Notes on the structure of *How to Be Both* (2014) — see [[Ali Smith]] for the author note. I haven't read this yet; this is a structural map assembled from reviews and study guides, not a first-hand reading.[^1][^2] ## The two halves The novel is built from two self-contained sections of roughly equal length, printed in a fixed sequence within any given copy — but Smith and her publisher deliberately produced **two different editions**, split roughly 50/50 in print runs, with the section order reversed between them. Which story a reader meets first is left to chance.[^1] - **"Camera"** — George's half. George is a bereaved 16-year-old in present-day Cambridge, grieving her mother, who has recently died suddenly. Narrated close-third, in a relatively plain, contemporary register. George keeps returning obsessively to a National Gallery painting by the Renaissance artist Francesco del Cossa — a painting she used to visit with her mother, who loved his work and took her to see his frescoes in Ferrara shortly before she died.[^2] - **"Eyes"** — Francescho's half. A voice belonging to Francesco del Cossa himself, spelled "Francescho" in this section, narrating in a dense, associative, stream-of-consciousness register that resists linear sense-making and demands a more active reader. Francescho is somehow present in modern London/Cambridge, at first mistaking it for purgatory, and becomes a spectral observer of George.[^1][^2] ## The hinge The two halves aren't sequential or causally linked in a conventional plot sense — they're mirrored. The connective tissue is the del Cossa fresco cycle in Ferrara: George's mother's fixation on it, the trip mother and daughter took to see it, and George's compulsive gallery visits afterward, on one side; Francescho's own account of painting it (and of disguising herself as a man to be permitted to paint at all — the "how to be both" of gender presentation runs alongside the "how to be both" of the dead/living, painter/subject, seeing/being seen doublings that structure the whole book) on the other.[^2] Because there's no strict chronology forcing one half to be read before the other, the "arc" isn't a single throughline so much as two arcs that rhyme: both are stories of loss, of an artist's or a grieving daughter's attention fixing obsessively on a single image, and of a consciousness trying to bridge two states at once (alive/dead, man/woman, then/now, viewer/painter). ## Effect of the dual ordering Reviewers and critics generally read the order-flip as more than a gimmick: George-first foregrounds grief and the present, and turns Francescho's section into something closer to an afterlife or a haunting; Francescho-first foregrounds the Renaissance voice and craft, and turns George's section into something closer to that ghost's discovery of who it's been watching. Same material, different emotional entry point and different sense of who is haunting whom.[^1] ## To read further - Sally Flint and Tim Haslett have both written closer structural breakdowns worth a look before or after reading.[^3][^4] - [[Bilge - Dual Narratives and Multiple Points of View]] — full text of the Bilge (2019) academic paper on the dual-narrative/multiple-POV structure, now filed with the PDF attached. Goes deeper on the colon-as-punctuation motif, the theory that George and H "wrote" Franchesco's section, and the Foucault/Merleau-Ponty/Berger framing of seeing and the gaze. <div align="center">⁂</div> [^1]: https://timothyrhaslett.wordpress.com/2015/04/14/the-structure-of-ali-smiths-how-to-be-both/ [^2]: https://www.supersummary.com/how-to-be-both/summary/ [^3]: https://www.sallyflint.com/ali-smiths-how-to-be-both/ [^4]: https://timothyrhaslett.wordpress.com/2015/04/14/the-structure-of-ali-smiths-how-to-be-both/ [^5]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338396937_Dual_Narratives_and_Multiple_Points_of_View_in_Ali_Smith's_How_To_Be_Both