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Before my visit, I hadn’t quite realized the extent of the scandal created in Lübeck by Buddenbrooks—not just on publication, in 1901, but for decades afterwards. This photo shows our tour guide standing in front of Manns’ grandparents’ house on Mengstraße, holding a reproduction of a 1913 ad placed in a Lübeck paper by Mann’s uncle Friedrich, denouncing Thomas as an author who “drags his own closest relatives through the mud in a caricaturing manner and flagrantly exposes the intimate details of their lives.”

The only sentence I understood in German was the last one: “A sorry bird that besmirches its own nest.” And in fact, one term that was leveled at Mann during this time was Nestbeschmutzer: nest-besmircher.

I was likewise horrified to learn that, as soon as the novel was published, Lübeckers started making “key lists” (Schlüsselliste), mapping the characters against their suspected models. The archivist at the Buddenbrookhaus told us that people would compare lists with friends, in order to fill in missing characters; booksellers would sometimes slip customers a copy of the list, along with the book. (The Buddenbrookhaus archive holds some 19 of these lists.)

So OK, here is the thing I want to write about. I just said I was “horrified”—and it’s true, I was horrified—and yet… the whole thing was also sort of hilarious. I have some pictures of us all looking at Uncle Friedrich’s ad, and everyone in our group—organized by Christine Lehnen of the University of Hamburg, and by her amazing grad student, Bita—looks delighted, even me.

When it comes to people’s efforts to identify the real models of fictional characters, or of unidentified intimate characters in memoirs, I have two contradictory sets of emotions. As a writer, I am filled with aversion and horror. As a reader, though, I totally get it. While listening to Famesick, I was constantly Googling people, apparently in a zombie-like semi-conscious state, because later I would look at my phone and be like, “Why is it open to an image search of some guy,” and then I would remember, “That’s Jenni Konner’s ex-husband, whose Hinge date diagnosed Lena’s hypermobility disorder.”

So my two questions for today are: (1) “Why do we, as readers, feel compelled to learn real-life information about literary characters,” and (2) “Why is this compulsion so horrifying to me as a writer.”

Coming up after the paywall: a 4000-word essay on this subject, with reference to Mann’s text “Bilse and I,” in which he responds to nest-besmirching allegations.

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Here is an ice-cream garbage for everyone:

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For me, these things come and go in waves. Some weeks or months, it feels like there are so many amazing books that I don’t know what to read first; other weeks or months, it feels like I’ve already “used up” all the books I am capable of enjoying, and all the other ones are not right. These rhythms are often tied for me with writing: the more of my bandwidth is occupied by my own writing, the more distracting and even painful it can be to try to get into other books—especially, somehow, contemporary fiction (which is depressing because I’m writing contemporary fiction). This is to say that I’ve been in a reading slump for several months now, and it made me think about the Kafka quote about how “a non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity,” because I think it’s the same with reading—a non-reading reader is a sad monster indeed.

So it was a huge deal for me a couple of days ago, when I started two books that I have actually been enjoying! First, in preparation for an upcoming visit to Lübeck (via the University of Hamburg), I finally picked up The Magician, by Colm Tóibín (a novelization of the life of Thomas Mann)—even as, on the recommendation of such (somewhat) diverse people as my mom and Katrina Dodson, I also started listening to the audiobook of Lena Dunham’s Famesick. Neither is annoying to me! To the contrary! Both are resonating with the part of my own book that I’m working on right now, which is about Selin in the first few years after college. This is a painful period to revisit, for a lot of reasons. (Seriously, who even wants to think about their early 20s. Yuck.)

Because it’s so unpleasant, I start feeling like an idiot for spending more time on it—why am I still writing about that? But my core belief is that that very avoidance is worthy of examination. I mean, so many people feel that way about their 20s—and at the earliest opportunity they escape it into the dignity of actual adulthood, a stable relationship, etc.; and then that has a way leading into parenthood (“I have way too much to think about now instead of just obsessing over my dumb self”)—and then their kids are in their 20s and then they can’t wait to not think about it anymore. So I want to think about it.

Anyway, for me (and Selin), the defining “problem” of those years was wanting so much to be a novelist, and having no idea how to do it. And that’s just what The Magician and Famesick are about, at least at the beginning: someone in their early 20s who desperately wants to be a writer/ artist, and can’t produce at the level of their desire, and has no clear career path or trajectory, and how bad it feels. And then there is the “relationships and sex” B-plot, which is also depressing, and becomes part of that same “unhappiness” that later they don’t take seriously.

I recently had coffee with one of my best friends from that time in my life, and she said, of our 20s, “Remember how unhappy we thought we were?” As if what we had then was only an idea of unhappiness—not actual unhappiness, which we didn’t know yet. And to an extent that is what it now feels like: like that was such an “innocent time.” But I don’t think this feeling now is more true than that feeling was then. In any case, I want to understand both of them.

[This post by Lisa Marchiano actually summed up a lot for me about that time, and made me wish that Jungian commencement addresses were a thing.]

Anyway, in the book, I gave Selin my own career trajectory: she starts a Russian/ comp lit PhD right after college, then takes a year off to try to write a novel; the novel goes off the rails, she runs out of money and goes back to school, and doesn’t end up publishing a version of that novel until she’s almost 40.

At the time when I was trying to write my novel, I already knew that I was the same age as Thomas Mann when he wrote Buddenbrooks. Later, when I was in my 30s and still didn’t know if I would ever manage to write novels, and “Tiny Furniture” and “Girls” came out and were so successful, I was, needless to say, extremely aware of Lena Dunham being 24. Such data points made me feel obscurely bad about myself: why wasn’t I able to get it together when I was that age (or ten years later); why did everything always take me so long; and even now there is a part of my brain that says, “How is it that I’m almost 50, and it’s only in the past few months that I’ve felt, for the first time in my life, that I’m writing what I want to write, at the time that I want to write it?” Which should be something to feel so glad and grateful about—but instead it gets surrounded by a cloud of belatedness and worry (menopause, brain fog, blah blah).

And yet! reading about Thomas Mann’s and Lena Dunham’s journeys, which I would have expected to make me feel worse, has instead brought me a feeling of lightness and relief—for reasons I will dive into after the paywall (2500 words).

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As soon as I read the first lines, I remembered when and where I had encountered the story: it was in a Cortázar collection that I received as a gift, in my first year of college, from a guy I had a crush on (the prototype of Ivan in The Idiot). Naturally, at that time, I had read each story with care, to try to figure out what he meant by giving me that particular book. The narrator of “Letter to a Young Lady in Paris” has a condition where he periodically vomits bunnies (conejitos). Then he’s staying at his friend Andrée’s apartment, while she’s in Paris, and writes her this letter. Without wishing to spoil this suspenseful work of magical realism, the effect of the bunnies on the property is not what most property owners, or even renters, would consider positive. What I remember taking away from the story is: “He really hates his friend—he’s really angry at her, behind all the flowery language,” and it gave me a scared feeling.

Meanwhile, I am still in book lockdown and rarely leaving the apartment… but I did make it to the Berlin Poetry Festival, to hear Valzhyna Mort give the annual Berliner Rede Sur Poesie, which was amazing and inspirational, and which also exists as a beautiful bilingual (English and German) book, titled “Long Lines, Long Days: A Prose Poem.” It’s a text that she started writing in Italy in June 2023, it’s very time-specific to these long days and short nights. It was really moving to hear her read it on such a bright evening, a week before midsummer, in a church-like hall that turned out to be a former crematorium.

Anyway, I bought the book and later at home I typed out the passages that I found the most resonant. That’s what I’m sharing after the paywall: a few of the quotes, plus my notes about why I found them resonant. (3000 words)

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[I just reread James Baldwin’s essay “The Stranger in the Village” (1953), which he wrote in/ about Leukerbad—I was getting a real Henry James vibe and started to wonder if the title was a callback to “The Beast in the Jungle” and then thought “what if the real beast in the jungle is imperialism” so I googled if anyone said that and I think some people did!]

After that, I’m thrilled to be doing an event at the University of Hamburg on July 13. The university offered to arrange a visit to nearby Lübeck to see the Buddenbrookhaus (where Thomas Mann grew up, and then he wrote Buddenbrooks), which I accepted with alacrity, but apparently the house is under renovation until 2030, raising the interesting question: what terrible damage did further decadent generations visit upon the Buddenbrooks House? I’m excited to walk around Lübeck and speculate.

Otherwise, as foreshadowed last time, today’s post is about the word “didactic,” which is something that came up in my conversation with James Wood about The Death of Ivan Ilyich (“But what do we make of Tolstoy’s didacticism”). During the actual conversation, I didn’t make very much of Tolstoy’s didacticism. But later I kept thinking about it, and realized I had a lot to say. So there is an essay about didacticism (2500 words), after the paywall.

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In the first picture, you can see contestant Shannon Crisenbery, from St. Clair MI, realizing that the clue she just chose was the Daily Double.

In the second image, she listens to the clue.

And then—she realizes that she knows the answer.

Her facial expression made me so happy! (She won the game.) Though this also made me realize how terrible it would feel to see someone lose money because they hadn’t heard of my book: a problem that had never occurred to me before, and I am relieved to have dodged for one more day.

(Also, if I branch out to merch I want to do royal blue T-shirts with “smart but also clueless” in the Jeopardy font.)

Moving on, I’m also really excited to share a link to a recent conversation I had with James Wood about The Death of Ivan Ilyich. This involved (for me) rereading The Death of Ivan Ilyich, which I somehow found more entertaining than I did on any of the previous occasions I had read it (most recently, three years ago, when I was hanging up curtains). Tolstoy is so savage! Check out these 2 sentences where he obliterates Ivan Ilyich’s father:

… an official who had made a career in Petersburg in various ministries and departments, of the sort that brings people to a position in which, though it becomes clear that they are unfit to perform any sort of substantial duties, still, because of their long past service and rank, they cannot be dismissed, and, therefore they receive invented, fic­titious posts and non-fictitious thousands, from six to ten, on which they live to a ripe old age. Such was the privy councilor, the unnecessary member of various unnecessary institutions, Ilya Yefimovich Golovin.1

Haha there goes all of organizational culture.

Then you hear about Ivan Ilyich’s work life (as an examining magistrate/ high-court judge), which consists entirely of various displays of power—and that’s “justice”—and the reason he’s so obsessed with his job is because of this horrible experience he had in his 30s, when he was enjoying social pleasures, and married a girl from a good family, and everything seemed to be going fine—except then she got pregnant and her whole personality changed, and suddenly she wouldn’t let him go out and play cards or do anything fun—and when he tried to go out anyway, she would freak out—and at first he tried to ignore her…

But one time his wife began to abuse him so energetically in crude terms, and so stubbornly went on abusing him each time he did not fulfill her demands, obviously firmly resolved not to stop until he submitted, that is, sat at home and was just as bored as she was, that Ivan Ilyich became terrified.

He realizes that the only possible escape—the only place he can go, without her screaming at him—is work. So he spends all his time at the office, controlling people. Meanwhile more children are born, and get sick (“two of the children died, and therefore family life became still more unpleasant for Ivan Ilyich”), so he has to work harder and make more legal judgments—and at the bottom of it is this terror that his freedom could be curtailed, like his wife’s.

Who will be surprised to learn that this picture of marriage—similar to the one that appears a few years later in The Kreutzer Sonata—is based on Tolstoy’s own. The young Tolstoy, too, was incredulous that his wife’s constant pregnancies were supposed to be his problem; and Sofia Andreyevna was equally incredulous and had to resort to screaming and machinations to try to win back any rights at all. (I think I already mentioned this book, The Kreutzer Sonata Variations, which unites Tolstoy’s text with novellas by Sofia Andreyevna, plus relevant extracts from diaries and letters? It is riveting.)

At first, Tolstoy clearly just thought he was right and his wife was wrong, she should be joyfully embracing motherhood… but I think by “Ivan Ilyich” he has reached the terrible realization that women are also people, and the rest of the story is kind of a guilt fantasy where now Ivan Ilyich is the one who is housebound and suffering horribly, and his wife and his daughter go out shopping and can’t hide that they’re enjoying themselves.

One thing that struck me on this reading is that, in Ivan Ilyich, as in Kreutzer Sonata, Tolstoy makes many of the same observations about gender inequity that Shulamith Firestone puts forth in The Dialectic of Sex. (Firestone’s thesis is that Marx and Engels were almost right about everything, except that the first inequity wasn’t economic class, but the reproductive division of labor. In the childhood chapter, she gets into the terror little boys feel when they understand their mother’s unfreedom, and how they spend the rest of life pushing it away, with the result that the world becomes such as we know it.)

Comparing Tolstoy and Firestone, I find myself thinking, these are two writers I really admire, and they’re saying a lot of the same things, but they do it so differently, and have such different strengths. So there are a lot of choices in writing that they can help a person see more clearly.

E.g. Tolstoy’s greatest strength is describing the different sides of an impasse in a detailed way—literally nobody is better than him at this. That said, I think Tolstoy is less great at articulating problems (let alone solutions).

(I wrote about this in an earlier post, about War and Peace—the narrative shows again and again that the reason men go to war is to escape their mothers/ wives—but Tolstoy doesn’t seem to realize this himself, and never states it outright. And in the historical essays, when he does try to state why men go to war… well, he’s good at disproving other people’s theories, but his own theory rests on the illusory nature of free will, and let’s just say it is not very compelling.)

Shulamith Firestone is the opposite. All she cares about is articulating the problem. So for her, description is a distraction. This is an actual quote: “We don’t need to elaborate on the subtle psychological pressures of family life. Think of your own family.”

From a writing POV, I find it exciting to think about turning the dial between these two modes—between spelling things out, in order to trigger people’s imagination, versus just asking them to draw on their experience. It’s a spectrum, right?—we can tune it either way. Personally my default tuning is more towards the spelling-out, Tolstoy end… so I find it helpful to remember how vividly Firestone can evoke so much from so little, and how it proves her point about these structures being huge and relatively invariant over time and place.

The Tolstoy-Firestone comparison also made me think about a question I have been avoiding on panels for many years now, about novels versus essays. E.g. “You, Elif, started out publishing essays and not novels, then you switched to novels, but the novels aren’t that different from the essays, and the essays use ‘novelistic’ techniques (like dialogue, etc.); so why didn’t you just keep writing essays, and how do you think novels are different.”

I’m not sure what it is, but something about this formulation makes me feel exhausted to the depth of my very bones. My default response is to deflect—to question the meaningfulness of the boundary line between novels and essays (“these genres are more related to marketing than to writing”; “I’m interested in doing what I want to do [explain], I don’t care so much what it’s called,” etc.).

That said… as I work on my new book I realize I’m sometimes asking MYSELF, “wait, is this part like in an essay or like in a novel”—and in my head, it’s not a meaningless question and it’s not related to marketing, it has a process-based reality. And I think there is a glimmer of this in the juxtaposition of “Think of your own family” versus “Every unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion.”

Coming up after the paywall: 1800 words about how I’ve been thinking about essay v. novel, with a specific example from my book in progress, plus the story of a rabbithole I went down, about how an abandoned proposal to rename St. Petersburg’s international airport after Dostoevsky.

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A couple days ago I swung by Desirelines Books, a beautiful brand-new English-language bookstore on the Landwehrkanal, where I signed some stock(!)—if you’re in the area, stop by this Saturday April 25 for Independent Bookstore Day, I think they’re raffling off signed books!

Maybe my favorite was Pequod Books, which is used international books 😭, I could have stayed there all day. I went hoping to find something in Turkish that would be easy to read and “educational”; I came home with this large sentimental historical novel by Ahmet Ümit—so far, it’s a melancholy revolutionary holed up in Pera Palace, recapping a lot of early 20th-c Turkish history in the form of letters justifying his emotional and physical unavailability to an old flame, Esther. Just what the doctor ordered! (I see that it exists in English, too.)

The thing that inspired today’s post is that Pequod also carries postcards with original art, by Ricardo Pickman (potentially an alias of the bookstore owner). This is the first one that caught my attention…

… but then I noticed this one…

… which now forms a valued part of my workstation.

Today’s post is about the challenges of staying motivated during a long project where you don’t leave the house; how it can help to use a “mood board” with one or more inspirational images; and how I have been helped by that particular image.

So look: what is that creature, a gerbil? Did anyone ask it to devote itself to its unclear, yet obviously artistic, undertaking? No; clearly this is the gerbil’s idea. Yet its energy is calm and relaxed. It doesn’t have legs; it doesn’t need them. It isn’t looking for confirmation from the outside world. It has its mask on an office chair. I love that even though it’s clearly engaged in art, its environment has the same IKEA-type office furniture that I, and perhaps you, use every day. I particularly appreciate the music stand, which tells us that, whatever the gerbil is up to—it’s repetitive. Every day, it goes in that room, consults notation for something too complicated to hold in its head—and practices. How else is it going to get really good?

For long writing projects, I find it helpful to have a few such inspirational artifacts (often postcards) on hand—things that sums up some aspect of the work and its energy: in this case, the mysterious nature of repetitive solitary work. I’m calling this collection a “mood board,” even though I don’t use a board, though I do also have a whiteboard where I periodically copy out quotes that make feel excited about my project.

The mood board is related to another piece of writing advice that I’ve mentioned before (via Shelly Oria and ), about how to get back into a writing project after some time away.

The advice is: do not immediately try to muscle your way back into the place that “needs the most work.” Instead, spend the first ~20 minutes re-connecting with the vibe—re-experiencing the initial excitement that got you into this project in the first place, perhaps with the assistance of your inspirational materials.

It may feel counterintuitive or inefficient, in our fast-paced world, to spend the first 20 minutes of your work time communing with a postcard. But personally I find that, when I zoom right into the “problem” area, I tend to spend the first 20 minutes just trying and re-trying things that already didn’t work—because I don’t remember exactly how they didn’t work and I need to see it play out again. By contrast, when I’m able to first tap back into the energy or vibe of the book, it gives me a different filter, where if I then go and reread the last thing I wrote, I see it in a new light. Instances of “delight” or “interest” jump out at me; it becomes clear that these instances are the most important part of the writing—are, in fact, the only important part, the rest is dispensable. This shifts the conversation in my mind about what can and can’t be changed, and frees me from the feeling that I’m facing an inextricable jenga tower of sentences, where nothing can be moved or changed because everything depends on the thing right next to it.

Coming up after the paywall: tips for retaining the authentic or vital spark1 while working on the same material for a long time; getting over the idea that repetition is “sterile”; plus further analysis of the clarinet gerbil by members of the writing group I belong to (including a bonus artwork by Jenny Odell), with an emphasis on how to write from a place of delight rather than a place of anticipating criticism from people who are pains in the butt. (1400 words.)

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But first, in honor of Easter coming up, I will share one photo with everyone. It’s a pedestrian crossing.

One of the biggest challenges about coming to Berlin from New York is restraining myself from crossing the street against the light, which nobody does here, not even when there aren’t any cars. The way I manage it is that the red light signal reminds me of Christ suffering for humanity’s sins, so I think: “OK if Jesus could do that for six hours, I guess I can stand here for another 30 seconds.”

The green light guy reminds me of the Monopoly Man, who I guess is the archetypal opposite of Jesus, so that’s a pleasing symmetry? Idk the red and green “Ampelmännchen” are apparently very popular here and have many stores dedicated to them. Lots of interesting gift ideas for the person who has everything!

OK, that’s it—the rest of the photos are my tribute to the great tradition of philanthropy. (Whoa—I think “philanthropy” is actually the place in the Venn diagram where Jesus overlaps with the Monopoly Man.)

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Otherwise, today I wanted to share a writing tip that helped me make surprising book progress, in the middle of a swirling maelstrom of extraliterary distractions. The short version is: I found a way to use dialogue-writing to access a calmer part of myself who turned out to have some good editing ideas.

To convey the full picture, I’m going to start by describing my eventful transit to Berlin, also last month. Depending on your level of subscription, you may already be aware that, on arrival, one of my cats was confiscated by German customs. This has been a ballooning surreal episode, and if I do ever get another commission for a Kafka-inspired short story, please know that “The Quarantine, oder Mein großes Katzenproblem” is basically queued up and ready to go. And I think the story has to start back in New York, with the Lyft ride to the airport, in the aftermath of the February blizzard. The driver, who was visibly Russian, really went “above and beyond” helping transport two cats and four suitcases over the massive snowdrifts. When we were finally in the car, thanking him profusely and crying a little bit, I blurted that he was a “geroi truda” (a hero of (socialist) labor). I’m not sure why I said that (I guess it’s something one of my teachers said in the 90s?), but it launched the driver onto a ninety-minute discourse, starting with an overview of Soviet orders and ranks, segueing into his teen recollections of screwing refrigerator doors onto refrigerators in a factory in Moscow in the 80s. Next came a comparison of his wages to those of his mom, who was an engineer in the same factory; then a general survey, surprisingly detailed, of different peoples’ wages throughout the USSR (“listen, then there’s the woman who went in at four in the morning to milk the cows…”). At first it all seemed kind of random and chaotic, but gradually I made out a poignant through-line: “Was it fair?” (“What was fair and what wasn’t?” “How could it have been fair?” “Where and when has it been more fair?”)

At some point we came to the story of our driver’s grandmother, a prosecutor after World War II, who had prosecuted people who stole food—“and at the same time, her own child died of starvation.” Her position gave her access to food; others would have stolen. But she was a “true believer.” Then came a couple more stories of true believers—people refusing to accept any “unfair” advantages (is any “advantage” intrinsically “unfair”?), on the grounds that it would invalidate the whole undertaking.

This was really resonating for me with the book I was reading, Christa Wolf’s City of Angels, or the Overcoat of Dr. Freud, which I learned about from a fascinating reader question. (I’m planning to do another Q/A video as soon as I get the AV situation sorted out.)

City of Angels is an autofictive novel based on Christa Wolf’s time as a fellow at the Getty Institute in LA in the early 90s. It opens with her arrival at LAX with a passport from East Germany: a country that no longer exists. Everyone she meets in the US is then basically congratulating her on joining the free world and escaping dictatorship. In fact, we learn, at the time of the partition, Wolf herself had tried to get to the West; it was only by chance that she ended up in the East—and yet, that then became her identity. She suffered a lot with the secret police and wasn’t, like, a fan of dictatorship—but she was a committed socialist, and when the wall came down, she wasn’t unambivalently happy.

Now, in the US, she felt oppressed when people expected her “to make a pious face at the mention of the word ‘unification’”; she had the troubling sense that there was nothing left blocking the global spread of consumer culture; that now, “daily life in America was the norm for the rest of the world; that it was normal to live for profit and success,” and that “after the collapse of Communism, all of this is valid for all eternity.”

Meanwhile, every day at the Getty Center, helpful staffers were bringing her German newspapers, and she would read letters from West German readers, complaining that the East Germans weren’t sufficiently pleased: “For heaven’s sake, all this screeching about so-called values that they wanted to preserve from a state that had fallen apart, what was that supposed to mean? What can you preserve from a dictatorship?”

In 1990, I was a middle-school student in the US. Reading about Wolf’s reaction felt like seeing the opposite side of a tapestry. All I remember hearing was the West German perspective: “What can you preserve from a dictatorship; how sad that these people got Stockholm-syndromed by their dictator.”

And doubtless that was part of the story. But there was also more—that’s what I felt reading Christa Wolf, and hearing about the “true believers.” At some point, there was a promise that felt revelatory to a lot of people, a promise of some way of life other than constant striving for economic growth—not through trying to deny “natural human self-interest,” but through learning to identify self-interest and happiness in some other way.

Of course it’s cartoonish to identify the “American way of life” just with buying dumb stuff (or with Trumpism); there are lots of good things about US culture. (I think this comes across in Christa Wolf’s portrayal of LA in the 90s—a lot of beauty and freedom and diversity, and also some amount of terror, and unfreedom, and lying). One of the things I’m the most grateful for, in the opportunity to spend time outside the US, is to get to think about which parts of my usual “way of life” that I value, and which parts I don’t value—the luxury of looking at the big picture.

The Lyft driver, like Christa Wolf, was always circling around this implicit comparison to the US. (Wolf quotes extensively from Thomas Mann’s diaries from his time in LA (1942-1952), which I was really excited to read—but I think so far only the 1918-1939 diaries exist in English, though of course they are also very resonant with life in the US now.) With our driver, the book he kept coming back to was the 1935 travelogue One-Story America, by Ilf and Petrov. I didn’t know anything about this book but I’m now excited to read it, too—these pictures really reminded me of Lolita, and made me realize that Nabokov arrived in the US only five years after Ilf and Petrov.

Returning to the driver’s life story: it turned out that his grandmother had had another child, who had already been killed during the war: Germans were randomly shooting people as they got off a train, and one of them was her kid. Because of the loss of the second child, the grandmother married a man whom she wasn’t hugely excited about, whom she wouldn’t have married under other circumstances, except that she wanted to have more children—and that’s how our Lyft driver came to be born. “We’re all here because of who knows what terrible things in the past.”

As I was trying to wrap my head around this, the driver, Mikhail, was checking 3 different GPS units, all showing dire traffic delays. He said he could save us thirty minutes by taking a different exit, to a parking garage that seemed far away, but had a walkway to the terminal. We said we wouldn’t be able to carry all our stuff over a walkway, but he said he would help us. And he did—he found a parking spot in the crowded garage (“It’s free, for fifteen minutes”), and carried our suitcases, not just across the walkway, but up all the elevators and escalators to the check-in line, so tell me if this man was not a hero of labor. We definitely saved at least thirty minutes, which was great because the airport was in chaos—we made it through security with just enough time to buy two $17 turkey wraps from an unmanned kiosk that was somehow charging $17 for turkey wraps, and within half an hour, we were flying towards Greenland.

We had been hoping to sleep on the plane, but this turned out to not be possible, because the place where a person’s feet would normally go was occupied, in our case, by cats. Though drugged, the cats would periodically start yowling so then we would comfort them. One was comforted by petting; the other preferred tiny installments of $17 turkey wrap (thank you paid subscribers!).

Then it was sunrise in Berlin, we deplaned, did the passport check, waited for all the suitcases, dragged everything to customs—and that’s where our problems really began. The food-motivated cat (Grover) got through OK, but with the cuddly cat (Mixie), the guards kept scanning her microchip again and again. Then they said we had a big problem and should go sit in some chairs.

After due sitting, we learned that the problem was that Mixie’s US paperwork—both the rabies certificate from her regular vet, and the USDA travel papers from the USDA-certified vet—had a misprint in her fifteen-digit microchip number: the last three digits were incorrect. I was cognitively not at 100% and couldn’t understand how this was possible, I seriously thought reality had split off; I had seen both vets in New York scan her, and compare the numbers to the paperwork, it didn’t seem possible. We spent the next 3 hours with the Berlin airport vets, investigating different theories, like: what if the US microchip needed a scanner of a different frequency; or what if Mixie had “a second microchip” somewhere else on her body.1

After scanning every inch of Mixie’s person with three different scanners, the vets said that they couldn’t accept her rabies certificate; it was for “not this cat.” They took her away, revaccinated her, and placed her in an undisclosed quarantine facility for 3 weeks, for the vaccination to take effect.

The staff at DAAD, where I am a fellow this year, were super-kind and helpful; one person called the veterinary authorities to request that Mixie be quarantined with us at home (it didn’t work); another waited for us outside customs for 3 hours, took us to a pet store to buy litter, and then brought us to “our” apartment, which is quite beautiful, and where a plaque in the foyer shows the names of former residents who were killed in camps. We were then told that a previous fellow, staying in this same apartment, had one day received a visit from an older Jewish woman who wanted to look inside: she had lived here as a toddler in the early 1940s, before escaping Germany. Apparently, when she came inside, she didn’t remember anything—until she saw the glass sliding doors in the living room: “I remember those big doors—behind them was the Christmas tree.”

Then there we were in this huge apartment; two people, one food-motivated cat, and the idea of the Christmas tree.

I spent the next few days trying to get the US vets to send new paperwork to the German vets, in the (vain) hope that this would motivate them to release Mixie early. I started to get really emotional and at some point the German vet emailed that of course she believed me, she had never thought I had been trying to introduce an unvaccinated cat into Germany using another cat’s papers; but what could she do, she couldn’t accept a retroactive rabies certificate. Which made a person think: “Why?”, and led to various fruitless nationalistic thoughts, e.g. “Is there something ‘German’ about this attitude towards rules”; or: “Our detained cat is receiving much better treatment in Germany than detained humans are in the US.” (They sent photos; she had a private room with a window.)

On the morning of the day of Mixie’s release, we finally learned where she had been all this time: it was in Brandenburg, near Fürstenwalde/Spree. We took a train to Fürstenwalde, then a taxi to what seemed like the middle of a forest. Google had predicted that we would get there in two hours and forty minutes, but we made it in two hours and twenty minutes—at which point we rang the bell at the gate, and weren’t let in, because it wasn’t yet the exact time when we said we would be there!

Luckily, it was a beautiful day so we spent the 20 minutes walking around the grounds, which had once been a Red Army Tanklager.

Eventually we recovered Mixie, got a cab back to the train station, and a train back to Berlin… and then the worst part started. As is apparently normal when one cat goes away somewhere and comes back smelling differently (I must say Mixie still smells terrible), the other cat didn’t recognize her. Mixie and Grover are sisters and had previously always enjoyed each other’s company, and in fact Mixie seemed to remember Grover just fine—but Grover took one look / sniff, expanded to 3x her normal size, and generally started to lose her shit. We were advised to spray the apartment with “feline pheromones” and to keep the cats in separate rooms until they reacclimated to each other, “usually in 1-2 weeks.”

This was a true nightmare, because we didn’t know how long it would last; any time we opened a door, Mixie would run in, and Grover would go nuts and attack her, like she was a ghost/ zombie; then Mixie would also go berserk. Grover is now missing a tiny part of her ear, and my wife and I have cuts and scratches from our peacekeeping efforts.

[Amazingly, at some point I saw my wife texting someone a photo of her hand, covered with cuts: it was the bloody hand! Was it a message? Maybe the earlier bloody hand was a figuration, like Auerbach talks about wrt Dante?]

On the seventh day, the cats were finally able to spend an hour in the same room, and even though Grover was giving Mixie the stink-eye, and Mixie was prowling around with a terribly hurt expression (“Do you mean EVERYONE ON EARTH ISN’T ALWAYS HAPPY TO SEE ME?”), no violence ensued. The next day, Grover fell asleep in Mixie’s presence, so it seems peace may be at hand.

What I’m getting at is, over the past month, there have been a lot of obstacles between me and book.

The writing tip that helped me, under these circumstances, is a variant of an exercise I may have talked about before on here—one I learned from the brilliant Shelly Oria. It involves writing out a dialogue between yourself and the book (or other writing/ artistic project)—generally when you’re feeling stuck or anxious or afraid or have some question of how to proceed. In the dialogue, you tell the book how you feel—and the book replies. Even though it’s you writing both parts, the book often says things that “you” wouldn’t normally have thought of.

There are lots of things I find exciting about this exercise—e.g. the premise is that the book, in some sense, already exists; it’s already an entity. Likewise, the writing isn’t something you’re doing TO the book; it’s something you and the book are undertaking together—a journey or adventure. You’re less of a “geroi truda,” as it were, than a “sputnik.” The relationship isn’t hierarchical: it’s not parent-child or creator-creation. You’re companions. This also means that the book isn’t identical to you. It doesn’t contain every single one of your thoughts. It has limits; and it has some independent volition.

That said, when it comes to actually doing this exercise, I have sometimes encountered difficulties. My question would often be “Does such-and-such thing belong in the book or should I leave it out”; and I would start thinking, “If the book already exists, doesn’t it know already what’s in it? Why can’t it just tell me?”

In these past weeks, the thing I was trying to do, against the backdrop of cat angst and various forms of guilt, was to put together different sections of the book that were written at different times, about different times, but involving some of the same backstory. I was running into the same kinds of problems as with nonfiction: how to handle exposition; how much data to dump up front; which particular parts to put first versus keep for later; how much to remind people when things come back.

Everything was starting to feel intractable—like, “no matter where I put it, it’s going to be boring and alienating; if I do this, then there’s that problem; if I do that, then there’s this problem.” At some point I was working with two sections, where each one seemed to have to come before the other. It was making me feel crazy—but when I started telling the book, the book was basically like: “Oh, that’s a good way of formulating the problem. Let’s go to that other section. Let’s look at the two sections. Let’s look at them together.”

The book basically told me that what I was doing was a normal part of writing—and not a sign that I did something wrong and now had to do damage control. The editing itself became fun. Pre-dialogue, whenever I saw an echo or repetition that I didn’t want, it was like finding a termite—“THERE’S ANOTHER ONE, this infestation is even more thorough than I thought.” Post-dialogue, it felt more like solving a fun puzzle.

So, the short version of the advice is: if you feel frazzled or despairing about something with your book (or other project), try writing a dialogue with it. See if “the book” has a different, perhaps calmer, attitude than you do, and knows what you should be doing next.

After the paywall, there’s another 1000 words with an explanation of how I think this advice works, with an illustrative example from P.G. Wodehouse.

Thanks for reading!

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I first learned of Ann’s illness, then nearing its final stages, only a few weeks ago, just as I was leaving for Toronto, for a panel that Sheila Heti put together. As often happens, I wept a fair amount on the plane (I think it’s related to cabin pressure), and then it felt very poignant to see Sheila—to realize how many years it had been since the last time—and that whole trip felt like a dream. At some point, we went with Sheila to a jewelry repair shop, to pick up a resized ring—and the shop was in an old building, you had to be buzzed in, maybe through multiple doors—and the walls were lined with tiny mysterious drawers that you could open, and I opened three or four drawers, and inside was every kind of ring setting you could think of—all these empty ring settings. At first, nobody in the shop seemed to know anything about Sheila’s ring, but then they found it, a beautiful opal ring, and it fit her perfectly—and then suddenly we were onstage talking about novels with Patricia Lockwood and Gwendoline Riley, and that part was like diving straight into some ancient lagoon, straight down to such a deep place—and we were down there for an hour, and then suddenly it was time to watch men’s Olympic figure-skating in a sports bar. And the whole time, I was thinking about Ann—about how, every time I saw her, it felt like a placeholder for the future date when we would really talk—like, once the books were “out of the way” then we could really talk about everything.

I was thinking, too, about how my close audiovisual associate (OK, my wife) never met Ann, and how we both assumed that someday it would happen, and maybe we would meet Ann’s wife Annik, and the four of us would get a drink. I did nothing to bring about such an outcome. I guess I didn’t think there was any hurry. The thing I was in a hurry about was the books—and I felt like that’s what was more important for Ann, too—she was famously not a schmoozer. But then, my first contact with Annik in this life was to email her a voice note to play for Ann, basically to say goodbye.

I did feel really lucky to be able to send such a note—it really helped in Toronto to have one last communication to look forward to, instead of just spinning the wheels inside my head. And back in New York, it was indeed a comfort to be able to tell Ann how grateful I was for the role she played in my life. I mean, I know she knew, but it was still a relief to tell her—that my dream basically since childhood was to write novels—and that there was a time in my life when I thought maybe it wasn’t going to happen for me—and then it did, and that was thanks to her.

I was thinking back to the first time I met Ann, in 2012, after she bought my nonexistent first novel, The Two Lives, on the basis of a proposal and sample. For various reasons, The Two Lives then became impossible to write—I struggled with it for two years, went into therapy, struggled another year—and for a while in there, I thought, again, that’s it, I’m finished—I thought I would have to return the advance—and who would ever let me write a novel again?

Then at some point I found myself revisiting a novel I had abandoned in my twenties, and it was funnier than I remembered, and I ended up revising it and giving it the title The Idiot, and then I sent it to Ann instead of The Two Lives, fully expecting her to be like “What the actual fuck.” Indeed I seem to remember for a moment she was like “Wait what?”, but then she read it and from then on she could not have been more supportive—of The Idiot, and of the larger project and the way it tied into The Two Lives, and of Either/Or. And everyone on her team was so wonderful, including / especially publicity, and I think the last time I heard Ann’s voice was when she and Juli called to say Either/Or had made it onto the New York Times bestseller list.

It’s sobering to realize how long ago that was—it would have been 2022—and how quickly those years went by. In 2024, I submitted the proposal for the book I’m working on now. I was in Rome, so I didn’t go to the office in person; and tbh submission makes me so nervous that I sent everything, including the cover letter, through my agent. Ann also replied to my agent, so the last communication I have from her is in the third person (“What a pleasure to return to Selin’s world, and to see Elif continue to stretch her writing in new and unchartered directions” 😭).

It’s been incredibly painful to realize that she’s never going to read the new book, at least not in the earthly sense that living people read books. (I do think that in some way she knows about all the books.) One thing that became clear to me in Toronto was that I want to dedicate this one to her. My first three books don’t have dedications—I didn’t totally understand what it was for a book to be “for” someone; but the new one is definitely for Ann.

After the paywall, I’m going to share some (somewhat) more personal recollections. But in the meantime I thought it might be interesting for Idiot readers to hear a few of Ann’s edits, as I remember them. (These were all in conversation, not in writing.)

1. In the first draft of The Idiot, many of Ivan’s emails are quoted in full. Ann pointed out that it’s different to receive an email than to read one in a book: a real email from a crush can go on a long time and make no sense, and you’ll still be into it; in a book, this is not so. I ended up doing a lot of paraphrasing, summarizing, and more selective quoting. This felt right—a little bit like not showing the monster in a horror movie.

2. In the draft, Selin’s last interaction with Svetlana is the phone call from the Hungarian village, when Svetlana is at her grandmother’s house in Belgrade. That’s before the long canoe sleepover episode with Ivan. Ann said that Svetlana was her favorite character, and it didn’t feel right for her to disappear so far before the end of the book; we had to hear something else from her, even if it was short. That’s how Svetlana came to send Selin that postcard from Venice. (This might sound minor, but that conversation about Svetlana’s continued existence really helped me to understand her role in the book, and contributed to the idea for Either/Or.)

3. In the draft, there are a few places where the narration slips into a retrospective tone: the narrator clearly knows more than Selin did at the time. (There had been a lot more of this in the first first draft, the one Ann didn’t see—I had cut most of them myself, but maybe without articulating why?) Ann said the amount of retrospection was distracting; there should be either more of it, or none at all, “it’s up to you, but my hunch is ‘none at all.’” That was right, too: the point of that book is, you’re in the mental space of someone who doesn’t know all those things. This also led to Either/Or—because there, the idea was to cue the readers to bring in their own retrospective knowledge, without Selin alluding to it herself/ breaking out of 1990s-character.

As I look back, I’m realizing how sensitive Ann was to “the reading experience.” I could describe the experience I wanted the reader to have, and she would phrase her feedback in terms of why it was or wasn’t landing. There’s a little bit of this in her last email to me. And now that I’m working on the new book, I’m especially glad to not have had a retrospective tone popping up in The Idiot—because in the new book, Selin is in her 40s, and she is going full-on retrospective (perhaps you have met someone in their 40s?). It feels important that that bell wasn’t rung earlier—just think if the person was always knowing better, how insufferable. (Also, compared to when I wrote The Idiot, I feel less confident now about knowing so much better than my younger self; it feels more like I know different things, so the retrospection feels more useful now.)

4. One memorable edit involved an episode near the beginning of the book—in Selin’s Constructed Worlds class, everyone is given a disposable camera and told to take 24 pictures that are connected in some way. Selin takes her pictures, drops off the film to be developed, and picks it up on the way to Russian. Then she’s in the classroom, looking through the photos she took—and suddenly in the middle there are 3 photos she doesn’t recognize, of a hand covered in blood. Ivan comes in like “Hey, what’s up?” and Selin says, “There’s a bloody hand in my photos,” and then she has to solve this mystery of the bloody hand. (It turns out that one of her roommates cut her hand on a defective Snapple bottle, took the pictures to send to Snapple to request a refund, forgot to tell Selin, and then forgot about the pictures.)

I have a clear memory of meeting Ann about the draft, and of her sort of steeling herself like she was going to say something difficult, and saying: “We need to talk about the bloody hand.” (My wife and I still say this to each other sometimes.) Her question was something like: “Can you help me to see how the bloody hand is moving the book forwards?”—and I thought I could, then I realized I couldn’t! I think it was some vestige of me worrying, “my book doesn’t have a plot,” and trying to add a mystery; i.e., it was written from a place of non-confidence and fear—and when Ann said, “You don’t need the bloody hand,” she was also saying “It’s OK to not have a plot, a book has to be what it is.” And maybe she was also saying, like, “Look, if you have to have a bloody hand, then go for it—and if not, then why not treat yourself, and me, and your readers, to a book without a bloody hand in it?”

Anyway, that’s why there is no bloody hand in The Idiot. Thank you, Ann—for this and so much more.

I’m also really grateful to Annik—for playing Ann the memo, for emailing me about it, and also for the incredible closing image in the New York Times obituary of Ann at age eleven standing on a diving board while Frank Sinatra sings “Thank Heaven for Little Girls” to her. It feels like a Great Cosmic Riddle to me now to try to imagine her facial expression—like the riddle of sphinx: who is anyone, what is life, what is time? In some way, wasn’t she already a great editor, even at age eleven, standing on the diving board?

Another 1700 words (the more personal ) after the paywall. P.S. I also really appreciated these reminiscences of Ann by Steve Inskeep and Franklin Foer.

Thanks for reading!

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My initial plan was to write about Sheila Heti and Christa Wolf, because I’ve been thinking about these amazing writers a lot over the past weeks. But I soon realized this was going to involve copy-pasting quotes, syncing Kindle with Mac, searching for links, and other tech stuff that was going to take the whole 3 hours. So instead I decided to write my actual thoughts for two hours, and then spend the third hour editing. The result was 1500 unusually raw and unfiltered words about insights I had into Miss Havisham, Don Quixote, “the novel,” aging, and mortality, while prepping for a colonoscopy. There’s a few subjects in here I would normally avoid. But you know what? Today the censors are off. So that’s what’s coming up after the paywall.

In the meantime, if any of you will be in Berlin on March 4, please come to this rad-sounding art space to hear me in conversation with Merve Emre!

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Then I was thinking about how much I love Mayakovsky—and that led me to his extraordinary essay, “Kak Delat’ Stikhi” (“How to Write Verses”), published 100 years ago in 1926. (I’ll be quoting from the excellent translation by George “That’s What” Hyde, “How Are Verses Made?”.) I had somehow never read it, and don’t know what exactly I was expecting, except that I guess I thought it would be 2 pages long, with 3 words on each line, and would start like, “First I throw all my books in the garbage”—by which I mean,

          First I throw
                   all my books
                            in the garbage.

So imagine how surprised I was to learn out that it’s a long, chatty, incredibly specific essay on writing process—one of the most generous self-analyses I’ve ever read, complete with discarded drafts.

At one point, Mayakovsky lists 12 versions of the same line: “I could deliver a whole speech for the defense, on behalf of the last line,” he notes, “but I’ll content myself for the moment with simply copying these lines from the manuscript so as to demonstrate how much work you must put in to choose a few words.”

1. Our days are ill-equipped for merriment.

2. Our days are ill-equipped for joy.

3. Our days are ill-equipped for happiness.

4. Our life is ill-equipped for merriment.

5. Our life is ill-equipped for joy.

6. Our life is ill-equipped for happiness.

7. For revels our planet is ill-equipped.

8. For gaiety our planet is ill-equipped.

9. Not specially well is our planet equipped for revels.

10. Not specially well is our planet equipped for merriment.

11. Our little planet for pleasures is ill-equipped.

12. For merriment our planet isn’t well equipped.

(Real quick, for Russian-reading peeps:)

          1) наши дни к веселью мало оборудованы;
          2) наши дни под радость мало оборудованы;
          3) наши дни под счастье мало оборудованы;
          4) наша жизнь к веселью мало оборудована;
          5) наша жизнь под радость мало оборудована;
          6) наша жизнь под счастье мало оборудована;
          7) для веселий планета наша мало оборудована;
          8) для весёлостей планета наша мало оборудована;
          9) не особенно планета наша для веселий оборудована;
          10) не особенно планета наша для веселья оборудована;
          11) планетишка наша к удовольствиям не очень оборудована;
          12) для веселия планета наша мало оборудована.

One thing that struck me right away is that the first attempt—“Our days are ill-equipped for merriment”—is quite close to the final version (“For merriment our planet isn’t well equipped”); as you go down the list, you see him getting further/ closer/ further, such that the goofiest version is the penultimate one—though you can still imagine him in the moment being like: “Wait, is THIS one it?” A great illustration of how, in writing as in other things, the first intuition is often right. It often gets you almost all the way there… but that last little extra distance can be a long and roundabout trip.

The way Mayakovsky is able to get so specific about process is by really drilling down on one particular (short) text: his poem “To Sergei Esenin” (1926), written in response to Esenin’s suicide. (“For merriment our planet…” appears near the end.) This is such a charged work, and it lifts this wonky process essay to a different plane. The bigger issue being addressed, in a granular and cosmic way, is literary composition in the face of despair. Not the least relevant subject for 2026.

Some background. On 28 December 1925, Esenin—a poet whom Mayakovsky has known for many years, and whose alcoholism, depression, and chaotic love life were also widely known—is found dead in his room in Leningrad’s Hotel Angleterre. Before hanging himself from a heating pipe on the ceiling, he gashed up his own arm and wrote a poem in blood. Newspapers printed it after his death:

          In this life to die is nothing new
          But to live, of course, is nothing newer.

          В этой жизни умирать не ново,
          Но и жить, конечно, не новей.

This incident is broadly terrifying to Esenin’s friends and colleagues, including Mayakovsky, who is basically enraged by the poem:

It was at once clear how many insecure people these powerful lines, just these lines of poetry, could bring to the rope or the revolver. And no amount of analysis in the newspapers, no amount of articles, can wipe out these lines. One can and must combat these verses only with verses.1

That’s his mission for the poem: “deliberately to neutralize the effect of Esenin’s last lines, to make Esenin’s death uninteresting, to replace the facile beauty of death by another beauty, since toiling mankind needs all its strength to sustain the Revolution it has begun.”

And when he writes this super-technical essay about process, he’s checking at each step to see if he’s meeting this objective: is he re-invigorating life, or isn’t he?

I felt so grateful to read this today in 2026: a time when I’m often asking questions like: “What was the point of revising that line 12 times; what is the connection between all this word-manipulation and any social reality.” In this essay, Mayakovsky never for a moment doubts that connection. The connection is precisely what enables him to do the 12 revisions of a single line.

As I read, I found myself wondering whether the same might be true for me. Maybe the connection is there, even when I can’t see it. (I will add that it may be easier to see such connections when one’s phone alerts are disabled (thus preventing one from being terrorized on a second-by-second basis by news-spewing tech that is controlled by villains).)

Coming up after the paywall: I go through all the “actionable writing advice” I compiled from “How Are Verses Made?” (different ways to begin an emotionally difficult work; how to mediate between personal and “social” problems; how to work with rhythm; how to stay connected with the stakes of a piece of writing).

It feels wrong to do a long post about this essay without taking into account Mayakovsky’s own suicide, in 1930, so I talk about that a bit at the end, with reference to one of my all-time favorite essays—Roman Jakobson’s “On a Generation that Squandered Its Poets”—and how it makes me think about our own political moment.

This is a long post, over 5000 words, and took a long time to write. Thank you for your support!

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Selin dismisses the play Hamlet because the protagonist is annoying. Selin is frequently annoying, so this is pretty hilarious. I assume you are poking fun of the callow certainty of undergrads, but do you also not have any time for Hamlet?

For those who haven’t read Either/Or, the allusion is to this passage:

People said it was universal to be obsessed with your parents, but I didn’t feel that way. When we read Hamlet in high school I almost died of impatience. All I thought about at that time was getting ­out—and Hamlet had done it, he was in college, and then he came back to get entangled in a gross drama related to his mother’s sex life? Because his father told him to, in a ­ pages-​­long outpouring of moralizing ­self-pity, where he didn’t say anything to or about Hamlet, and just droned on about how lust was preying on garbage? And then Hamlet went around making cutting remarks to people about his mom? I had no patience for such a person.

I ended up having a lot to say—about Hamlet, annoyance, unreliable narration, psychoanalysis, “poking fun,” reverence, nihilism, irony, and “critical thinking.” Video after the paywall. Thank you!

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Happy New Year!

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Here are the questions:

1. From Neziha:

   hi elif, 19 y/o turkish american reader here. growing up in the u.s., i’ve always loved finding bits of turkish identity in my books and media to resonate with, as it feels validating to my own experiences and life in a way haha. as someone in a similar position to yourself & selin (daughter to immigrant parents), I resonated with selin a LOT. and i happened to read both books in respective alignment to my own life lol so selin as a person and character eerily resonated with me. i specifically found the detail of her not wanting to revolve her identity & work around her ethnicity but not knowing how to be authentic without mentioning or tying back to her cultural roots, so real and relatable. i assume this part was autobiographical, and was wondering how you have navigated through this feeling as you progressed through higher education & later life? w love !

2. From Agnes:

   I know you wanted to be a writer from a very young age, but when did you realize autofiction was an option? Was it always what you wanted to write? Did it take discovering others who did it (like Sheila Heti) before seeing it as a legitimate technique? [Dear Agnes, your other excellent questions ended up in a different category (for another time).]

3. From Maria Jacqueline Evans

   With your books and sometimes even New Yorker articles being so autobiographical, how do you manage the feeling (illusion/delusion) your readers have that they ‘’know’‘ you. I ask as someone who has said aloud: “I love Elif Batuman’s writing because I love being in her head, watching her think” and then had to remind myself that I’ve never been “in your head”...

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In very tangentially related news, it is now once again possible to purchase a Chris Kraus baseball cap (after a bold, pro-literary-baseball cap stance taken by a recent New Yorker interview with Kraus). There is also an Elif cap available here. (In the interests of transparency, I will note that I declined the seller’s offer of a share of the profits—though I did gratefully accept the gift of an Ursula K. Le Guin T-shirt. (I kind of wanted the Sheila Heti cap, but I hear Zadie already has one.)

Speaking of Sheila… I truly cannot wait for this event that she put together in Toronto in February, with Patricia Lockwood and Gwendoline Riley. It looks like we will be talking for a whole hour, so I confidently expect us to get to the bottom of what imagination is.

Another event I wanted to let NYC people know about is Press Play, a two-day “fair of books, records, art, ephemera, talks, and workshops” this weekend (December 13-14) at Pioneer Works. Coming up after the paywall, I will be sharing a special Elif Life promo code for free admission to Saturday’s many amazing events, including a panel where Silvia Federici will be talking about Zohran’s NYC and autoreduction. Federici, of course, is the legendary author of Caliban and the Witch.

Speaking of witches: a couple of years ago, I wrote a short novella Tituba (a mini-Selin sequel, set in 2000-01: she takes a year off from grad school to try to write a novel about Ivan, but it somehow ends up being about the Salem witch trials). Some version of this text will appear in the novel I’m currently working on. Another version of it now exists as an attractively bound art book, including some experimental stuff that probably won’t make it into the novel (e.g. a long poem by Selin, using only 16 letters of the alphabet), PLUS a sumptuous enclosure by the painter Louise Bonnet—now available through the Gagosian Gallery shop, as part of the Picture Books series.

Coming up after the paywall: 3700 words of thoughts I had on rereading the Miranda interview! Subjects discussed include: simultaneous reading of Miranda July and Oksana Zabuzhko • Fredric Jameson on Hemingway and “the art-sentence” • Flesh by David Szalay • “content warnings” • MJ’s killer Substack • novels versus personal correspondence • a tiny bit about the next Selin novel.

Thanks for reading!

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I’m very excited to share this second video Q/A (answering questions submitted by subscribers through Chat).

These are the questions I addressed this time:

Monica: “Could you please walk us through the process of writing a short story? I’m in an MFA program and lately short stories are completely eluding me.”

Asha Indralingam: “As a writer whose work I am greatly inspired by, can you share a little bit on your novel-in-progress process? Assuming you have an idea in mind, do you just start writing and worry about plotting later? When is the right time to solicit external feedback and what could this look like? How long did it take you to write your first book?”

Tanja: “I wanted to ask how you approach the writing process where you have various ‘scenes’ of the novel but don’t have an event that links them into a coherent story. I have pieces that I want to go into the novel but don’t have that big idea/conflict that will link them together.”

Caroline Jacquie: “What is your relationship to research like? Your books (and substack) often feel deeply researched and full of knowledge. Do you usually start from the research and build a story around it or start from the story/characters and research follows?”

Hannah Frances Johansson “How do you come up with a concept for a novel?”

Mynda: “I absolutely love your work, and as a university student myself find so much relatability in your writing. As a semi-autobiographical fiction writer, how would you describe your writing process/what gives you artistic inspiration? Do you record interesting interactions/ conversations? How often are you thinking about your writing in your day-to-day interactions? Does it ever get in the way of being present in a moment?”

Thanks to everyone who submitted questions - next time I’m going to answer the ones about “autofiction.” In the meantime, love to all the writers and all the students and all the student writers!

Here’s a list of references, aka Show Notes

Earlier posts on short stories: “My Journey With Short Stories, Part I,” “Short stories, II,” and “Short Story Maps”

Anton Chekhov, “House with a Mezzanine” and “A Boring Story” (short stories)

Haruki Murakami, “Sleep” (short story)

André Alexis, “Houyhnhnm” (short story)

Osip Mandelstam, The Noise of Time (book) (free pdf here)

Cara Blue Adams, You Never Get It Back (book)

This Jungian Life (podcast)

Bruno Schultz, The Street of Crocodiles (book

Céline Sciamma BAFTA talk (video)

Isaac Babel, Red Cavalry (story cycle about the Russo-Polish War, a.k.a. Polish-Soviet War)

Isaac Babel, 1920 Diary

The Save the Cat franchise

NB Although I am not convinced that Mark Twain ever said or wrote, “A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way,” that doesn’t make it any less true or poignant.

Thank you for reading/ watching/ listening!

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You may notice that we are in a high-school band room (the green room for the event): a kind of space I hadn’t inhabited since the 90s. They still have Garfield cartoons on the wall!

Truly, a dark oeuvre.

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I somehow thought this was going to be fast and easy, I guess because I had a lot of thoughts. But the thoughts turned out to forking and ornery, with almost every paragraph leading to a rabbithole of memory or speculation—as if some external, combative energy was periodically swooping into my brain, making me Google things or have imaginary arguments with people. In retrospect, I don’t know why this came as a surprise, I was basically gazing into a fall cornucopia of agitating subjects (New York, Gaza, Turkey, “facts,” Westernization, self-betrayal, US foreign policy in the “non-West,” definition of “non-West,” “journalistic ethics,” writing careerism, “whiteness”).

Two weeks later, the post still feels messy and unfinished. Yet, I urgently need to not be writing it anymore. I am therefore sharing it with you in its current form, in the spirit of inquiry. I did go through and tried to flag the compulsive drive to Google, rehash, argue, etc., when I noticed it—just so we can learn more together about these phenomena, and maybe someday we will all move beyond them, and then just imagine the boon to public health and governance, and the reduction in personal feelings of isolation. (On the Rehash Train, we always ride alone.)

~4000 words after the paywall. (It was initially 11,000.)

Thank you!

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