Ayşegül Savaş on Friendship, Motherhood and the Necessity of Solitude
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What was the first short story you ever wrote and how did you come to write it?
For reasons not entirely clear to me, I didn’t take any literature or creative writing classes at university. But in my last year of college, I sat down to write a story about a man who visits a sheikh during a visit to his hometown and is troubled by the sheikh’s predictions about his life. There are, also, the many stories I wrote as a child, often set in the world of The Hobbit.
In Long Distance, your debut collection, social life plays an important role in many of the stories, but often the most interesting aspect is the fraught relationship between friends. What do you find interesting about such dynamics and what makes you return to them?
Perhaps because friendship is so varied, perhaps because it is so essential to my own life, perhaps because I am mystified by the ways that friendships evolve (and, at times, end), perhaps because I often understand myself through my friends, I am continually drawn to this vast and diverse topography.
You write about motherhood with some ambivalence. In ‘Marseilles’ and ‘Cry It Out’, the exhaustion of new mothers and their reluctance to relate this experience to friends takes centre stage. The mothers are often concerned with boring their friends. How do you approach writing about this?
I wouldn’t say that I write about motherhood with ambivalence, but rather its social dimensions, norms and expectations. In all my writing, I am drawn to exploring the distances between our imagined and lived selves, the different people we become in different interactions. Motherhood, especially in its early years, interrupts these fluid states, the roles we play in different settings, and can thus be an interesting filter through which to examine them.
Long Distance begins with an eponymous story and ends with ‘Twirl’, both of which depict disappointing romantic encounters, or at least encounters that don’t quite live up to the protagonists’ expectations. To what extent are these stories connected in your mind and was it a conscious decision to begin and end the collection this way?
My editor, Callie Garnett at Bloomsbury US, was largely responsible for the order of the stories. Callie is also a poet and thought deeply about how the pieces would come together as a whole. It was surprising to me that she suggested ending the collection on ‘Twirl’, when I might have suggested something more sombre, or final. In retrospect, it makes perfect sense to end on that open image of a woman twirling, uncertain about the future. I did not write the stories to be in conversation with one another, though once Callie and I had identified the main obsessions of the pieces, we took out the ones that did not fit the conversation.
In ‘Long Distance’ and ‘Notions of the Sacred’, it is only in moments of solitude that the protagonists are able to muster generosity towards characters they were quite harsh towards earlier in the story. And in ‘The Room’, the protagonist leaves behind a flat she shares with friends to live a more tenuous lifestyle just so she can be alone. Why is it that these characters are striving for or require solitude to become fully realised?
Is it not the case in life as well that we access such emotions, and see through the layers of our own feeling, in moments of solitude and contemplation?
The only story in Long Distance written from the perspective of a man is ‘The Guest’. How did you find writing from this perspective?
When I first started writing stories, I frequently wrote from the point of view of men. I wonder, now, whether this had something to do with the fact that I had mostly read male writers until that point, and thought that the male perspective might give me more authority. Or perhaps it was an effort to distance myself from the subject matter, so that I could see it more clearly.
How do you find writing about cities you’ve only visited compared to writing about cities you’ve lived in?
Setting, for me, is one of the great pleasures of writing. Whether it is a place I know intimately or as a tourist, a place I have invented or pieced together from different sources, I love to set the characters’ yearnings and disappointments against these backgrounds, to play with ideas of estrangement and belonging, even to have the setting bring the characters’ emotions to a crisis.
You’ve often gestured at the limits of language, far more than the constraints of a form, be it the short story or novel, at depicting experience. To what extent do you feel that experience, particularly emotional experience, can be distilled using language? And, as a writer, do you feel that it is the point of a story to encapsulate or convey such experience?
All writers are, first and foremost, translators, transforming experience into language. The challenge, I think, is to not fix the states that we are interrogating with words, to stay open to the shifting experience. I do think, perhaps naïvely, that literature should try to capture something that is essentially unsayable.
What is the relationship between your short stories and novels? Do your novels ever emerge from a short story?
I think that the two forms are very different, and require different types of attention, so it’s always surprising to me that I have nevertheless turned short story material into novels! In both cases, it was a desire to stay in the landscape of the story, to expand on its dynamics, but this meant breaking free of its form so that it might be capacious enough to house a novel.
Finally, which writers have been your greatest influences as a short story writer?
William Trevor, Alice Munro, Sait Faik Abasiyanik, Mavis Gallant, Jorge Luis Borges, Tessa Hadley.
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Ayşegül Savaş is the author of the novels Walking on the Ceiling, White on White and The Anthropologists, as well as the non-fiction work The Wilderness and the story collection Long Distance. Her work has been translated into over a dozen languages. Originally from Istanbul, she lives in Paris.
Sruti Basak works as the Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant at The London Magazine.
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