Poured Over: Elif Batuman on Either/Or

By Jenna Seery / June 8, 2023 at 6:00 am

Either/Or, Elif Batuman’s sequel to Pulitzer Prize finalist The Idiot, is the humorous and relatable ongoing story of a Turkish American surviving college in the 90s. Batuman joins us to talk about her approach to writing fiction, how her own life influences her work, analyzing literature and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over.

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Executive Producer Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.           

Featured Books (Episode):
The Idiot by Elif Batuman
Either/Or by Elif Batuman
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The Possessed by Elif Batuman
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

Full Episode Transcript

Miwa Messer
I’m Miwa Messer the producer and host of Poured Over and Elif Batuman, I have been waiting to talk to you, I love to The Idiot. I’m not the only person who loved it. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Now Either/Or the sequel is out in paperback. And this just feels like a really cool moment for the book. Because also I’ve been reading, rereading, I should say, by listening to your audio books, and you read them. They’re so good. They’re so good. Thank you for being here.

Elif Batuman
Oh, my gosh, thank you so much. I could not be more excited.

MM
So I have a question for you though, listening to you read both books, both The Idiot and Either/Or does it change your relationship with Selin? Does it change your relationship with your own work when you have to read it out loud over the course of what a week per book?

EB
Yes, I think it was three or four days, and it’s all day video, and you have a director. And actually, with The Idiot there was, I wouldn’t say push back. But it was made very clear to me that they prefer for nonfiction books to be read by the author and fiction books to be read by an actor. And the director also, like a big part of his kind of like personality was how much it was, how he thinks actors are better at reading books than authors. And he’s like, written a lot of essays about it that I read online. And the reason for that is that he’s like, the words don’t matter. And this is something that he said frequently, like, I would come in, and he’d be like, you know what, the words don’t matter, because words aren’t actable, but emotions are actable. So the words really don’t matter. And I was like, it’s an interesting thing to say to the writer.

Dude, what?

I never took drama in school, you always had to choose between, like drawing and acting. And I feel self-conscious, not writing in the first person, I feel self-conscious, pretending to be someone I’m not, I feel self-conscious about acting. So I thought, yeah, let’s go with an actor. And then they sent some sample clips. And you know, I started consuming audiobooks during the pandemic, and the ones that are in America have like a very particular style, different readers are different. And I think the general style works better for certain books than for other books. But there was a kind of like, “over it” quality that was like, kind of being like, you know, the chair was pushed up against the wallpaper, which was faded, it would be like, the chair was pushed up against the wallpaper, which was faded. And it also all of the clips that they sent me all had people reading, it was all kind of like white sounding people for want of a better— reading about stuff that was like, from another country, I had a bowl of chewy Keita kind of noodle. Just I just thought, I don’t know, I don’t want this person. Like, that’s not the sensibility. And I know, actors, and they can do different stuff. So I was like, Okay, I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna do it. So then I went there. And the first-person stuff, I mean, there was a challenge, which was, the director gave me actually a lot of really helpful terms. But within, you know, it was kind of a matter of constantly, you couldn’t just be like, Okay, I’m just gonna listen to what this person says, because like, 30% of the stuff that he said, just sounded crazy to me. It was like, okay, the parts that were first person were, were relatively easy to do, I did have a lot more trouble with the dialogue, including the Selin dialogue, and especially the dialogue for other people, it did really change, there’s a scene at the end of The Idiot, where, not to give too much away, but there’s like a conversation between two characters who don’t really talk for the whole book.

It’s a great, great section. That’s all I’m gonna say. But it’s great.

It’s based on an actual relationship that I had when I was 18, that I and you know, when you live things, you have a story that you tell about it, you don’t necessarily revisit it or change it as you get older. And definitely reading it out loud and with a director and the characters, the guy, so the director was a man, so he was much more in tune with, like what the man would have been thinking and found that mind blown, because I hadn’t realized that I hadn’t been thinking about like, why was he thinking why was he saying those things? Yeah, that actually felt really cool to read out loud.

Which is one of the things I really love about both books on audio and the way you read them is that it feels so sort of perfectly dead pan and organic to what you’re doing in the novels. And I mean, you got me to read character. I know you wrote Either/Or as a sophomore in college and all I can think is you know, I would like to talk to sophomore year because we’re gonna get to the influences. Obviously, some of this is you but these are novels. These novels, but character I’m sorry, my eyes are getting big just thinking about it. I just I love the delivery. And the delivery to me just keeps me seated in the story in a way as if I was reading it on my own on the page kind of thing and I don’t like being taken out of the story when I’m in something that deep, especially something that’s making me squirm a little bit. I remember being 18,19, 20— It’s not my finest moments.

Depending on what you consider by our scale of fineness.

Let me rephrase that I have some memories that…

Feeling emotions deeply?

Yeah, I mean, it’s, I have a lot of compassion for who I was, at that age. Let’s put it that way. But at the same time, it’s like, oh, do I really want to remember, but I love Selena as a character. And I like her honesty. I like her sort of directness. I like the fact that she’s very earnest. All of these things where she’s just she’s to me, she’s a really refreshing new kind of character, because I don’t think we always give this kind of coming of age story, the room to roam, because you’re playing in two sort of sections, right? You’ve got this whole, like, how does the life of the mind work and how are all of these influences creating this character? And then you’ve got this 18-year-old who— I guess she gets to 20 in Either/Or right? So between the ages of 18 and 20, we meet this young woman who, I mean, there’s a lot of change and a lot of growing, and she’s just she’s so right. And I don’t know, she always knows she’s funny. Yeah,

The literalness and the deadpan-ness. I guess what one thing I’m interested in is like, why are things the way that they are? I think novels are really well equipped to do that, like one thing that really attracts me to my writing is to question what why our structures the way that they are. Why are the things that we don’t question like maybe in the part about alcohol, where she, when people drink at parties, and then she’s like, oh, I understand when people drink at parties, people drink at parties because other people are insufferable, and you have to poison your own mind to numb yourself. And it’s kind of like, she knows that’s funny. Like, she kind of knows it’s funny, but she’s also kind of really trying to truthfully describe everything. Yeah, I’m gonna say she’s a very kind of literal person. And in that sense, I think it’s also like a, like a kind of a device that novels do. Like Don Quixote is someone who takes everything super literally, comic results. And I think that there’s some, like, she’s reading Kierkegaard who’s really saying some kind of bonkers stuff. And if you want to, you know, really read those books as works of philosophy, you have to extend a lot of like, you know, take a lot of things metaphorically, and she’s really just taking everything as a literal instruction, which I find really refreshing because I think that there’s, we sort of tend to say, like, oh, everyone knows that you should take this metaphorically, everyone knows you’re not supposed to take this literally. But then, you know, we go around with all these ideas that we should already know, things that are never actually stated. So I that was one of the things that I wanted to question and kind of push.

Which I love. Because the other thing is to and you said it when about the assumption, right, that we should know, we should know, we should know. And it’s like, actually, your brain doesn’t finish cooking until it’s 25. Like we actually have the science it says, your brain continues to develop and change until the age of 25. So this idea that somehow we’re, you know, tiny adults as we get thrown into college.

It’s good to know everything, like everything just changes all of a sudden. And also, you’ve been like working and working to like, get into college, and then you get there and you think everything’s over. And then but everything is only just because also, I feel like one of the big obstacles that I’m always thinking of, and that I think, I would like to think about eroding is just shame culture, and how much of the culture works by people hoping like everyone knows, you don’t do that. Everyone knows you do this. Everyone knows nobody does that. And the thing that nobody does is actually something everyone does, but nobody talks about. Yeah, I feel like the literalness is a way to combat that, too.

I just really love her voice. And I’m wondering, you have talked about the fact that you had sort of a start to The Idiot, you put it in a drawer and you came back to it like 15 years later? Yes. And that you needed that distance. And then on top of it, I read, Either/Or was maybe going to be an essay collection, not a novel, and it sort of comes directly out of the experience of publishing The Idiot, which I mean, so many of us were like raving about this, but when The Idiotfirst came out, it just it was so refreshing and it was so fun and slightly weird, in a good way. But we almost didn’t get Either/Or and it’s a pretty direct sequel. So I’m wondering if you would tell that story about how we got here because it’s pretty great.

Oh, yeah, I always wanted to be a writer and in college, I had this kind of crazy experience with this guy who’s like the character Ivan. And I always wanted to be a writer, but I wasn’t like I could tell I wasn’t good enough at it to, like, make a living. So I went to grad school, I found out that they pay you to get a PhD, to do that they you know, you do some teaching and basically reading books, and you’ve got a stipend and you got housing. So I did that. And then I thought, I’ll write a novel on the side. And then that turned out to not be possible, you couldn’t do anything on the side, because you were busy with all the reading books and teaching classes and stuff. So I took a year off and I tried to write this book about this thing that happened to me in my freshman year of college. So at that point, I was like 23, and I was writing about being a teen, I wrote and I wrote. And it’s like, the thing that I produced was like, five times longer than The Idiot, which is not, it’s not hugely long, not especially short. And then I couldn’t figure out how to finish it. And I broke my arm and I didn’t have health insurance. So I went back to grad school and had excellent health insurance. And did this, you know, PhD in Russian literature and comparative literature. And then from that, I ended up becoming a nonfiction writer, which was somehow— I think it had a lot to do with how fiction and nonfiction was positioned at this really specific time, like between 2010-2011, which like autofiction happened, and it’s completely changed again. But um, so I became a nonfiction writer. And I was living in Turkey, and I was writing for The New Yorker, and I decided I wanted to write a novel about a New Yorker writer who’s in Turkey, reading these magazine articles, who realizes that everything in the magazine articles is like kind of a lie, because it’s not actually about like, the whole, like human integrity of life. It’s just about these kind of like packaged magazines subjects, I got a contract to write that novel and it turned out to be impossible to write because it was basically just about the life that I was living then. And then I ended up having to spend a bunch of the advance for unrelated stuff and then I was just in this very difficult position. And I started writing flashbacks to that novel about like, how, how did this New Yorker writer get in this situation? And her love life was a mess and then it was like, she was thinking about how her love life was also a mess when she was in college. And then I was like, wait, didn’t I write a whole novel about this? I did a residency, this wonderful residency, Santa Maddalena, it’s the one in Italy where you get this house and there’s like pugs everywhere, there was something about being there. I was super, super depressed. So then I went to therapy for the first time and a year into therapy, suddenly someone cancelled at Santa Maddalena and I went at the last minute, and I was just surrounded by all of these pugs and stuff. And then I was able to go into the cloud and read this old novel that I had written and then I realized, the book I was trying to write was called The Two Lives. And I came across a sentence in the abandoned book that was like, I began to feel I was living two lives, one consisted of my normal life and the other consisted of these emails, I was writing with this guy. And I was like, oh, so it was always the two lives anyway. So I realized that was the book I had to write first. So I wrote that book. And then I thought I was done with college, and I was finished. Then I went on book tour. And it was like, right at the beginning of the Trump presidency, it was like early on 17. And that year, Me Too happened and it was like all I was doing the promotion and all of the media people were just like, completely shell shocked by Trump. And a lot of the conversations were about, like the Muslim ban, and just like political stuff that wasn’t really that closely related to the content of the book. And it made me think a lot about — and there was some pushback about the book not being political enough, particularly there were these two incidents that I had. One was in Berkeley and when I was in Italy, in my book festival, where these kind of older men really publicly took me to task for, there’s one passage in The Idiot where sitting in the main, the narrator reads a newspaper, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that the newspaper, that article that she reads is about the artificial insemination of an elephant in the Berlin Zoo named Kiko and they fly the sperm there in a cooler and she’s like, ah, so that’s what’s in the news. And both of these guys were like, was this a commentary on how oblivious people are, there’s no political consciousness in these books. Like, there’s so much going on in the world between 1995 and 96 and all this, like idiot can see is, you know, the elephant insemination. And then, you know, the more I was talking about the book and talking to readers and people who liked the book, and people who didn’t like the book, the more I understood that it was a book about deep politicization. And I, you know, there were specific scenes in it. Like there’s a scene where Selin decides, learns that some people at Harvard major in government and that such people exist, and they’re called gov jocks. And she’s like, Well, so are people like that going to be our rulers, and it’s kind of a throwaway line, but then the Kavanaugh hearing happened while he was still promoting the idea, and I was like, no, those people are rulers, you know, like, there’s Kavanaugh being like, was the captain of the whatever team and so you know, like, it was so clear at the time that the idea came out. I was very early in my first lesbian relationship with my partner with whom I now hope to spend the rest of my life and I was just living my best life and with this new queer consciousness that I didn’t know that I had. And I was thinking a lot about like, why didn’t I do this earlier? And then Me Too happened and I think a lot of women my age, were thinking back about our early sexual history and retelling it using language that we didn’t, you know, as someone who was a teen, and 20 year old, and in the 90s, I didn’t think of the word rape culture, or patriarchy, like, I think I knew about them, but I don’t think I thought that they applied to me, I just don’t remember them. And then if it’s like vocabulary that you didn’t necessarily have or didn’t use, it’s hard to go back in time and remember how you thought about it. So in the process of promoting The Idiot and talking about the end and thinking about my own early sexual history, and about, you know, the year in my life after the events of The Idiot, I realized that I had to write another book, and that it had to be set in that time, I had to go back there. So I did not really plan to write another book about her next year in college. But that’s how it happened.

It’s really great. Because here’s the thing, if you go back and you think about 95, 96, 97, the period that the two books cover together, email is brand new. And it’s not like the interface we use now. Like you’re actually having to type like little bits of code, which makes me laugh because shenanigans ensued because our friends, Selin types like I do, and occasionally stuff goes in different directions. And you know, things happen. But we also didn’t have, as you said, language for things. Like if you think about how quickly language has changed in the last 20, some odd years, right? Wild, it is five years. It’s wild. It’s totally wild. So the idea that you’re getting sort of guff from people saying they’re not political, I mean, I could argue, and I will argue that actually, that is a political statement in and of itself, that she is not a political, it represents the time it represents this moment in the 90s, when like, we were all kind of barbarians. I mean, honestly, like, men, women, not everyone was a barbarian, because we just didn’t have the awareness that we have now. And this is part of what culture and art and societies were supposed to evolve, that we’re supposed to keep moving forward. And Selin, I just, I really, I’m so fond of her because she’s just looking at everyone going really, really, there’s a lot of that sort of, and the idea that she keeps turning to books, at one moment, like Henry James pops up, and she’s having this moment with Isabel Archer from Portrait of a Lady. And I’m like, oh, okay. And it totally works. I love it. I go back and forth on Henry James, because as I mentioned, I’m, you know, there’s some stuff that I’ve read, and there’s some stuff where I’m like, I get it, and I appreciate it. But this is not the thing that makes my heart go pitter patter. But I love the idea that this kid who’s just so focused on trying to figure out how to live and how to be a person and how to be a writer like she wants to write to. And yet, there’s Henry James, you know, there’s Proust. There’s, I just, I love the way you bring in all of these sort of, well, classic ideas, because that to me, like, the contrast between her life of the mind, right, and like what the reality of her day to day is, that is? No, I’m just calling guff on the people who were giving you a hard time.

Thank you. I mean, I had those ideas too, like, I think that what you said is it took me a long time to recognize what you just said, which is that, that like the depoliticization is itself political and I think in the 90s I was really conscious of choosing, that there were literature people and politics people and I’m a literature person. And it wasn’t until 2016, 2017 that I started reading second wave feminism for the first time I really understood what they meant by the personal is political. And a lot of those writers like Schulman, Firestone, and a lot of second wave feminists, Adrienne Rich, are talking about ways that great literature has deep politicized and romanticized life, and specifically has politicized women. And that was something that I really became conscious of. During the Kavanaugh hearing, when I just thought about how Christine Blasi Ford, like she’s clearly such a smart, thoughtful person and who wrote this PhD dissertation on childhood trauma, and she’s thought about all these things, but she went into psychology, you know, and Kavanaugh went into politics, and it’s like, I went into literature and this is how like, these are the people who go into all these different things.

I’m also one of those people though, who thinks that art is political. It is it is, and also whose story gets told through art, like that’s political. Like, there are people who can say, well, you know, I don’t want politics in my movies, I don’t want politics in my books, I don’t want it in my poetry, whatever.

They brewed during the Cold War and, you know, we drank it to some extent. And it’s one of the things that I’m really excited about the changes in language and everything of the past few years is the extent to which it’s become part of common awareness, the extent to which, like personal life and individual decisions are actually interfacing with world historical movements in some way, which I feel like was not when I was a kid, and when I was growing up, those things were like, not viewed as continuous. And now they, that’s a realization, that art was— on to how important childhood trauma was, like, you know, I remember reading novels for the first time in high school and being like, why do I have to read like three chapters at the beginning about the great grandparent’s childhood? Because that’s actually the most important you know, it’s epigenetics and trauma and, and that’s how all these things feed into to making the world the way that it is. Yeah. So I agree with you completely art is political.

You reference Anna Karenina and Eugene Onegin. And, you know, when I was younger, I had a really different relationship with Anna Karenina, and also honestly, Madame Bovary. And, you know, you Bovary surfaces a little bit too, but not quite to the level that Anna Karenina does, and feel like my relationship with those books have changed over time. And those characters too, I used to be a little snotty about both of those women, because I was like, well, why would those are just, what, those are bad— You know, that sort of judgment that you have when you’re younger, and you quite don’t have the full picture, but you really think you do because you have that sort of arrogance of youth. And I love the idea that it was Eugene Onegin and Anna Karenina that made you think, oh, I can do this. Like, you read them at a really young age and we get these sort of very complex idea driven novels with a great character, their hard, like, we don’t always get that as much as I like in fiction.

Yeah, that’s true. I think I had a similar response to Madame Bovary. I was just kind of, why do I want to read about this kind of icky depressing person, which I’ve now blamed Flaubert for. I think Anna Karenina is much more kind of humane and Anna actually reminded me a lot of my mom. My mom left my dad and there was another guy involved and it was an, I heard people say the same kind of like poisonous stuff about her that the characters say about Anna Karenina, so I was the kind of like, there’s a way that reading Anna Karenina, when I was a teenager in high school, it felt like it was describing the same kind of complicated situations that I felt myself and, and describing how angry people will get with each other and giving all the reasons when you’re reading it, you feel that anger, too. And then he goes to the other person, and you see it from their point of view, I just found it very, like, soothing. And I don’t know, not even like, oh, I could do this. But I want to do this, like this is the way that I’m going to have some kind of mastery over I’m going to not be a ping pong ball in my own life, I’m going to be you know, be able to turn it into a rich, meaningful story. Like that’s, that was kind of my dream. And then with Eugene Onegin, I think that it kind of goes back to what you were saying before, which is the interface between books and real life like the narration of Eugene Onegin is so chatty. And so like, there’s so much quotation and so much the books and there’s a real acknowledgement of I mean— I think this is a problem that I had when I wanted to be a novelist earlier and a kind of nonfiction writer, I was told sometimes that things that I wrote that I thought of as fiction, like I would submit them to be edited and three or four times, I have the experience of people being like, well, we can publish this but as nonfiction, because it’s clearly an essay. And I think that the problem I was having was wanting to write about, you had to really nerd out on books and read because I think of it all as being the same texture, you know, like, if you’re a reader, you’re always reading something, or you’re often reading something, and it’s always kind of going in the back of your mind, and you’re going in and out of it, and you’re going in and out of your real life. And they’re kind of these two tracks that are always playing, and they’re always informing each other and like, that’s what I want to read about is like that. That’s the kind of total picture.

Your very first book Possessed. You wanted to write that as a novel about a graduate student at Stanford, Russian lit and it was actually published as an essay collection. And it’s a really terrific essay collection. And if you’re looking to dip into Russian literature, in a way that is not incredibly intimidating, I highly recommend it. I mean, it’s also very funny. And I think people assume that, like the Russians are just not funny. Like, it’s just a mountain to be climbed kind of thing. It’s like 1000s and 1000s of pages, and I’m like, well, actually, but this idea that you have laid out and you’ve done it in a number of places where you were comparing War and Peace to something is some other epic novel in your life. And so the only thing they have in common is the fact that stuff is made up, that’s like not enough.

It was probably In Search of Lost Time. I was just thinking about how, because I studied theory of the novel in grad school, and people get really critical. And there’s, there’s no working theory of the novel, like, there’s no rule that you can make up that immediately tells you what is a novel and what isn’t a novel and why that everyone can agree on and yet, that’s kind of in the in the world of theory. But like selling books, there’s this idea that there’s fiction and nonfiction and novels and fiction, and novels and fiction are kind of the same thing. And it just seems crazy to me to think of like, if you think of War and Peace, In Search of Lost Time, Don Quixote, and like Moby Dick, and Robinson Crusoe, you know, all of which have huge nonfiction components in them. And if you think like those, what those things have in common is that the most important thing that they share is that they’re not true. It just doesn’t make sense to say that.

Elena Ferrante also has a little bit of a hand in the creation of Either/Or, and I really love this part of the story, too, because you were reading her. And again, you’re thinking about nonfiction versus fiction, and all of these big and you’re coming off of this tour for The Idiot. Yeah. And you’re reading the third volume in the Neapolitan series, and you’re like, hey, wait and I love this connection. I really, I think it’s very cool. Can we talk about that for a second?

Yeah. Oh, I love the Neapolitan novels so much and yeah, at the beginning of the third novel, Elena, the narrator is promoting an autobiographical novel that she wrote about this unpleasant sexual infatuation, encounter that happened with her crush Nino, and she basically ends up raped by Nino’s father, though she doesn’t use that word and she writes this book about it. By the time the book comes out, it’s 1968 and it’s the middle of the student protests and all of Elena’s friends are they’re communists, and they’re protesting in the student movement, and they’re doing all this stuff. And, and she can tell that, like her friends, they’re supportive of her book. And they’re like, you know, well done, Brava, but she can tell that they’re a little bit not enthused. And finally, she calls one of them on it. And he’s like, look, you did what was possible. But objectively, now’s not the time for writing, now, you wrote about, what is this in the end, except a story of bourgeois social climbing, and she’s like, Oh, God, is that true? And I read that when I was in Italy, promoting The Idiot and it was at this moment when the far-right Matteo Salvini had just become minister of I forgot what, the interior or something like that, and they were sending away refugee ships and people were talking about it was the end of Europe. And so it was a little bit similar to actually promoting the idea in the early Trump period was like, at that Italian at this, like, this weird Salvini moment. So, it was like a little bit of the same questions. And I did encounter that story with the newspaper, in Italy also. And it just made me realize that when I saw that, how Elena’s story about Nino was taken as being not political, it really made me understand the extent to which my feeling that the political didn’t apply to me was because so much of the political, the way that I encountered it in my youth was misogynistic, for one reason or another. Also a reason I called the book Either/Or, it was kind of like, there was a division between my parents where my father was the political one, and my mother was the more artistic one. And in the end, I had to take a you know, I chose my mother’s side in some way, because there was something about left wing Turkish politics, class centered politics, that my dad came from that really did not take women seriously in the books that they read they’re like, why don’t you read Yasar Kemal, but there’s like, there’s no women in Yasar Kemal, because when someone’s sort of being critical of something that you wrote, like, someone’s like, oh, The Idiot isn’t political, or whatever. My instinct is to be like, oh, are they right? But when it when I saw it, so clearly, in the Ferrante book, I was like, no, those critics were not right, that story was political. And then that made it possible to extrapolate it to my case and that gave me impetus to write Either/Or.

I mean, part of why I asked you to tell that story beyond the fact that I love the, the sort of points of connection is when we first meet Selin in The Idiot, and this is partially her mom, but you know, she says point blank, she’s like, well, I want to know what books really mean. And, you know, I love the idea, and I love the idea that she’s talking about books with her mom, and you know, they’re picking stuff apart and sort of pushing each other to think in different directions. But this idea that we can ever know what a book is really supposed to mean. It’s like every single one of us is going to bring our own experience and our own understanding and in some cases, even our own desire or own infatuation right to whatever. I fall in love with ideas all the time, and sometimes the execution isn’t there and I’m like, oh, man, it happens or, you know, you start treating fictional characters like they’re, you know, just standing down the street from you. And I know that sounds weird, but I’m a bookseller and that’s part of the job, right? Like, if a writer has done the thing, it’s like, oh, yeah, I really don’t want to leave this behind. So the idea of going back to college, you know, with Selin and her gang and her friends, Svetlana, who I really quite like, as well, you know, the idea that they’re sort of finding out what the definition of friendship is for them and Selin is trying to still use classic literature to sort of help guide her through the 20th century is…. it’s really charming. It’s charming, it’s absurd is she’s just a wonderful, messy character. And this idea that she really just wants to know what books mean, and how she can apply it. And I just, it’s great.

Thank you. I mean, I think a lot of us go to college, like, wanting to know what books really mean, like, what does that really mean? I guess I was also thinking to some extent about the and this is after having the experience of doing the PhD and being a teaching assistant and teaching undergrads and then, you know, teaching undergrads later after I finished, like, how much of teaching literature is creating frustration in the students by like, they think is important and kind of withholding and being Socratic and being like, Well, what do you think? And that’s how we’re trained to do it and that feels like a way, but maybe it’s not. I was used to thinking of it from the teacher’s perspective and I wanted to go back and think of it from the perspective of the of the kid in that moment. So that was the front part of it. And also, just to quickly say that Selin is, she’s really looking for an instruction manual for and that’s why, I don’t know, right at the beginning, there’s a mention of her trying to put in a tampon and reading, like the instructions for how to do it and being like, the whole idea that you can read instructions and follow them, it’s kind of crazy, because it’s assuming that you could replicate someone else’s experience, or like at the end, she works for a travel guidebook, and like, I went on this thing and got lost than does that mean, if I write it down, but like that, that guy’s not going to be sitting at the side? If she’s really questioning that idea of instructions in a way that seems kind of comical. But I think it’s actually kind of true. Like, I think it’s not misplaced to think about how instruction works and how teaching works. And what are the assumptions that we make that might not be true.

And you can layer in authority? Like, there is an inference of authority when you’re giving directions, you’re giving instructions, you’re showing and teaching whatever it’s, there is there is a little bit of like, well, I’m gonna muddle my way through, this will be no surprise to anyone. I’m not great at reading instruction, sometimes. Can we get back to Selin and Svetlana for two seconds? Because you ask a really great question of the course of their friendship and you may actually come out and say this directly, can you ever really be sincere without being pretentious?

Oh, yeah. I love that they talk about all of those things. That was, it was really fun to write their conversations. I guess, I think that a lot of things are sort of a continuum and there’s no, it’s like, it’s a kind of thing with instructions. Like, if you go too far in this direction, you’re going to be like insincere. And if you go too far in that direction, you’re going to be conscious, and you have to kind of like, it’s just like tuning, and I feel at this point, it’s like another thing with references like, one question that I’ve gotten from readers is like, do you ever feel worried about putting in so many particular references like to particular things like that people won’t be able to understand it. And I also feel like that’s another you know, you could write in a really spare, kind of fatalistic, allegorical way that’s universal, and then like, everyone’s gonna be able to relate to it. Or at the other end, you have so many little details and allusions that the only person who would understand it was like you because you were the only one who were there to like, read all who read all those particular things and was there at that time. And I think you have to tune it somewhere. And I’m sort of more comfortable tuning it towards the more pretentious end, and I’m more comfortable tuning it toward the more the end of like, more allusions and I think that just means being okay with the idea that like, the downside is some people are not going to get your allusions and they’re going to feel alienated or upset. But the downside of like, of the other thing is that of writing in this kind of pure spare, allegorical style is that people are going to tune out because there isn’t enough stuff to like, kind of like hang your interest on. And I guess it’s just a matter of taste.

The thing is, I’ve read a lot of the other novels that you talk about, have I studied them? I have not, I have read them, but like, I’m not going to run out and read Andre Breton now and no offense. Like, I know, I’m not going to connect with that. But I have other like, I don’t feel like I’m missing anything, because that’s a point of reference that I don’t specifically have experience with, like, I have enough experience of the Russians. I have enough experience of Flaubert and Balzac.

I mean, this is a conversation I had actually with, with one of the editors of the New Yorke. I wrote an essay that mentioned a lot of Russian literature and they really wanted, they’re a general interest magazine and kind of like anytime you mention anything… like I had said, you know, I went to Ukraine for the first time in 2019, and as the author of two books with titles The Idiot and The Possessed, I got to hear a certain amount about people’s opinions about Dostoyevsky. It sounds a certain way. And it comes back from editing and it’s like books called The Possessed, and The Idiot are titles of books by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, who was born in this year and did you realize that not everyone knows these things? And it’s like, I totally realized that not everyone knows these things and it’s also not that I know everything, I know a lot about a very small, specialized area. I don’t know a lot about everything. I enjoy reading things where everything isn’t explained, that it doesn’t feel like a Wikipedia article, especially now that there’s the internet. I feel like if I didn’t get something I could look it up. With the Breton, that was actually, it’s funny, because there was like, a micro moment when that book was on every cool person’s bookshelf. And it really did not last very long. I remember like, people even just like, a little bit younger than me who were like, why is she reading this dreadful book? And I’m like, you don’t understand like, everyone has. But yeah, so that’s why that’s there. And I did put a decent amount of effort and too, for me, the story isn’t, it’s not about like, knowing who Breton was in the context. It’s about understanding, like, what it meant, what its cultural currency was in that world. What, you know, what did it mean, to see that book cover on his bookshelf? And what did it mean to see those photos? And that kind of, I feel like, I My hope is that you can understand that even if you haven’t read the particular book.

Absolutely. I mean, one of the things that I love about both The Idiot, and Either/Or is that they’re not exact, I don’t need them to be exactly my experience, I need to be involved in Selin’s life and her friends’ lives. And I’m more interested in the world that you build in both of these books and they sit really nicely together, I think, you know, you could argue actually, that you don’t have to read The Idiot before you read Either/Or. It’s a rich experience, if you choose to do that. But they really do stand alone.

I wanted them to be able to.

They super stand on their own. I know there are autobiographical elements, obviously, you’ve talked about it, you know, you’ve been very open about it since the beginning. They’re just fun. I just I want to be in the world, I want to hang out, like, you and I don’t exactly correspond in the years that we were in school, but like that whole, like all of the emotions, all of the stuff that you’ve read or not read, or just that entire motional landscape, it’s really kind of great to be thrown back into that and just be like, well, at least I have some distance, at least it’s not yesterday.

Well, yeah, that’s the hope is that, you know, because like why? Why are novels full of all these specific details. And also, you know, I get a fair number of reader mail from people who are that age now, they tend to, letters tend to look a little bit similar. And they’re like, you’re not going to believe what just happened, I was sitting reading your book in this cafe, and this song came on the radio and then I was reading this book and then someone mentioned that, again, just the other day someone was saying that. And it’s like, I think for me, the ideal of putting, first of all, the point of writing about myself is not because I’m so interesting, but because it’s what I know. And it’s, I want to write about the human condition and really get in there with the details and the motivations. And I don’t want to lie, I don’t want to fudge things. I feel like there’s bad information out there. And, and then the reason for going to all the detail is like you could say like, you could just say what the upshot is of like, a lot of novels, like you know, In Search of Lost Time is like, social climbing and snobbism is a waste of time, it’s more important to do things that are actually meaningful to you. And you could say that and like, you know, maybe a person would mean something, but not really. But if you tell the whole story of, I was so excited to go to this party, like having the granularity even when it’s not, by definition, it’s not going to be transferable to all people who are, different people in different ages and live in different places and everything. But I think once there’s a certain amount of granularity it invites the person to go back and reconstruct, what was that that for them in their mind and gives them a structure to hang all the things on? Because otherwise, why do you need a whole story about some random person and like all of their stuff? It’s because you can’t just transmit like the moral to people. But the point of the novel is that storytelling can deliver certain things that can’t be said about it.

So I also heard there’s a novella coming Emma Cline does this cool thing with Gagosian and my understanding is you’re doing something for that with Selin?

It’s set the year after her graduation. So she’s moved to California to go to grad school and she’s taken a year off to try to write a novel and the thing she really wants to write about is everything that happens in her first year of college with Ivan. Now she has another boyfriend and she’s living with him, but for some reason, she’s still writing about Ivan, which makes her feel really guilty. And she’s like, why can’t I be happy in my happy relationship? And then on top of that, she feels like, well, this thing that happened to me is too trivial and historical to be a novel and she reads Austerlitz by Sebald and Windup Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. And she’s like, Oh, these are both books about a mysterious elusive person, where the mystery of that person is really tied to like a genocidal event that happened related to World War Two in the geographic area where it took place that she’s like, oh, what genocidal event. So she ends up writing a book about like, it’s called Tituba and it’s about the Salem witch trials, which is kind of in the geographic area, she writes a book about the Salem witch trials, basically, on the role of this, like enslaved indigenous woman, and then which is a its own true kind of appalling story. And then at the end of it, she’s like, wait, what and then she goes back to school. So that’s yeah.

Can I ask who the artist is that they’re pairing you with, because that’s the whole point of this. It’s an artist and a writer and it’s just really cool.

It’s brilliant, right? I’m so excited about it. I don’t know, I, we just finished the edits on the text. And they’re still working.

Well, we can be patient. But I just, I think it’s a really cool idea. And I liked the idea, too, of switching to a shorter story for a second because, I mean, I know people have asked you so we get a book for each year of college and it doesn’t sound like that’s what your plan is, but are you writing the book about Selin in her 30s Because that I would really like to read.

I really want to get to it, I really enjoyed doing this shorter form of Tituba. So I have like a few kind of shorter installments, so I think the next novel is going to be made up of, you know, like a few different parts that are different episodes in her life that are going to extend over more. Because I just, I don’t have time to write another book for every year of college, you know, when she’s bought her first, you know, IKEA futon, and. And it’s also like, you know, the first years of college, so much happens and then I think even in your memory, like time gets sort of condensed the older that you get. Yeah. I don’t know, it feels like my first two years of college, like, as much happened and I thought as much stuff as like, maybe in like 10 years of life between the ages of 30 and 40. And it just feels like it’s getting faster. Like it’s gonna be another 20 years and curtains. I’m glad that we got to this point.

Yeah, I also I think she’s just going to keep getting, I think Selin is just going to keep getting more interesting. I mean, watching her sort of, I don’t want to say flounder because that’s not fair to her. But watching her figure it out. Yeah, I’m really fond of your character.

Thank you. I want her to get to now because there’s something like, I feel like she sees things that I don’t see. And so far that’s been kind of a function of like, she’s in the past. And I’m writing about her now. So I guess I see the things but like, I almost feel like if I can catch up to the present, then be able to see things through her point of view. I don’t know that maybe that’s like unrealistic.

It makes a ton of sense to me. But did Selin surprise you at all? I sort of feel like she did.

I mean, it was surprising even, so when I was 38 and I revisited that first draft that I wrote when I was 23, about being 18. And there was so much that I didn’t remember, there’s so much about, I don’t know, like her sense of outrage about everything and how kind of funny she is and that she made a lot of kind of jokes that I wouldn’t make any more because they just seemed too mean and you know, some of it I took out because it was just too mean. But a lot of it I just still thought was really funny and unexpected. Something about once I’ve seen that and had that experience, I could kind of keep going in that voice even though I wasn’t that person anymore. And then with Either/Or it was a matter of kind of like updating it a little bit because I wanted it to be like there’s things that she said in Either/Or that she couldn’t have said in The Idiot but also I wanted to like, you know, plausibly the same person was just it feels like one of the most interesting, like jobs of novels is to portray the person over time and how the person changes, but they’re like, they’re the same person in some sense. But like, what is that sense, exactly. It feels really good and fruitful.

I just I really liked the novel as an art form. I really do. I just I think you have so much room to roam, and you can do so many cool things with it. And the question is like, what do you want to do? I mean, yes, I mean, it is the ultimate sort of form for capturing any passage of time, right? Like whether it’s specifically about a person or a community or whatever, and you for a second had talked about not writing fiction anymore before Either/Or came out I just want to make sure that that’s not the case anymore, right? Like, we’re good? You’re staying with fiction.

For now, we’re good. Yeah, I did go through a moment where I was like, I’ve been depoliticized. I’ve been deradicalized by novels. And I learned to aestheticize the conditions of my oppression rather than to question what needs to change them in the world. And I guess now I’ve both come around to both to the idea of like, even if you just decide I’m going to actually change the conditions in the world instead of instead of aestheticizing, like how do you do that? That’s not really clear. And I guess from writing Either/Or, like the most gratifying thing has been meeting younger readers who actually are activists, and who say that they’ve been inspired by it to actually do things in the world. And I now think that there’s a lot more room in the novel for it to be critical than I feared at that moment when I felt panicked, deradicalized, and also that there’s like, it’s important to have people in the world who are like acting, acting, acting, but it’s important, you know, society sort of discourages people from like removing themselves from the flow of life and like sitting in a room and just thinking about what everything means and it’s important work, it takes a lot of time, you can’t like speed it up. I believe, increasingly, or I believe, again, that it has value in guiding how we’re going to move you to need people to sort of remove themselves and analyze things and those are the skills that I’ve developed. So that’s what I’m gonna do for now.

You also sound hopeful. Yeah, it’s really cool. It’s really, really cool to hear. That sounds like a really good place to wrap though and thank you so much, Elif, it was so great to talk to you. The Idiot is out now in paperback, Either/Or is out in paperback. You can also get them in very cool audiobooks with Elif reading them and those I super recommend. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you for joining us today.

Thank you so much Miwa, this has been an utter delight.