How to Be Both
by Ali Smith
Summary
One half of this novel belongs to George, a fiercely clever sixteen year old in Cambridge whose mother has suddenly died, leaving her with a grieving father, a small brother, and a memory to interrogate: a trip they took to Ferrara to see a fresco cycle by Francesco del Cossa, a painter her mother loved. George's half is grief observed with total precision, therapy sessions, a first love, and a self imposed vigil in front of a del Cossa painting in London, watching it the way her mother watched her.
The other half belongs to Francesco del Cossa, the actual fifteenth century painter of the Palazzo Schifanoia frescoes, about whom history knows almost nothing, a gap Smith fills with glorious invention: her Francesco is a girl raised as a boy by a bricklayer father so that the talent could have a life, and the narrative is the painter's spirit, yanked into the present, watching a strange child, George, stare at a painting. The two halves mirror, answer and complete each other, mothers lost, genders doubled, surfaces and undersides.
The famous device: the book was printed in two versions, half the copies opening with George, half with Francesco, so which story reads first is decided by the copy in your hand, and the novel means differently in each order.
Around three hundred and seventy pages, playful and profound in the same sentence.
Best for readers who want form and feeling genuinely both at once, and who will let a novel teach them how to read it as it goes.
Historical Context & Significance
How to Be Both won the Baileys Women's Prize in 2015, completing a sweep that already included the Goldsmiths Prize and the Costa Novel Award, with a Booker shortlisting besides; the New York Times later placed it among the hundred best books of the century. The dual printing was a genuine bibliographic event, and reviewers admitted the obvious: having read it one way, you can never know the book the other readers got.
The real Francesco del Cossa survives mainly through the Schifanoia months and one magnificent begging letter to the Duke of Ferrara demanding better pay, which Smith gleefully repurposes; the painter's reimagined life is her invention and her argument, that history's gaps are where fiction has standing.
Ali Smith spent the standing this book earned on the Seasonal Quartet, Autumn through Summer, written and published at news cycle speed after 2016, which made her Britain's de facto novelist of the present tense. This book remains her most complete single performance.