Naomi Klein: Eight things we learned when she spoke to Kirsty Young

In her BBC Radio 4 podcast Young Again, journalist and broadcaster Kirsty Young takes her guests back to meet their younger selves and asks the question: if you knew then what you know now, what would you have done differently?

Naomi Klein is a writer, social activist and filmmaker who became internationally known for her best-selling book No Logo in 1999. Her most recent title is Doppelganger, part memoir and part exploration of the meaning of political truth in the internet age.

Here are eight things we learned...

1. As a teenager Naomi couldn’t get her work published – and it’s not something she regrets

“I definitely knew I wanted to be a writer from a pretty early age,” says Naomi.

“From the age of nine, I kept a journal and just boxes and boxes of journals, and I thought I was good because I was always submitting poetry to teen magazines who would not publish them – thankfully – so there's no record of my teen poems,” Naomi laughs at the memory, before adding, “But I was sure that I wanted to do something with writing.”

In 1999 Naomi published No Logo, the book that brought her to the attention of an international audience. It has since become for many a manifesto of the anti-globalisation movement.

2. Politics was a big part of her family life growing up

“I grew up in a political family,” Naomi says. “I was born in Montreal, but my parents had just moved to Canada a couple years before because my father did not want to go to Vietnam. He was a war resistor.”

Her grandfather Philip Klein was an animator for Walt Disney. He was fired after trying to organise a workers’ strike at the animation studio in the 1940s.

“He was blacklisted and that had very real consequences. He was not able to work as an artist... it altered the course of their lives. So yeah, politics was consequential. That was our family culture.”

3. Naomi wrote a passionate bat mitzvah speech aged 12

“I would say looking back now that I was always political, even though I wasn’t political in a way that my parents understood... I didn’t like going to protests.”

“I had a very clear sense of social justice and injustice,” Naomi says. “My bat mitzvah speech was my first piece of published writing, and it was published in the synagogue bulletin… It was a kind of cri de coeur about racism within the Jewish community. I wrote a speech about how shocking I found it that at my Jewish day school I would hear racial slurs all the time.”

“I had a really good rabbi who worked with me closely,” Naomi remembers. “And he reined it in a little bit. He said I needed to tone down some of the angrier parts so that people could hear me. But he believed in me.”

“Do you think it was good advice to tone it down?” Kirsty asks.

“It was really good advice,” replies Naomi.

4. Young Naomi struggled with body image

“I really struggled with body image which was one of my biggest challenges, and the confines of femininity and what was projected on to me… Looking a certain way,” says Naomi.

But looking back, Naomi has a lot of compassion for her younger self.

“I don't feel embarrassed by my teenage self,” she says. “I was very hard on myself… I was hard on my looks. I didn't think I was good enough in pretty much any respect. I think I feel some of the compassion that I wished I'd had then for myself.”

5. She learned something from her mother’s illness

When Naomi was 17, her mother suffered a series of debilitating strokes. “It was the last year of high school, and my mother had one stroke which was severe. And then a second stroke that knocked everything out.”

“An event like that either breaks a family apart or it brings it together, or both.”

“I became a pretty active caregiver for my mom for a few years,” Naomi recalls. “Having disability in the family, at least for me, made me think fairly early on about what it means to really believe in true equality, even when that means that there need to be all kinds of accommodations for that to be possible.”

6. Naomi feels that self-consciousness stopped her enjoying her success

“If you could go back and give your 29-year-old bestselling self a little bit of advice, what would it be?” asks Kirsty.

“I'm a fairly self-conscious person, and I think I've always held my public self too tightly and worried too much about what I'm projecting,” replies Naomi.

When her book No Logo became a bestseller, Naomi found all the attention stressful. “I was suddenly being asked to give speeches to thousands of people and stuff like that, I was so acutely self-conscious and all I could do was think about what if I mess up and give a bad speech?”

“I wish I had just thought less about what I was going to say and what people would think of me. And just experienced it, because it was extraordinary.”

7. Social media now would shock her younger self

“With millions of individuals performing branded versions of themselves – because that’s what we’re doing with our avatars, with our online personas,” says Naomi. “We’re performing a version of ourselves that people mistake for us, but it’s not actually us. We are more than that little avatar.”

“I think that’s part of the reason why there’s so much cruelty online. We treat each other like things and things don’t bleed and things don’t have emotions.”

8. Naomi says she can reflect on her work now in a way she couldn’t when she was younger

“I think because I'm a political writer and because my books are always contentious, I have been resistant to that kind of reflexiveness because I've sort of had my dukes up, because I'm always having to defend the work,” Naomi considers.

But now Naomi feels she is able to look back.

“One of the joys of writing [her latest book Doppelganger] was getting to write with enough distance and humour about my teenage self, my ten-year-old self, the weirdness of going from a totally unknown writer to a very public person quite early in my life.”

“It's been almost a quarter of a century since No Logo came out, and I'm able to look at it with anthropological curiosity.”