Hey!
David here. Long time since I sent a newsletter, I know. But I’m writing to let you know that I’m getting back to writing a weekly newsletter, this time on Substack. You’ll get it on Wednesdays.
This is the first of those emails, which will be focused on How I Write, my interview series. Today I’m sharing the episode with Elif Shafak, who’s a wonderfully heartfelt and soul-driven author (and has written 21 books). She’s perhaps the most popular female author in Turkey and as of a few weeks ago, the new president of the Royal Society of Literature.
Watch on YouTube | Listen on Apple or Spotify
As for the show, there’s much to look forward to. In the coming weeks, I’ll be interviewing Lee Child, Fareed Zakaria, Chuck Palahniuk, the director and screenwriter of Train Dreams, Michael Pollan, and Lois Lowry (who wrote The Giver — a book I pretended to read when it was assigned to me in school and only came to appreciate as an adult).
Beyond the podcast and beyond these newsletters, I’m yearning to get back to writing substantial essays, and I have a big one in the works that I hope to share soon. Shouldn’t the host of ‘How I Write’ be writing a bunch? I think yes. I’m bothered by how the answer’s been no.
If there’s anything you’ve been reading or watching recently that you think I should know about, please do share it with me.
Happy holidays,
— David
Transcript
00:00:00 Introduction
00:02:02 Making small things feel enchanted
00:04:39 How to avoid fake wonder
00:07:22 Elif’s writing routine
00:09:13 Writing at night
00:11:11 How heavy metal helps writing
00:18:07 What makes characters feel real
00:19:55 Fixing a story
00:22:15 Writing like children
00:26:09 Which senses matter most
00:32:32 Taking risks after being successful
00:34:12 Soft vs hard writing
00:38:59 Elif’s editing process
00:43:27 How poetry influences her writing
00:48:30 What English can’t express
00:51:46 Writing as if you’re “drunk”
00:55:04 Why freedom comes first
00:57:04 Lessons from favorite writers
01:06:44 Rumi’s influence
01:10:22 Spirituality vs religion
01:15:07 How cities shape writers
01:17:11 James Baldwin’s influence
01:18:22 Melancholy and humor
David (00:00 - 02:49):
Elif Shafak has a way of writing that’s lush, that’s enchanted because she writes about real things in the world. Water, houseboats, ordinary things that we stop seeing. And she infuses them with life and wonder so that we can see the world fresh again.
Elif has written more than 21 books, and she’s the president of the Royal Society of Literature, which has had fellows like Jared Tolkien, Rudyard Kipling, W.B. Yeats, and Margaret Atwood.
You’ll notice that her writing advice is different from what you normally hear. She wants to help you splash your personality onto the page, how to write with soul, and how to unlock your wild imagination to do it day in and day out until you’re left with a finished piece of writing.
All right, let’s get to the episode.
Genre names can be kind of unhelpful and kind of annoying, but I think that magical realism is actually a pretty good genre title.
I think that it explains your work and what I admire about it, which is taking the ordinary and almost making it enchanted or filling it with wonder. I was really paying attention to how I felt as I was reading your work, and it made me realize just how closed off we get to the world that we live in, and we stop seeing all the mysteries that are inside of it. What I really admire about how you go about your craft is that you inject enchantment back into the world. That’s what I want to talk about today.
Elif (02:49 - 04:37):
Well, I so appreciate your words. Thank you. Maybe I might have a slight disagreement about the concept of magical realism, only because, and I wonder if it will make sense to you what I’m saying, but only because when I think of life, when I think of the city of Istanbul, for instance, if I may give you an example, Istanbul is not a city that says, okay, this is the box of the East, this is the box of the West.
It does not say this is the category of humor, and this is the category of sadness, or here’s the magic part and here’s the reality part. What it does instead is it combines everything constantly in the wildest way possible. So it’s a city of so many contrasts, but everything condensed.
Sometimes in one moment, in one scene, for instance, in Istanbul, you might come across a very sad moment, but underneath, there’s a layer of absurd. I wouldn’t call it funny, perhaps, but the humor that comes with absurd or the opposite. There’s such a funny moment, but underneath, my goodness, there’s so much sorrow.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, in my mind, I do not separate these categories. Like, here’s the domain of magic and here’s the domain of reality. That’s my only opposition to the term magical realism, because it assumes that there’s a duality, whereas I think in life there is magic in every moment, every breath.
There’s magic also in this room. I’m longing maybe for another word, another category to describe my work and the works of many other writers.
David (04:37 - 05:09):
Yeah, I think that what happens, though, is we go about our lives and things become our left brain takes over.
Things become about utility. They become about definitions, about categories. Rather than seeing the beauty and the wonder in objects, you stop seeing that.
I think a lot of times when people try to reinject magic or wonder into whatever it is, you get into the realm of cliche. Things feel cheesy. How do you not do that?
Elif (05:10 - 06:35):
Well, I think at the end of the day, as writers, we need to follow our intuition, our heart. The moment we start thinking about what will people say, how they’re going to react? Are the readers going to like this? Are the editors going to like this? That is really a very dangerous road.
I say this as a Turkish writer who had to deal with a lot of nonsense. When my books have been published, sometimes I’ve been prosecuted, investigated, targeted. So if I start thinking about what the reaction to the story that I’m writing will be like, probably I won’t be able to write.
Therefore, for me, as a novelist, the best way forward is to remain inside that imaginary world that I am constructing and to believe in it with all my heart. Those characters become my friends. That imaginary world becomes my reality. Only when the book is done and I give it to my editor, then I can have panic attacks as to what people might say.
It’s too late. The book is born and it’s free of worries, the way it should be.
All I’m trying to say is all these adjectives that we use, the labels that we use, the categories that we use, all of that happens later. But within the process of writing, you need to keep it as pure, as independent, as free as you can.
David (06:36 - 06:54):
So can you take me to month four, month five? You’re in a novel. The characters have become your friends. You’ve created this imaginary world.
Take me to what’s going on in your life. What’s any given Tuesday like? What are you feeling? What are you experiencing? What are you thinking?
Elif (06:55 - 08:25):
No two days are exactly the same. With all due respect, sometimes it’s only a small number of writers of a certain age or background who are very proud of their precise schedules. But for all the rest of us, we’re juggling, like everyone else in every other profession. The difference is that, unlike many other professions, when you’re a writer, it’s not a job. You don’t leave it behind. It’s with me day and night. It seeps into my dreams.
I don’t have precise schedules. But I do read every day, and I take notes every day. It doesn’t mean that every note that I take will go into a book, and it doesn’t mean that everything that I write when I’m writing a book will be in the final cut. There’s a lot of deleting and erasing. There’s a continuity of reading, researching, learning, and writing. In terms of precise schedules, I don’t believe in those because we are mothers, and we have many other responsibilities.
We carve out a space for ourselves. If I cannot write during the day, I will write at night. If I cannot write at night, then I will try to do it the next morning. But that’s always my passion.
David (08:25 - 08:28):
Do you feel like you write differently during the day versus the night?
Elif (08:28 - 08:42):
The night is interesting. I’m nocturnal. I like the night, although as we get older, I think it becomes a bit more difficult to work long hours at night. But I’ve always liked working at night.
David (08:42 - 08:44):
How do you feel like the work is different?
Elif (08:46 - 09:18):
I think you have more time to listen to the voices coming from the page. That said, I’m speaking with a little bit of caution because I don’t like extreme silence. I cannot work in silence. I feel very uncomfortable when there’s too much silence around me.
Maybe it’s the impact of Istanbul. I lived in a very noisy neighborhood, which was even noisier at night than during the day. I usually put on my headphones, and I usually choose a heavy metal song.
David (09:18 - 09:24):
Which I think is absolutely hilarious. You listen to heavy metal. Who do you like?
Elif (09:24 - 09:29):
I’m a metalhead. I’ve always been a metalhead since my early youth. It never abandoned me.
David (09:29 - 09:30):
That’s so cool.
Elif (09:31 - 10:23):
What has changed over the years is I think I move towards subgenres of heavy metal. I usually listen to melodic death metal. I love industrial metal, a bit more gothic metalcore. I like many Nordic bands, Scandinavian bands.
I’m also very open to discovering many bands from all over the world. It’s such an amazing scene, or kingdom, of the heavy metal world because it’s so dynamic, so creative. There are always new bands coming.
When I like a song that speaks to me in that moment, I can listen to that song on repeat maybe 70 or 80 times. It becomes a loop. I don’t jump from one song to the next. I stay with that song, and it becomes circles and circles. That’s how I zoom in and zoom out, and then I’m in a different place.
David (10:23 - 10:32):
Explain the point of the heavy metal. Is it that you like the music? Does it make it more generative? What’s going on there?
Elif (10:32 - 11:19):
Heavy metal is so honest. It’s so raw. It’s all about raw emotions. I love the dialectics, the contrasts, particularly in melodic death metal. You know, the clean vocals with the contrast, a bit more guttural, the harshness, the intensity of it.
It’s not pretentious. It is what it is. I think it’s a myth to think that people who listen to this kind of music are aggressive souls. Many metalheads are actually very gentle souls, including many heavy metal musicians. It’s always been a genre that spoke to me, and when I listen to this kind of music.
David (11:20 - 11:45):
Maybe I feel calmer. I can definitely relate to that. I actually find I feel often the most calm in the most busy environments. But that’s not where I want to go here.
You were talking about writing from the heart. Can you explain to me what that means? The difference between the mind and the heart, their different personalities, and what it feels like to pull from the heart?
Elif (11:46 - 13:57):
I’m a little bit cautious because, at the end of the day, we use these words in a very narrow way. How do we differentiate the mind? Where does the heart start? Where does the gut end?
The human being is much more complicated, and everything is interconnected, of course. But for the sake of this, maybe building an argument, I can tell you that the mind, the rational mind, has more constraints. It’s more aware of ideas, identity politics. It’s more aware of boxes. It’s more anxious.
The heart, particularly our ability to empathize with others, is so much bigger, broader, and deeper. I want to make the heart my guide.
I think broadly speaking, there are two different ways of writing a novel. In one, the writer is like an engineer. You want to have a great plot. You want to construct everything. You want to know how the characters are going to behave beforehand. The author is in charge, in control, and there’s a lot of cerebral activity going on.
I have a lot of respect for authors who write that way, but it’s not my way. I like the second way, in which you write with your intuition. You’re a little bit drunk. You don’t quite know what you’re doing. You take risks. You don’t know what that character is going to do in the next five chapters, or you allow a side character to take over, and you’re more lost inside the text. As an author, you’re not above the text.
For me to be able to feel that kind of confidence and take the plunge, because you’re literally jumping into something without quite knowing what you’re doing, I do a lot of learning beforehand. I read a lot, I research a lot, and I listen a lot. I try to become a learner in life.
David (13:57 - 13:58):
What do you mean?
Elif (13:58 - 14:17):
To me, this is very important. Writers need to be two things all our lives. We need to be good readers, and we need to be good listeners. When I say good readers, I believe our reading lists should be eclectic. Let’s read anything and everything that speaks to us.
David (14:17 - 14:24):
Good readers don’t just read the classics, like Dostoevsky. No, read everything. Read everything.
Elif (14:24 - 16:03):
Definitely. Let’s read the classics. Let’s read Dostoevsky, Anna Karenina, Tolstoy, and many others. But if there’s a particular book that speaks to us in that moment in time, let’s not ask if it’s highbrow or lowbrow literature. Who makes those distinctions? Where do those dualities come from?
I think graphic novels are amazing. They open up our imagination. I think cookbooks are amazing. They tell us so much about cultures. Equally, let’s read political philosophy. Let’s read neuroscience, water science. Let’s have interdisciplinary conversations. Let’s keep the curiosity of the mind alive.
I always believed in being intellectual nomads. We shouldn’t have comfort zones. I think the mind is always more nourished when we dare to leave our comfort zones. So, for instance, when a novelist becomes interested in neuroscience, or when a scientist is drawn to poetry, or when a poet falls in love with film theory, or when a director is interested in political philosophy, those moments, I think, are the best, when our mind is always open to learning.
By listening, I mean not everything is found in written culture. There’s so much knowledge in this world that is transferred through oral storytelling, ballads, folktales, legends, riddles. We should not belittle that world. To the best of my ability, I would love my work to bridge written culture and oral culture.
David (16:03 - 16:29):
Also, with listening, there’s a lot that is shared that isn’t spoken, that you can hear when you’re really listening carefully. One of the things that, if you really listen to somebody, what they don’t say is as important as what they do say. You would think of listening as when they’re talking, but sometimes the pause actually tells you more than anything that they actually said.
Elif (16:29 - 17:18):
That is absolutely true. When I listen to people, I try to listen to two things: what they’re telling me, of course, but how they’re saying what they’re saying—the choice of words, the pauses, the silences.
I think those are just as important, particularly if you happen to be a storyteller from a country like Turkey, where we have lots of silences, lots of ruptures. I’ve always believed that you can’t only be interested in stories as a writer. You also need to start paying attention to silences. In that sense, maybe being a novelist is a bit like a linguistic cultural archaeologist. You have to dig deep through layers of memory and amnesia, stories and silences.
David (17:19 - 17:50):
You’re talking about listening. And I want to get into characters in terms of what makes a character believable: their strengths and their weaknesses; how they look, how they act, how they feel; and how they speak. It’s so hard to categorize these things, but there’s a felt sense of what makes a person real versus what makes a person fake. I would imagine that it requires deep listening to have an intuitive sense for when a character feels true versus false.
Elif (17:51 - 19:05):
Yes, I think how we connect with characters is a big part of the writing process. I’ve never believed in heroes, like I’ve never believed in absolutely brave, absolutely good characters, or the seeming opposite. I think as human beings, we’re all on some type of spectrum.
Maybe as a writer, I’m always intrigued by that moment when a timid person suddenly shows courage, or a very brave person has a moment when they’re so scared. Those are the things that draw my attention a lot, and also the change in our characters. We’re all going through a metamorphosis. Ovid, of course, got this so right at a very early time. It’s those transformations, those metamorphoses that I’m always drawn to.
I’m also interested in the periphery more than the center, what remains unseen more than what’s heard. The unheard has always called me.
David (19:08 - 19:42):
So when you’re thinking about the change, the transformation in a character—you were talking about how writing for you is more intuitive, not so planned—are there times when you’re thinking through that change deliberately? What happens when it’s not working? Like, what do you do? Do you descend into, “I’m going to have the imagination fix this,” or is it, “Let’s map this out, let’s see what’s going on?”
Elif (19:44 - 21:27):
I think it doesn’t matter whether it’s your first book, fifth book, or tenth novel. We always go through valleys of anxiety, mountains of depression. This is not a linear, steady progress, and doubt and self-doubt are big parts of the writing journey. That’s what I learned over the years.
One week you might feel like, “Okay, I got this. I’m writing an amazing story, it’s going to be great.” And then the next week you’re crawling on the floor, and everything you’ve written previously is so bad you just chuck it away. So that also happens.
I’m not saying that there isn’t any planning, there isn’t any plot or structure. Of course, those things are incredibly important. For instance, when I was writing *There Are Rivers in the Sky*, I literally had to hold these three storylines in my hands at the same time. It’s not like I finished one storyline and then I started another, and then I started another—they were written simultaneously. So it felt like weaving a braid, like a hair braid. That requires a lot of thinking, taking notes, and arrows.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that you have to trust your intuition. You have to understand that we don’t control everything as writers. This is not a completely rational process. I’m not denying the existence of reason and intellectual activity. But sometimes as you keep writing, you discover a lot about yourself, so there’s a self-discovery as well. There’s an irrational element as well. That’s what I’m trying to say. It’s a much more complicated process.
David (21:27 - 22:11):
I spent last week with some friends and their kids at Disney World. Kids always want you to tell them a story, and I was reflecting on my time with them. I like hanging out with kids. I’ve always gotten along with them well.
One thing I’ve noticed is I’m in a real state of play. I’m just imagining and going with the flow, doing whatever I feel like. I think the same way. When you’re in that state of mind, stories can flow out of you, and you’re surprised by what you come up with. Once you try to plan things, the mind just goes numb.
Elif (22:11 - 23:29):
Absolutely. It really resonates with me, everything you said. That’s why I believe we writers are a mess in our daily lives. We’re full of anxieties. But when we sit down and start writing, we become wiser, not because we’re wise in our daily lives, but because we tap into something bigger, older, and definitely wiser than us.
What we tap into is this ancient, universal, timeless, and placeless art of storytelling. It’s so old it doesn’t belong to a single ethnicity, class, region, or religion. It really belongs to all humanity. I think as human beings, we are all storytelling creatures.
Not only that, we are story-remembering creatures. It’s so interesting. What we remember of the past often goes hand in hand with emotions and stories. Those are the things that remain so deeply within us. Neuroscience explains those connections in the mind between emotions, memories, and stories. So I think we just have to tap into that beautiful, old, ancient art of storytelling.
David (23:30 - 24:10):
You were talking about the braided fish tank, and you have a way with metaphors and analogies. I don’t know the difference. Then there are similes. One is like, “like” or “as.”
I highlighted this one: “It had been drizzling since the early hours. Clouds hanging over the city, the color of a neglected fish tank.” That seems to be one of the things that I like best about your writing. A good metaphor can do two things. The first is it can help you see something that might be hard to see. And the second is it puts an emotional hue on whatever you’re describing that we can innately feel.
Elif (24:11 - 25:21):
I appreciate that. It’s important to activate all the senses. When I was writing *10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World*, there’s a reason why I’m mentioning this book. We know right away that the character is dead on the very first page. But her brain is active and alive for a few more minutes after her heart has stopped beating. So, within those limited minutes, as she remembers her past, the question for me as a writer was, “How do you remember?”
I think we often remember via smells and tastes. Marcel Proust wrote about this better than anyone could. It’s a very central theme to literature. Sometimes you dip your cookie or madeleine into a cup of tea, and that takes you back to your childhood. It takes you back to your grandmother. My point is, the senses are so important. How we see, how we taste, how we hear the sound of the universe—everything is alive.
David (25:22 - 25:26):
Do you find that some senses are easier to activate than others?
Elif (25:29 - 26:45):
I feel like when I’m writing, those senses are more active. Whereas in our daily life, the rational mind takes over. That’s one of the many reasons why I love literature so much, and I always associate it with freedom.
In our daily lives, if we say, “Well, I was drinking a glass of water, and then the water spoke to me,” people will think you’ve gone bonkers, right? But in fiction, you can say, “Well, actually, this drop of water has a story to tell. It has been traveling since time eternal. We haven’t discovered any new sources of water.” It’s the same drops of water in the Mississippi, the Ganges, the Thames, or the Euphrates. The same drops of water circulating over and over.
It’s the same water that we have in our bodies. One of us might have shed tears, or it’s the same water that we drink in our glass. So my point is, you can tell a story, and you’re not stopped by the rational, logical mind, because there’s more to the world. There’s more to the universe we’re living in.
David (26:45 - 27:46):
You do a beautiful job with it. In *Water*, I collected three sentences. The first is that you wrote, “For unlike humans, water has no regard for social status or royal titles.” “Water is the consummate immigrant, trapped in transit, never able to settle.” And my favorite one, “Water hardens in adverse circumstances, not unlike the human heart.”
You had this description of water falling, and it was almost like the water had fallen from the sky but hadn’t landed on a tree, almost as if it hasn’t decided where it’s going to land. All of a sudden, you’re just thinking of water. And water is just infused with this enchantment and this range of what it could be. It’s like spreading out your imagination.
I’m sitting there reading it, and I’m like, “How does she get there?” I don’t understand how your mind got there. It makes me a little teary because it’s so beautiful.
Elif (27:46 - 28:36):
Thank you. That really means a lot to me. It’s at the heart of the art of storytelling. It’s not something that I do personally. We’re all born into a box of identity. We’re born into one place in time, one religion, one ethnicity. We’re so used to looking at the world from that angle, from that window. This is what we are taught, right?
But art and literature hold us by the hand and say, “Come with me. Let’s see what’s beyond that box.” That’s why I passionately believe in this. It’s a pity that we usually emphasize the autobiographical aspect of literature. Please don’t get me wrong; I have a lot of respect for that.
David (28:36 - 28:37):
What do you mean when you say that?
Elif (28:38 - 30:01):
When we teach creative writing in workshops, the first thing students learn is to write what they know. Understandably, people then think they need to write about their own experiences and their own story. There are many amazing works of literature that started from that point, and I have a lot of respect for autobiographical books.
However, I disagree with reducing literature solely to the autobiographical; it’s more than that. There are transcendental aspects to it. Sometimes you tell your story, but sometimes it’s not about your story. It’s about the other. You become the other, and then another other, and you keep making these journeys.
This, to me, is so important. You try to go beyond those boxes, dismantle the dualities, and then realize the person you regarded as your other is actually your brother, your sister is you, and you are the other. There’s not much difference. Dissolving those dualities is a crucial aspect of literature for me.
David (30:02 - 30:26):
To what level do you feel like you sometimes become another character? Do you feel like you actually *are* that person? Like on Halloween, when someone’s really in costume, they talk like the person. For a second, it’s almost as if they actually are Thomas Jefferson or Amelia Earhart or whoever it is. To what level do you feel like you become that person?
Elif (30:26 - 31:45):
I do feel like I become that person, because otherwise I cannot write about them. That said, you also need to hear the relatively smaller characters in your heart, or those characters that might not look very nice.
You need to try to understand, and remember this is not about judgment. We are not judging our characters. We try to understand equally. You even need to understand a tree.
Sometimes I wish you had seen my agent’s face when I told him there was a talking tree. Years ago, I told him I was writing this new novel and that there was going to be a tree in it, and this tree was going to talk. I saw a flicker of panic and anxiety in his eyes, which I understand. Of course, he’s always very supportive, but he was worried for a moment.
I was worried, too, because if you have a talking tree inside a literary novel and it doesn’t work, the whole thing collapses. But I believed in that tree. I heard that voice inside my mind and soul, really, day and night. To me, she sounded so convincing. It was a she-tree. I just wanted to follow that voice. I couldn’t resist it. So you have to identify.
David (31:46 - 31:54):
Do you feel like it’s harder to take risks like that as you become more successful? Or do you feel like now that you’ve written 21 books, whatever it is, it actually becomes easier?
Elif (31:54 - 31:55):
It’s always hard.
David (31:55 - 31:55):
It’s always hard.
Elif (31:55 - 31:58):
It’s always hard, and it never gets any easier.
David (31:58 - 32:08):
What is the hard coming from? Is it from a personal fear of failure, or from the critique of the editor or the culture?
Elif (32:08 - 32:28):
I think writing *is* hard. It has suffering in it. When I’m writing, I’m always a little bit miserable, but if I’m not writing, I’ll be more miserable. That said, I also enjoy it so much, otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to do it.
David (32:28 - 32:30):
The word compulsion comes to mind.
Elif (32:30 - 33:25):
It’s stronger than us. You just have to do it. It’s art, it’s literature. The impulse is so big, and I have so many fears and anxieties.
I feel miserable and I’m like, why am I doing this to myself? Why couldn’t I choose a simpler subject? Why am I making it difficult for myself? All these questions you ask yourself.
But at the end of the day, the love of literature is stronger than all these questions. If that love is there, in everything we do in life, if love guides us, if you really love what you’re doing, only then can we keep doing it. Otherwise, writing is really not easy. As we get older, it doesn’t get any easier. Perhaps it becomes harder and harder, and that’s something we don’t talk about enough.
David (33:26 - 34:25):
Let me know if you disagree with the framing, but when I think of your writing, I almost think of soft bedsheets. Your writing doesn’t just do the job, but it’s cozy, it’s comfortable to be in.
Then you read more nonfiction-style writing, and it’s a little bit more coarse, with right angles. It really serves a purpose. I’m interested in the way that writing softens, because I think that that’s a bit of what poetry does. You trade off clarity and singularity of meaning, and then what you get is that the writing can mean more things, and it becomes beautiful, but it’s softer.
Elif (34:26 - 36:21):
Your question is really important to me. You said something that resonates with me: the singularity of meaning. How do we go beyond that? To me, that’s so important.
I don’t like these clashing certainties. We live in an age of clashing certainties, whereas in art and literature, there’s nuance, pluralism, multiplicity. Of course, as a writer, I have my opinions, my values, all of that, and I care about these issues. I care about silences, I care about minorities. There are many things we can talk about, but when you’re writing, you cannot preach. That is so off-putting. I don’t like it when writers just try to teach something or lecture.
I really don’t know the answers myself. The only thing I know is that there are questions that I care about, and it feels important to me to deal with these questions. But you do it in such a way that you open up a space of plurality, multiplicity, and nuance.
Then you need to take a step back as a writer and leave the answers to the readers, because every reader is going to come up with their own answer. Readers are not passive. No two readings are ever the same. You take two friends; dear friends. They share every little secret. They read the same book, but they wouldn’t read it in the same way. Or couples who’ve been married for 45 years, 50 years; they read the same book. One of them loves it; the other one hates it. Why? Because every reader brings their own gaze into the story. We create the meaning together, and as an author, I have to respect that diversity of answers.
So no preaching, no teaching, no lecturing; nothing like that. It’s just a space of nuance, freedom, and multiplicity that I’m after.
David (36:21 - 36:31):
When you’re editing and you produce a sentence that you’re really proud of, how does that process unfold?
Elif (36:31 - 38:11):
I think I do simultaneous editing as I keep writing. But that said, there comes a moment when you start working with your editor, and it is a blessing for an author to work with an editor who understands her or him. A book, of course, only shows the name of the author, but we work with a team of people.
I’m not only referring to the editorial process, but every moment: the cover design, the copy editors, who are amazing people. We never, in the public space, recognize their work. But these are the people who find the mistakes. They say, “For instance, you mentioned this hotel in the year 1943, but in the year 1943, that hotel did not have green curtains. It has pink curtains, so be careful.” That’s so interesting. They love fiction with such passion, or translators who translate our work into other languages.
I feel very grateful to everyone in this industry. But that said, when you are writing, you are alone. It’s the loneliest form of art. I think it was Walter Benjamin who called it the loneliest kind of art. So the storyteller is alone, and I do a lot of editing, rethinking, polishing. I never walk a straight, linear path. It’s always jumping back and forth, and I always think in more cyclical, circular timelines rather than linear.
David (38:11 - 38:14):
Besides writing, what forms of art move you?
Elif (38:16 - 38:52):
Art moves me in general. Music, dance, cinema, I love cinema. The visual arts, a sculpture.
The very fact that a sculptor can turn marble almost into liquid, like water, is mesmerizing. The fluid nature of human movements...how can you turn stone into that? So art in general, photography. I love the arts, and I think we need more interdisciplinary conversations between artists and writers. We don’t have enough of that.
David (38:53 - 39:53):
Well, I think one of the things that art can do is take us back to a state of youthful awakening. When you’re in a state of awe, you’ve completely forgotten about your life. You are so struck, awestruck. That’s why we have that word. You’re so struck by whatever’s in front of you, and you just become a kid again.
The single most embarrassing photo of me that exists, that has been taken in the last 10 years, is of this room at the Met in New York. It’s all these sculptures of women dancing, and I’m in there mirroring them, just doing whatever, with way less flexibility. But that proves my point. I would never just do that. But something about it... I said to my friend, “There’s so much movement in this room,” and he goes, “Dude, there’s no movement in this room.” But I was like, “No, there’s so much movement in the room.”
Elif (39:53 - 39:53):
Yeah.
David (39:53 - 40:04):
And I think that’s what art can do; it warps us back into a place where we’re like children again, and there’s imagination and wonder.
Elif (40:04 - 40:20):
Absolutely. You know, I love the example you gave. I could almost see it in my mind’s eye. That’s the beauty of it because when we were children, we were not afraid of calling ourselves artists, poets.
David (40:20 - 40:23):
Those categories don’t exist. It’s just being.
Elif (40:23 - 40:24):
It’s just organically part of life.
David (40:24 - 40:25):
Exactly.
Elif (40:25 - 42:38):
Children ask the deepest questions about life, death, God, and mortality. They’re not afraid to ask those questions, but as we grow up, we censor ourselves. Little by little, that creativity withers away.
I used to give talks. I also published a children’s book in Turkey, which gave me the chance to talk to young readers, like six or seven-year-olds. If you speak to a Turkish, Jordanian, or Lebanese child that age, they are no different whatsoever than a Canadian, French, or Norwegian child. At that age, children have a natural ability to be creative.
If you ask in a room full of children, “Are there any artists in this room?” so many hands go up; all of them are artists. “Are there writers in this room?” They’re writers. “Poets?” They’re poets. I think at that age, girls are perhaps a little more vocal than boys.
I would then give talks at high schools for older students, 16 or 17-year-olds, and everything would have changed. Now, if you ask in a room full of teenagers, “Are there any writers in this room?” No hands go up. “Are there any poets or painters?” Again, no hands. And girls have become timid. Why?
Because we taught them to be careful how you sit, how you talk, the length of your skirt, and the sound of your voice. You will be judged. Once you are judged, you will be categorized and put in a category. We internalize that fear of judgment, and little by little, that kills our creativity.
To me, it’s very essential that we encourage each other and remind each other of the innate, natural creativity and imagination that we all had as children before society and traditions started chipping it away.
David (42:39 - 42:50):
Can you tell me more about poetry and how you read a poem, how you feel a poem, and then how that ends up in the writing that you produce?
Elif (42:51 - 43:06):
I think poetry is the ultimate barrier for an immigrant. As you can hear in my accent, I’m not a native speaker. English for me is an acquired language. I started learning English around the time I was 10 or 11 years old.
David (43:06 - 43:09):
Yes, Spanish was your second language, so English was your third?
Elif (43:09 - 43:56):
That’s true. Spanish was my second language. Of course, when you’re an immigrant, there’s always a gap between the mind and the tongue. The mind runs faster, and the tongue, in its own clumsy, awkward way, tries to catch up but never quite can. That gap is very frustrating. If we can learn not to be intimidated by that, it can also be inspiring because you don’t take anything for granted.
When it comes to poetry, particularly writing poetry or hearing the melody, the cadence, the rhythm of the words, that is an immense challenge. That said, I love poetry, so I try to read not only in my mother tongue, which is Turkish, but also I read a lot of poetry in English.
David (43:56 - 44:12):
The poem that I know you like, which reminds me of your work, is the William Blake line, “To see the world in a grain of sand, to hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and heaven in a wildflower.”
Elif (44:12 - 44:12):
So...
David (44:15 - 44:45):
I think the challenge of awakening—you see kids, and they’ll see the smallest thing. They’ll go, “Just imagine something very big.” They don’t need the universe to imagine something as expansive as the universe. They can see the universal in the most particular, ordinary objects. I think that’s a lot of what poetry does; it reduces the claustrophobia of our own minds.
Elif (44:46 - 47:09):
Beautifully said, and you’re so right. We take it for granted, but a grain of sand, a drop of water—the seemingly small, the seemingly insignificant—actually says so much about the universe because everything is interconnected. So sometimes that small thing might be a microcosm, and it does talk about the macrocosm.
It’s a bit mystical, perhaps, this approach, but I’ve always been interested in those ancient philosophies and ancient poetry that just pays attention to the world, pays attention to details, and does not take things for granted.
This is also important when we approach nature. A tree, a creek, a stone—they’re extraordinary. We can’t take it for granted. We’re not above nature; we’re not outside nature. We’ve become so arrogant as human beings, and we have turned ourselves into consumers of nature.
If I may give you an example, if you talk to some grandmothers in Asia Minor, the Middle East, the Balkans, or the Levant, for example, when I was writing *There Are Rivers in the Sky*, I did a lot of research about the Yazidi minorities. As you know, the Yazidis are one of the most maligned, misunderstood, and persecuted minorities in the Middle East. They don’t have a written holy book, and there isn’t much written literature about them. It is a community in which memory is mostly carried on via oral storytelling. So you have to do a lot of listening to understand and connect.
I’ve spoken with many grandmothers, and I’m very grateful because they shared their stories with me. I mention this because I noticed that in the month of April, if children are running around jumping up and down as children do, the grandmothers gently warn them. Why? According to them, in the month of April, the earth is pregnant. So when you walk, you need to walk softly; you need to tread gently.
To our rational, modern minds, this is just an irrational thing.
David (47:09 - 47:10):
But of course the earth is pregnant.
Elif (47:10 - 47:45):
But of course the earth is pregnant. You’re going to see all these flowers blooming, the fruits, and we’re going to appreciate it. This idea that you need to tread gently because it’s alive—you can’t stomp on it—only a culture that has not disconnected itself from nature can come up with this kind of storytelling.
I think sometimes we’re so obsessed with novelty, the modern, and new inventions that we forget there’s a lot of wisdom in the ancient teachings all around the world.
David (47:45 - 47:52):
As you look at English, what do you think English speakers—what can’t English access that Turkish can?
Elif (47:54 - 48:57):
Every language has its own amazing strength. I love the English language and its vocabulary. It’s a challenge for me.
Some novelists are plot-driven, some are character-driven, and a smaller number are passionate about language. They’re not poets, but they write prose. I am in that group. Language has always been a big passion for me.
I wrote my first four novels in Turkish, my mother tongue. Switching to English more than 20 years ago felt like cutting off my writing hand. It was very challenging, but I needed freedom and cognitive distance.
David (48:58 - 49:05):
I love what you said. It’s a great metaphor: sometimes, in order to see something more clearly, you step away from the painting rather than closer.
Elif (49:05 - 49:41):
Absolutely. Writing in English put a bit of distance between me and my subject. It’s like taking a step back to look at a painting from a different angle.
Perhaps writing in English brought me closer to the land where I come from. I’m not generalizing, but in my case, for my personal history, this is what worked best.
Now, coming back to English, I love it when the English language uses the word “chutzpah.”
David (49:41 - 49:42):
I love that word.
Elif (49:42 - 51:00):
I love it, too. Or when you use the word “kismet,” and nobody says, “Wait a second, the first one is a Yiddish word, and the second is an Arabic word. They shouldn’t be part of the English language.”
Of course, nobody says that because they are organically part of the English language. Language is a river, and you need to allow it to flow.
In Turkey, we have Turkified our language. We have taken out so many words of Arabic or Persian origin, and sometimes from other minority backgrounds as well. As a result, our vocabulary shrunk quite a bit. I cannot help but notice these differences.
At the end of the day, all I can tell you is that my connection with the Turkish language is very emotional. It’s the language of my childhood, my grandmother. I really love it dearly. My connection with the English language is more intellectual, more cerebral, and I feel like I need that too.
I realize that if my writing has sorrow or melancholy, I still find these things much easier to express in Turkish. But humor—not condescending humor, but compassionate humor—irony, and satire, I find that much easier in English.
David (51:00 - 51:08):
Earlier, you were talking about writing as if you were drunk, almost being drunk inside of the story. Can you paint that picture of what that feels like?
Elif (51:08 - 52:07):
It’s difficult to paint that picture because I’m surrounded by the story. I’m not above the story. I’m not looking at these characters from some height. I’m inside the story, and they become my companions. We’re on this road together. That’s how I feel. I try to stay in that zone for as long as I can, as deep as I can.
The novel as a genre is where I feel most at home, most free, and where I feel like I can be multiple. We all contain multitudes, as Walt Whitman said so beautifully, so eloquently, but we forget this.
We live in a world that doesn’t allow us to be multiple, let alone celebrate that multiplicity. But when I am inside the novel, I feel like I can celebrate it. I can bring out that multiplicity.
David (52:07 - 52:34):
Yeah, well, it’s the job, I think. I feel like that is the job because there’s living inside the different characters and then, like you were saying earlier, moving between the different stories. There are so many different moods and affects in a novel that I think being able to do that just seems like the first thing you’d see in a job description.
Elif (52:35 - 53:54):
It’s like a nomadic experience. You have to journey from the psyche of one character to the next and then back and forth. So you can’t be sedentary. You have to be quite nomadic spiritually and intellectually.
I really think it’s a very humbling exercise for the human soul. As we spoke about earlier, we’re always looking at the world from our perspective, from our truth. But when we read a book or write a book, in the case of the reader, for a few hours, days, or weeks, we leave that comfort zone behind and we journey into the existence of another person. The same is true for the writer.
That’s really a very humbling exercise. You learn to look at the world from shifting perspectives, and by the time we come back to ourselves, I’m hoping we’re a little bit wiser, a little bit perhaps more mature.
Fiction can teach us things, not in a preachy way, but in a very gentle, quiet way. I think it’s unfortunate that in the English language we use the word “fiction” as if it were the opposite of “fact.” We trace its etymology all the way back to Latin to invent.
David (53:55 - 53:56):
It’s weird, isn’t it?
Elif (53:56 - 54:18):
It is. It’s not like that in every language. People rightly think, well, fiction is the opposite, the antithesis of reality. So you read fiction when you want to escape reality. I don’t agree with that. I think fiction is very interested in truth, and it does bring us closer to truth, but it does it in its own way.
David (54:19 - 55:17):
I want to read this to you because I think it really gets to the core of how you see writing differently from most people. If you think of writing class, you think of grammar, syntax, punctuation, five-paragraph essays. But you say no. What a writer needs, first and foremost, is freedom: the freedom to read, freedom to write, freedom to be a culture that values books, libraries, literacy, literature, imagination, and the universal art of storytelling. This actually is one of the things I’ve noticed about London: lots of statues of artists, which I think is cool.
A country that does not intimidate, prosecute, or exile its creative minds with forces of censorship, persecution, disinformation, and oppression; a society that does not ban books, target librarians, and remove books from libraries. So let’s start with the first part about freedom, and then we’ll get to the second part about the roots, or really the soil, that a culture needs in order to produce artistic fruit.
Elif (55:18 - 56:19):
Well, freedom is so important because when you don’t have the freedom to write, the freedom to read, the freedom to access books, so much is taken away from us. How can imagination flourish under these circumstances? And I wanted to write that article because I also wanted to be able to say we can’t take the freedom for granted. We can’t say, “Oh, it’s always there.” Sometimes it isn’t.
Where I come from, for something you write, whether you touch history or sexuality or gender or politics, for a sentence, you can be sued and put on trial. You can have prosecutors asking for three, five years in prison for fiction. You can have fictional characters being defended in court. So I’ve experienced all of these things. A part of me does not take the freedom to write or the freedom to read for granted.
David (56:20 - 56:32):
What I want to do is throw out the names of different writers who I know have inspired you, and I want to hear what you’ve taken from them, either in terms of the craft itself or what they’ve taught you about life.
Elif (56:32 - 56:33):
Wonderful.
David (56:33 - 56:34):
Walter Benjamin.
Elif (56:37 - 57:19):
I love Benjamin. He really shaped me in so many ways. I started reading Benjamin at a relatively young age. Of course, he’s not a writer that you can discover in one sitting.
Incredible mind, the collage, the diversity of his interests: culture, history, philosophy, the visual arts. I’m very interested in the interdisciplinary nature of his thinking. I think he was one of the greatest public intellectuals of the time. Yeah, I’ve always a soft spot in my heart.
David (57:19 - 57:23):
What was the book that he never finished that you really like?
Elif (57:23 - 57:24):
Almost.
David (57:24 - 57:28):
It’s called the Arcades Project.
Elif (57:28 - 57:58):
The Arcades Project, of course. It’s a massive project. And again, it’s like a collage.
But how do you read a city? How do you walk in a city and pay attention not only to its monuments, statues, streets, but to the ruins, to what has been lost, what is gone, but still somehow is present through its absence? Benjamin, in a way, showed me how to think in that way. This is very important because when you live in a city.
David (57:58 - 58:00):
Istanbul, I was about to say that.
Elif (58:00 - 58:10):
I love those remnants, ruins, absences. He’s an amazing reader of the urban world.
David (58:10 - 58:36):
Well, that’s what’s cool. I’ve never been to Istanbul. But my sense of Istanbul is I think of it as a very layered city, layered in terms of all the different cultures and people that have been there. You know, you think of Muslim on top of Christian. The city might forget in certain places, but the amnesia does not seem to exist in the same way in terms of the architecture in the buildings.
Elif (58:36 - 60:10):
Yeah, indeed. It’s layers upon layers of history, but also layers upon layers of forgetting. The way history is taught to us is his story, meaning the stories of a few sultans or sheikh men at the top of the religious hierarchy, and that’s about it. Other than that, there are no individuals in that kind of narrative.
The moment you start asking questions about seemingly ordinary people as a writer, for instance, the moment you start asking, “But where are the stories of women? Why don’t we have streets named after women? Why don’t we have any visible placards or statues, anything that honors their lives?” There’s a big silence. What was the Ottoman Empire like for a peasant woman who had no access to power or authority? What was it like for a prostitute? What was it like for a concubine who was not necessarily the sultan’s favorite in the harem? Then there’s a silence.
Equally, what was the empire like for an Armenian silversmith or an Arab peasant or a Kurdish farmer or a Jewish miller, a Greek sailor? These were the main minorities at the time. Again, there are big silences. So you have to pay attention to what is written, but also what is forgotten.
David (60:10 - 60:29):
It makes me realize how much of politics is actually a battle over what we’re remembering. There’s a choice of what we’re going to prioritize, what we’re not going to prioritize, who’s going to be on the statues, who’s not going to be on the statues, what are the stories that we’re going to teach children, what are the songs that we’re going to sing? A lot of our fights are about that.
Elif (60:30 - 61:47):
Memory is important, but not because we want to be stuck in the past. That is not healthy either. If we cannot remember, we cannot repair. What we cannot repair keeps coming back again and again.
It is an illusion to think that time is always or history is always linear, a progressive, steady march. We want to believe that the arc of history bends towards justice, but there’s no such guarantee. Maybe in reality, there are more cyclical repetitions than linear progress.
I want to question that understanding of time. The time used by storytellers is more cyclical, close to the time of nature. The Greeks were very wise about this. They talked about Chronos, the chronology, time, which is the one we can measure. Then they talked about Kairos, which is deep time. That is the time of storytelling. You look at the world from a completely different angle. If we had more words to describe time in the English language, our notion of time would be quite different.
David (61:48 - 61:53):
Can you tell me a little bit more about the difference between Kronos and Kairos?
Elif (61:54 - 63:53):
Kronos is more measurable; it’s easy to calculate. You can depend on clocks, calendars, and schedules. But Kairos is deep time, and you need to pay attention to Kairos. If you’re interested in the stories of nature, maybe the journey of a rock, you can’t just measure it with that tiny element of time. You have to look at millennia; you have to look at this longue dure of time.
I’ve always believed that storytellers should be interested in a much more cyclical notion of time. If I may give an example, I sometimes think this beautiful river that shapes London, the Thames, is a zombie river. It’s a zombie because not that long ago, it was declared biologically dead. 150 years is nothing in the history of the world; it’s a short amount of time.
So not that long ago, this beautiful river was declared dead, but it has come back from the dead because of the way human beings mistreated it. It was full of filth and sewage to such an extent that people thought no species could ever survive in water this dirty. And yet here we are today, and the Thames is full of life. It is home to close to 300 bio species.
But instead of admiring the river and respecting the river, as we’re speaking right now, in the name of money, profit, and greed, water companies are pumping sewage into the same river. When you follow the journey of a river, is it really linear time, or are we talking about a much more cyclical time? It makes you wonder.
David (63:53 - 64:32):
I remember reading that in the Christian tradition, Easter is the closest you get to Christ in the year in terms of the Resurrection. You would think, under the Kronos idea of time, that every single day you’re farther and farther from the Resurrection. But Easter actually brings you back to it.
We can feel those different ways of thinking about time in our hearts, even if we can’t measure them with tools.
Elif (64:32 - 66:00):
Absolutely. A part of us understands. Maybe we can’t quite name it or describe it, but it’s so close to our hearts.
When you look at the movements of the moon, the crescent, how it becomes the full moon, how it waxes and wanes, there are cycles in nature. As women, we understand this perhaps better. All of this is ancient knowledge. The problem is we have disconnected ourselves completely from those old philosophies, that beautiful poetry.
That’s why I think we have become very arrogant, because we think we’re the clever species and we don’t need anyone else. In reality, we’re only a tiny part of a very delicate ecosystem. One day, human beings might cease to exist on this planet, but there will be mountains and trees. These are very old beings. Maybe trees are more sentient than we recognize.
Science is now telling us that trees are more sentient than we thought. Large language models are being used to trace how different animals in nature communicate with each other. There’s so much more to nature than we know; our knowledge of it is still quite limited.
David (66:00 - 66:01):
Tell me about Rumi.
Elif (66:02 - 66:09):
I have a lot of love for Rumi’s poetry. We’re talking about a poet who lived more than 800 years ago.
David (66:09 - 66:10):
Is that long?
Elif (66:10 - 67:39):
Yes, and it is fascinating that his poetry transcends centuries. Sometimes I jokingly think we Turks like to believe that Rumi belongs to us because he lived in Anatolia, he lived in Konya, so he is our Rumi. But the Afghans say, no way, he is our Rumi because originally his ancestors came from Belcher. There are very interesting stories about how, with caravans of camels, they carried books. Books were so important for them as a family. So many Afghans will say he’s our Rumi.
The Persians will say he wrote in Persian. He’s definitely our Rumi. There are some poems of Rumi written in Greek, so the Greeks might also say he’s our Rumi.
The beauty of Rumi is that he’s nobody’s Rumi, but everyone’s. His message is universal; it transcends boundaries and borders. The same is true for many other poets and mystics who lived in very different parts of the world without seeing each other. The fact that they were saying similar things is interesting to me.
David (67:39 - 67:40):
Virginia Woolf.
Elif (67:42 - 69:38):
Massive love for Virginia Woolf. She played an important role in my life, not only as a novelist, but also as a public intellectual. I use this word as a positive word here. In the UK, when you say public intellectual, people often see it as a sign of hubris. I disagree. I would like to see more public intellectuals, people who have dedicated their lives to furthering knowledge.
I would love to see more women public intellectuals, young people welcomed as public intellectuals, working class public intellectuals, or minority background public intellectuals. I use it in a positive way. Virginia Woolf is someone who thought deeply and cared deeply about many issues that are still relevant today, from war to what it means to have a nation, militarism, violence, and togetherness.
Primarily as a novelist, I think she left a big impact on me, particularly reading Orlando. I never forget the first time I read Orlando. Until then, I didn’t know you could write novels like that; it was almost fluid. Everything transcended geography, time, temporal borders, cultural borders, and gender. She just went for it, and then she called it an autobiography or biography. It’s fascinating the way she played and the way she refused to be boxed in. She’s a very interesting author. Everything she’s written interests me.
David (69:38 - 69:57):
I thought this was an interesting way to think about religion and spirituality. Obviously, it’s not the only way, but I never really framed it in these terms—that religion could be something institutional, dogmatic, and masculine, while spirituality could have a tenor that’s more fluid, personal, and feminine.
Elif (69:58 - 71:24):
Yes, I’m interested in this. I’m not a religious person at all. The way religiosity sometimes divides humanity between “us” and “them,” and assumes that “us” is closer to truth or closer to God than “them,” is not something I relate to.
I don’t want to think in dualistic terms, but I am interested in spirituality. I don’t know what to call it, to be honest. What I am cautious about is certainty. The moment people are very certain of their truth, they close the door on others. I’m very cautious about that.
I think people who are absolutely certain of their religiosity want to get rid of doubt. But faith without doubt is dogma, and dogmas are very dangerous. Equally, people who are very sure of their atheism want to get rid of faith. Whereas in life there is faith, and I think faith can also be a secular concept. It doesn’t always have to be a religious concept.
For instance, when you start writing a novel, you don’t really know what you’re doing, but something tells you to keep going. For me, that’s a secular act of faith. When you fall in love with someone, you don’t know if that person is the right person for you, but you go with it.
David (71:24 - 71:25):
That’s a great example.
Elif (71:25 - 71:27):
It’s a secular act of faith.
David (71:27 - 71:29):
So, “til death do us part” is an act of faith.
Elif (71:29 - 72:43):
It is an act of faith. When you move to another country, or another city, you don’t know what you’re doing, but you do it. It’s not the rational mind that’s speaking.
There are all these secular acts of faith in life that we cannot brush aside. My point is, rather than the certainty of people who are very sure of their religiosity or the certainty of people who are very sure of their atheism, I am interested in something different. Maybe that is agnosticism, or maybe they’re mystics who are a bit like misfits, walking a very thin line between faith and doubt, sometimes falling a little bit, but trying to keep going.
I am interested in people who are not afraid of saying, “I don’t know. I don’t have all the answers. I’m still learning. This whole life is a learning journey.” I like that. I think there’s a certain humility to that that we have forgotten in this age of information.
Unfortunately, we’ve started to think that we know everything, or we know something about everything, and we forgot to say, “I don’t know.”
David (72:45 - 73:17):
When you think of such an expansive question around religion and spirituality—a rich question with so much potential—and you think about how top of mind that question is for you, in what way does that make it into your book?
Do you feel like your books are ways to grapple with those sorts of questions? Do you do it through characters? Do you do it through stories?
Elif (73:18 - 73:45):
It’s an interesting question. These are all important questions for me. As we talked about earlier, it’s important that you bring these questions, approach them with honesty, and give it your best as a writer.
Then you open up a space of multiplicity and plurality. You can have different characters with different opinions, and you can’t judge them.
David (73:47 - 73:48):
Like the omniscient.
Elif (73:48 - 74:22):
Right, but you’re not. It’s a long debate in literature. Flaubert, for instance, wanted to be like God in his writing, completely invisible. I’m always interested in how writers approach their writing.
My point is that we’re not there to judge our characters, and definitely we’re not there to preach. You open up these questions, but you also need to recognize that different people are going to come up with different interpretations. All I’m saying is I care about these questions, and I care about these issues that we’re talking about.
David (74:24 - 74:40):
Cities. It feels as if you have a straw that allows you to drink from the well of cities. I was talking about writers and how they’ve influenced you, but I feel like cities have influenced you just as much as the writers.
Elif (74:41 - 74:46):
That’s so true. It maybe started in Strasbourg in France.
David (74:46 - 74:47):
That’s where you were born.
Elif (74:47 - 75:37):
Yes, that’s where I was born, but I didn’t live there for a long time because my parents separated. So I have this interesting relationship with the French language and with France through its absence in my life. Sometimes absences also shape us, not only presences.
I feel like the French language was in my hands once. It’s like sand between my fingers; it just slipped away. Then I grew up in Ankara next to my maternal grandmother. This was a very conservative, very inward-looking, very patriarchal neighborhood where I really felt like we were the odd ones out. I couldn’t fit in. But that said, my grandma was a matriarch.
David (75:37 - 75:40):
I was gonna say she was very different from that.
Elif (75:40 - 76:27):
Very different, and she played an important role in my life. She was a very wise human being.
Then I moved to Istanbul on my own. I fell in love with Istanbul. I thought I would live there forever. I had so much love for the city, and I still carry that love with me. But also, it was a very difficult place for a writer, and I needed freedom.
I moved to London and became a Londoner over the years. I loved this city dearly. In between, of course, there was Madrid, Boston. I lived in Michigan. I lived in Arizona. The desert taught me a lot. Living in Arizona connected me with nature in a very different way. So you’re absolutely right: cities shaped me in many ways.
David (76:28 - 76:30):
All right, one more. Tell me about James Baldwin.
Elif (76:32 - 77:38):
James Baldwin is so close to my heart. I have this votive candle in my library that says, “James Baldwin, patron saint of exiles and poets.” Baldwin’s work, fiction primarily, and his work as a thinker and a public intellectual, has always been of interest to me.
Baldwin calls himself a commuter, and I call myself a commuter, inspired by him. He was someone who thought deeply about home, belonging, and exile. As a Black gay man in America at the time, with liberal opinions, he found it very difficult. He questioned many things when he lived in Paris and Istanbul. He came to Istanbul and spent a long time there throughout his life. Baldwin’s work has always been important to me.
David (77:39 - 77:56):
I want to close with a more melancholy topic: sadness, and writing about sadness and feeling sadness. It’s an easy emotion to run away from, but I think in order to have the depth that you have in your writing, it’s one that you need to engage with.
Elif (77:57 - 78:10):
Yes, we have to engage with sadness and sorrow. I’m not claiming it’s easy because you identify so much with your characters and the story. It really affects me and my psychology.
David (78:11 - 78:11):
Wow.
Elif (78:12 - 79:43):
I’ve always been interested in this dialectical relationship between melancholy and sorrow. We’re drawing a circle and coming back to where we started. In life, just like there’s magic in reality and reality in magic, there is also a symbiotic relationship between melancholy and humor.
I love compassionate humor, not condescending humor; not the kind of humor in which the writer situates himself or herself above and makes fun of people. I mean a compassionate humor that tries to understand our weaknesses and follies.
Each and every one of us is struggling in so many different ways. A more all-embracing kind of humor is our oxygen. There’s a lot of humor in my writing as well as melancholy. This was a little bit hard for me to explain at the beginning to my editors, mainly because the subjects I deal with are heavy and difficult sometimes. People didn’t expect to find humor in the same book, in the same pages, but because of exactly what we talked about about Istanbul, you know, being a city that mixes everything. Life mixes everything, and we need the oxygen of humor. It’s equally important to me.
David (79:44 - 80:00):
It’s been so good to meet you. You have the most compassionate, warmest heart, and it’s cool to see the writing that you do and spend some time with the person behind that writing. I’m very grateful. Thank you.
Elif (80:00 - 80:06):
It’s been an immense pleasure for me. I’m so grateful. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it so much. Thank you.
