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The Fall of My Teen-Age Self, by Zadie Smith | The New Yorker

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This particular April, I’d sworn to my mother I wasn’t smoking. Therefore: stolen cigarettes. Therefore: windowsill.

Save this story Save this story I’ve been thinking about teen-agers. I have one myself now, and of course I was one once—in a different world at a different moment—and can remember the feeling. Everything was extremity. It still is. Four waves of feminism, digital connectivity, a global wellness movement, the injunction to “be kind,” the commonplace “it gets better”—none of it seems to have put much of a dent in teen-age misery, especially not of the kind that concerns me. Watching girls gather outside the multiplexes this past summer, choosing between “ Barbie ” and “ Oppenheimer ,” I thought

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