Analysis Of Some Notes On Attunement By Zadie Smith And Highway Of Lost Girl

What happens when one has an epiphany about something, years after it has happened? The essays “Some Notes on Attunement” by Zadie Smith and “Highway of Lost Girls” by Vanessa Veselka are personal essays that at first glance seem disconnected from each other as they touch on completely different subjects. However, it is evident that both have a common theme: realization. Zadie Smith comes to appreciate an artist named Joni Mitchell a decade after she first refers to her singing as “just noise” (Smith, 2012, p. 189). Vanessa Veselka hunts for more answers as she discovers the possible identity of the truck driver who threatened her life as an adolescent. Yet, it is important to note that the theme of realization covers a multitude of ideas expressed in these essays. Smith and Veselka in telling their individual stories, also utilize stylistic choices of their writing to enhance these ideas.

Zadie Smith grew up listening to black “soul voices”, so she didn’t grasp the appeal of blonde singer Joni Mitchell and her “bloody piping” (Smith, 2012, p. 190) until a decade after her friends used to rave about her. Suddenly on a drive to Tinten Abbey a decade later, Smith changes her mind about Mitchell and writes, “How is it possible to hate something so completely and then suddenly love it so unreasonably?” (Smith, 2012, p. 191-2). Even though on the surface this essay may seem like a story of how a woman started to love an artist she previously hated, this event represents her realizing her ignorance and discovering a personal deficiency. Smith considered herself a “connoisseur of novels” (Smith, 2012, p. 191-2), but recognizes her anxiety when she converses with people who are just as much of an expert as she is- but also knowledgeable...

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...l awareness of these “invisible girls”. An example of her powerful writing can be seen in her encounter with the truck driver where she writes, “I said he didn’t want to do it. I said it was his choice. I said he could do it in a few minutes. I said it was his choice, ” (Veselka, 2012, p. 39.) She uses repetition and also varies her sentence lengths to grip the reader to make them feel exactly as she did in that moment 27 years ago.

Both Zadie Smith with “Some Notes on Attunement” and Vanessa Veselka with “Highway of Lost Girls” use their essay to tell a story. Yet in analyzing these pieces of writing, it is clear that there are more to them than just the stories themselves. These stories, filled with personal thoughts and experiences, also are full of an assortment of stylistic choices such as repetition and comparisons that emphasize many deep, underlying ideas.