Swing Time

by Zadie Smith

Romance was beyond me: it required a form of personal mystery I couldn’t manufacture and disliked in others. I couldn’t pretend that my legs do not grow hair or that my body does not excrete a variety of foul substances or that my feet aren’t flat as pancakes. I could not flirt and saw no purpose in flirting. I did not mind dressing up for strangers – when out at college parties or if we went up to London for the clubs – but in our rooms, within our intimacy, I could not be a girl, nor could I be anybody’s baby, I could only be a female human, and the sex I understood was of the kind that occurs between friends and equals, bracketing conversation, like a shelf of books between bookends.