How to Be Both

Two Stories

How to Be Both was published in two forms: half of the print run begins with the story of Francescho del Cossa, a real Renaissance fresco painter from Ferrara whose work survives in the Palazzo Schifanoia; the other half begins with George, a contemporary Cambridge teenager whose mother has recently died. Which story the reader encounters first changes the meaning of the second.

Francescho, in the Renaissance sections, is rendered in an unusual second-person voice — direct, slightly anachronistic, full of the specific sensory world of 15th-century painting. George, in the contemporary sections, is grieving: for her mother, for the self that existed when her mother was alive, for the answers to questions she never asked.

The Argument About Art

Smith’s formal conceit is not playful for its own sake. The argument of How to Be Both is that art (specifically painting, and specifically Francescho’s frescoes) persists across time in a way that creates a form of contact between the living and the dead. George visits the frescoes in Ferrara with her mother shortly before her mother’s death. Francescho’s consciousness inhabits the novel alongside George’s. The dead painter and the grieving girl are somehow in conversation.

The novel won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2015.

The Two Orderings and What They Do

The two-printings device is the book’s signature, and it is worth understanding precisely. Both editions contain the same two sections — Francescho’s and George’s — but half the print run leads with the painter and half with the girl, and there is no way to tell from the cover which copy you hold. Smith has spoken about wanting readers to encounter the book differently depending on chance, and the consequence is real rather than gimmicky: a reader who meets George first reads the contemporary grief as foreground and the Renaissance voice as an answering echo, while a reader who meets Francescho first experiences the painter as the living presence and George’s world as the strange future being watched. The title’s question — how to be both — applies to the structure as much as to its characters: both past and present, both the seen and the seer, both, in Francescho’s case, possibly male and female, since Smith plays with the historical ambiguity surrounding del Cossa’s identity. The form is the argument made tactile.

Ali Smith and the Voice of Francescho

Ali Smith is among the most inventive and decorated novelists of contemporary Britain, a four-time Booker shortlistee who would go on, immediately after this book, to write the Seasonal Quartet — Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer — composed and published at speed to register the political weather of Brexit-era Britain. How to Be Both, published in 2014, is widely regarded as her finest single novel, and its triumph is the voice of Francescho del Cossa: a real fifteenth-century fresco painter whose work survives in the Hall of the Months at the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, and about whom little is documented beyond a surviving letter complaining about his pay. Smith fills that silence with a voice that is at once earthy, punning, sensuous, and startlingly modern — a painter’s consciousness rendered through the physical facts of pigment, plaster, and the body. The achievement is that the anachronism never reads as carelessness; it reads as Smith’s claim that a great image collapses the distance between its moment and ours. The book won the Goldsmiths Prize, the Costa Novel Award, and the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2015, and was shortlisted for the Booker.

Grief, Watching, and Being Watched

Beneath the formal ingenuity, How to Be Both is a book about a daughter learning to live in the gap her mother left behind. George — short for Georgia — replays in her mind a trip she took with her mother to see Francescho’s frescoes in Ferrara, and her grief expresses itself not as collapse but as a kind of stubborn, literal-minded attention: she pores over old emails, learns Italian phrases, keeps watching a piece of footage, tries to hold her mother in place by sheer cognitive effort. Smith captures something true about adolescent mourning, which is that it lacks the structures adult life provides and so often shows up as compulsion, irony, and a refusal to perform sadness in the expected ways. The motif of watching threads through both halves: George is observed by a man she suspects of surveilling her mother, while Francescho, now a kind of disembodied spirit, watches over a living figure he cannot understand, drawn to George across five centuries. To watch and to be watched, to look at a painting and feel it look back — this is the emotional current that the formal experiment exists to carry, and it is what keeps the novel from being merely clever.

Approaching the Novel

How to Be Both rewards readers willing to surrender to ambiguity rather than demand resolution. Those who like their fiction linear, or who find wordplay an obstacle, may stall in Francescho’s section, which is the more demanding of the two — looser in syntax, freer in its associations, less obviously anchored in plot. The contemporary George sections, with their grief and their teenage precision, offer an easier point of entry, and readers nervous about the Renaissance voice might take comfort in knowing that whichever order their copy gives them is the “right” one. The novel pairs naturally with the Seasonal Quartet for anyone wanting to follow Smith’s project further, and with Kazuo Ishiguro or Rachel Cusk for readers drawn to formally adventurous contemporary fiction. Come to it for the rare pleasure of a book whose physical form is part of its meaning, and for one of the most honest accounts of adolescent bereavement in recent literature.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 4.0/5 — Smith’s most formally inventive novel and the Baileys Women’s Prize winner — the dual-time structure is not decoration but argument, about how art mediates between the living and the dead.

Reading Guides

• Where to Start with Ali Smith