"Interesting Abyss" Bonus Post

Deeper and darker 🕳️

Hi everyone!

Quick note: after the last post, I received some number of “Is everything OK, Elif?” texts/ emails, and I just wanted to thank everyone for their kind wishes and assure you all that I’m fine!

FWIW I realize I was a bit verklempt by how much I empathized with Alice in Beautiful World, Where Are You? (the writer in her 30s who ends up in a psych ward after book tour), whose mental state, as it is represented, brought me back to some difficulties I experienced after my first book came out, in 2010. That was almost 15 years ago. I am now in a different and more comfortable place in life, and happily do not have those feelings anymore. However, I sometimes feel emotional when I remember that time.

Furthermore, although Beautiful World, Where Are You? is a work of fiction, nonetheless the thought that publicity/ “success” had caused Sally Rooney, a person I met only once, in 2017, to experience, in the intervening years, so many of the same crazy-making thoughts I had experienced almost several years earlier—at least, to the extent that she was able to write them so lucidly—made me feel protective of her, and exasperated by the book industry.

I also want to clarify that 0% of my exasperation is directed at actual individual publicists or publishers, who are among the best, wittiest, and most passionate advocates of books / writers I have encountered, and who surely do not enjoy every aspect of their job, any more than anyone else does. Nor do I currently have, off the top of my head, any easy actionable suggestions about how book publicity could be made less painful (though I will continue to give thought to the subject). All I was saying is, I agree with Sally Rooney, or at least with Alice, that the current set-up negatively impacts both the form and the content of conteporary novels.

That said… I am fine, and clearly Sally Rooney is fine, I haven’t yet read Intermezzo but I loved the excerpt in The New Yorker.

Now as promised, a special thank-you post with bonus material for paid subscribers. Coming up:

1. Story outtake involving accordion-playing child

2. The Cakes and Ale passage re: writing life

3. More about photo shoots

4. Bonus photos of me relaxing my face

Thank you!

Big hug to everyone who is either going to college or dropping off a child at college this weekend! I’m really excited to meet my new students in a couple of days. 🍁🍁