THE TRIALS OF FINCH
by ZADIE SMITH

Finch had three friends: Claire, Karen, and Jemima. These were tall, lucky, professional Englishwomen in their early forties who had been ever so kind to Finch, and who felt, with some reason, that they had saved her. Ten years ago, when Finch first entered their circle, these three women were married, they had families and intricate lives, and Finch had no one and nothing. It was a friendship so unlikely it had the color of charity. By befriending her, they plucked poor Finch from the very edge of something. Stopped her from slipping down a notch to join the lonely mad, who were visible everywhere in Hampstead, with their sticks and props and wigs, spitting, effortful, bent. Because of her friends, Finch was not one of these people. She had a job and did not fear the London Underground or any of its African employees with their blue caps and bloodshot eyes. She had been persuaded (after a battle!) to give up long, bright socks and men's suspenders. She no longer kept food loose in her pockets. It turned out that Finch wasn't mad at all—she was only an eccentric.
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  thanks to wood s lot

Dreaming Up Finch

This week, Zadie Smith's short story "The Trials of Finch" appears in the Winter Fiction Issue and here online (see Fiction). The story is about a peculiar middle-aged woman with a dark secret in her past, involving the deaths of two other children when she was a child. Here Smith discusses this story, and her career, with The New Yorker's Ben Greenman.
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