Here is a false memory: one of my writing instructors once said, “You do not need to find an organizing principle for your work. You are the organizing principle.” This was enormously freeing—we could write fiction, poetry, essays, plays, articles; we could return to the same material or styles over and over; we could try out wildly new voices. This would not be evidence of uncontrollable messiness and failure to understand our own projects as writers, not to mention our own purposes here on earth. This writer, at that moment standing in the oracular spot at the front of the classroom and therefore speaking The Truth, seemed to be saying that it was fine to write whatever came to us: our own obsessions and projects would inevitably emerge. In fact, this isn’t my memory at all, but belongs to my spouse and writing partner, Ron, who once took a weekend workshop with Kate Braverman. Ron told me all this more than once, and I ate that memory and made it my own. Thinking of the writer as an organizing principle, and also as a person who will hoover up everything around them and make it theirs, is one way in to reading Zadie Smith’s complex, sad, gripping new collection, Dead and Alive: Essays.