, Like, published in 1997, drew on her postgraduate experience of moving to Cambridge to do a PhD at Newnham College. There is a dearth of good novels about Scotland’s relationship with England, and this overlooked work has taken on an extra resonance with the renewed interest in Scotland’s place in, or outwith, the UK.
Yet when other writers were fully engaged in last year’s independence referendum, Smith kept her distance. Why?
“I didn’t have a vote,” she says bluntly, “so I just withdrew from it. I didn’t have a say. There was a bit of adolescent pique, on my part, but my adolescent self was also terribly excited to hear and feel the things that we had talked about all the way through our formation, see them coming to the surface and then to see the electoral turnout.
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“It has to be one of the most exciting things I’ve ever seen politically in my life, the electoral turnout in Scotland. A pride swelled in me, and still swells in me.”
So how would she have voted if she’d had the chance? She refuses to answer the question directly, but chooses a more nuanced way to make her preference known: “My brother sent me a text the next morning that said: ‘I am 55 per cent happy and 45 per cent sad.’ And I felt like that too.”
A year on from the referendum, she has “two contrasting reactions”. She says: “Because of the life I live and the work I do, I naturally don’t like borders. I want to cross them. I think it’s important that we investigate them, and I don’t like things to be segregated, and I don’t like things to be exclusive or exclusionary.
“And at the same time I’m very interested in exploring the place where that happens, where the line is drawn, and why we are drawn to our oppositions. And I think it’s terribly important to have that dialogue.”
Her view of the Scottish question is heavily informed by her perspective on the wider world. “About seven or eight years ago I went to Morocco, and I saw the fences literally being built to stop people getting out of Africa and into Europe, saw them installing razorwire and electric fencing three to four metres high.
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“I am conscious at every point of the world walling itself in, and so any point at which one of those lines gets drawn, I want to argue that line open.”
She is talking fast now, phrases overlapping with gathering urgency. “The world is becoming more and more pressurised because of the drawing of those lines, and current politics is not dealing with the future, where we are going to have to learn to be more fluid, as human beings, right across the world, internationally. Otherwise we are going to be nothing but divided and broken.”
A Scottish nationalist, I put to her, would passionately and sincerely argue that the border is a way to protect values that she herself would want to be cherished. Smith isn’t having it. “What are these values that are so separate from everybody else’s values in the world? No, we are all human beings, and sure enough we are made by the places that made us, we’re made by where we grew up and by the values that surround us, so it’s really important to ask questions of those values in a way that relates them to all the values of the world.”
Smith is one of the most politically engaged writers of her generation. She has a particular interest in refugees but her current cause is library closures. Public Library and Other Stories, which is published in November, intersperses recent work with testimony about the deep attachment people feel to their local library.
“Libraries are the only public space left in which you do not have to spend money, in which the genders and ages all mix and nobody judges you, and there’s no security guard asking you to move on,” she says. “It’s the last of the public space where you’re not overlooked by money or security.”
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The restaurant staff are clearing away the plates as the conversation moves on to old friends. I hope that the next time Ali Smith comes in here for lunch they don’t treat her any differently because they now know she’s a famous author. I don’t expect they will. She’s already a star in their book.
A life in books
Born Inverness, 1962
Education Aberdeen University; Newnham College, Cambridge
Partner Sarah Wood, filmmaker
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Recognition Three of her novels — Hotel World, The Accidental and How To Be Both — have been shortlisted for the Man Booker prize. How To Be Both also won the Baileys Women’s Prize For Fiction, the Goldsmiths prize and the novel prize in the Costa Novel of the Year award. She was appointed CBE in the 2015 new year honours.