Life Goals
IN 2016 I was asked to take part in a keynote conversation at BinderCon with whomever I wanted. “Our keynotes are conversations between two writers, so we would love to know who your dream conversation partner might be,” conference cofounder Leigh Stein wrote to me. Almost immediately I landed on Elif Batuman. By that point I’d been reading Batuman for over a decade, since she appeared in the pages of n+1 in the mid-2000s, and I had stayed her loyal fan as she became a New Yorker staff writer in 2010, the same year Farrar, Straus and Giroux published her deeply engaging first book, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. I was in awe of her as a writer and as a human. I’d run into her at parties, where she was always a combination of kind, effusive, funny, and flustered—she had the bearing of your favorite affable old professor trapped in a very beautiful, extremely tall, Turkish New Yorker nerdy cool girl.
Born in New York City, Batuman grew up in New Jersey and studied at Harvard before completing a doctorate in comparative literature at Stanford and returning to the East Coast to begin what soon blossomed into a prodigious career.
After the conference in 2016 we became friends. We were in conversation with Yiyun Li at an event, sponsored by the Asian American Writers Workshop, on my book tour for my memoir, , and she joined me again for the launch of my last book, . During that virtual event—in May 2020, when the stillness and stagnancy and horror of the pandemic was feeling chronic—we drank and toasted each other over screens in our New York City homes, hers in Brooklyn and mine in Queens. Every time I am with Elif I (Penguin Press, 2017), which follows Selin Karadag, a Turkish New Jerseyan in her freshman year at Harvard. I could not put the book down as I followed Selin’s misadventures falling for a Hungarian grad student named Ivan. This was also my experience reading , forthcoming in May from Penguin Press. The highly anticipated sequel to , the novel takes us to Selin’s sophomore year, past Ivan and into all sorts of other forays with young men both at Harvard and beyond. was the kind of masterpiece that earned all its rave reviews—including being a Pulitzer Prize finalist—but is somehow even better, which already feels like it is breaking the unspoken rule that a sequel must never overshadow the original. Here again the narrative is awash in nineties pop culture—Fiona Apple, Lauryn Hill, Alanis Morissette—and references to canonical authors such as Proust, James, and Flaubert. The entire novel is enveloped in a highly addictive yet gentle wit and wild benevolence, a singular brand Batuman has made her own.
