The Brooklyn Rail

Growing up Turkish-American, I lived a dual identity—Ohio during the school year and Bodrum, Turkey during the summers. I longed for those summers on the Aegean, where I could pretend I was someone else for three months. Each Labor Day, I would return to America with hair streaked with blonde highlights, olive toned glowing skin, and memories of my secret Turkish life.

It’s no surprise that I immediately connected with Ada, the Turkish-American main character of İnci Atrek’s debut novel, Holiday Country. Set in the Turkish beach town of Ayvalık, Holiday Country takes the reader on a thrilling journey through Ada’s exploration of her cultural identity. Does she belong to her birth country, America, or her mother’s birth country, Turkey? Ada has spent nearly every summer in Ayvalık, swimming in the sea with her childhood friends, and catching up on the local gossip from her grandmother. When Levent, a mysterious man from her mother’s past shows up, Ada is tempted to challenge fate. If she tries hard enough, can she tinker with her kismet and prevent history from repeating itself?

On a December morning, I spoke with Atrek over Zoom—she in Istanbul, myself in New York. Our physical distance quickly dissipated as we bonded over complex mother-daughter relationships, personalities in different languages, and our love of writing postcards.

Amy Omar (Rail): Holiday Country is your debut novel. Could you elaborate a bit on your journey as a writer? At what point did you decide, I’m going to sit down and write a novel?

İnci Atrek: I always knew I wanted to write books. When I was in undergrad I was sure that I would also be a literature professor, but by my senior year of college I was very tired and thought, Oh god, I can’t do seven more years of academic work. After graduation I started working corporate jobs. In 2013, my team had this big whiteboard where everyone wrote down their non-work goals for accountability, and I wrote that I was going to write a novel. Though I always knew I would get to it eventually, that was the year I really started to take my goal seriously.

Rail: Who are some of your early literary influences?

Atrek: As a child, I don’t remember a particular book standing out more than any other, but my dad’s relationship with books really influenced me. He collects first edition books, as well as rare books. Often, he would come back from work with a first edition children’s book he found at the second-hand book shop he’d always stop by on his way home. We’d wash our hands and cut out this plastic wrap and tape a little protective cover on the book. Then we’d carefully open the pages together. So I’ve had a very strong respect for books and writers since I was young. Books have always felt sacred and magical to me.

When I was in college, I was an English and creative writing major. One book we read in class that made me realize how seductive and manipulative language could be was Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. I was just in awe. That’s when I started to really think about mastery of language, and the extraordinary power you could have if you got really, really good at it.

Rail: You recently took the plunge and moved to Istanbul. I’m curious about how location affects your writing and if you’ve seen a difference in your work since moving to Istanbul.

Atrek: I moved to Istanbul in 2019, but before that I was living in London and had already written most of Holiday Country. For me, it’s about not being in the place that I’m writing about. When I was in London I could easily write about Turkey. Since I wasn’t there, I didn’t think, Oh, let me make sure this is exactly true to life—I could use my imagination and focus more on the essence of what I remembered, which made writing more fun.

Separately, being in Istanbul overlapped with the end of office life for me. I know a lot of writers wish they had more free time, but I actually wrote really well when I had an office job and a full social calendar. When I moved to a country where I didn’t have to report to an office every morning and didn’t have a social circle, it was tough to focus. I put a lot of pressure on myself, since writing was the one main activity in my life. It’s something I’m still working on.

Rail: Why did you choose Holiday Country to be your debut novel?

Atrek: I always knew that my first novel would be a mother-daughter story set in Turkey. I worked on a novel for about five years—also a mother-daughter story, but set in Istanbul—then I got to the point where I just wasn’t excited by it, so I took a break for a year. When I went back to the manuscript I asked myself, Which chapter did you have the most fun writing? That happened to be the one chapter on Ayvalık. I took that chapter and built around it, creating a whole new story set in Ayvalık.

Rail: Ada often stumbles over speaking Turkish, not able to exactly express herself how she wants, her “personality gets lost in the shuffle.” Can multilingual people have varying personalities depending on the language at hand? How do you think Ada’s level of Turkish linguistics impacts her personality and actions?

Atrek: When people think about learning a language at a very basic level, they’re worried about using the wrong word, being misunderstood, or saying something they don’t mean. The focus is on exchanging correct information. But Ada’s relationship with language goes beyond information exchange—it’s about expressing herself and creating the types of relationships that she wants through language. Did she sound powerful, or meek? Did she use words that suggested an intimate relationship with the person across from her, or words that kept them at a respectful distance?

The question of whether you can have different personalities in different languages… I think yes, you can, but you’re not limited to those personalities. You can break out of them through experiencing more of the world in that language. For example, I grew up speaking Turkish with my family, and for the longest time when I spoke Turkish, I always spoke as someone’s daughter. When I moved to Istanbul, it became clear very quickly that I would have to come from a different place when speaking—to negotiate with a contractor working in my house, to solve a problem with my landlord. I couldn’t bring forth my qualities as a daughter—someone who feels protected and loved, someone who works toward harmony vs. victory—to handle those situations.

It’s interesting to think about the opportunities that language gives you to express certain things. For example, informal vs. formal relationships and determining the right moment to switch to an informal relationship with someone. We also have the “gossip tense” in Turkish, where you use a different tense depending on whether or not you were actually there on the scene when retelling an event—so you end up revealing more information through a sentence than you would in English. The more you learn other languages, you see the constraints that exist in English.

Rail: Levent sets a strong tone from the beginning. What are Levent’s intentions? Why do you think he continues his relationship with Ada?

Atrek: I wanted Levent to mean so much to Ada, just completely above and beyond who he was as a person. On the flip side, I wanted Levent to look at Ada in a much less complicated way. Which is, here’s this young woman who kind of reminds me of this other woman that I was with way back when I was young and having the time of my life. It’s a nice ego boost for him, to be with her. The relationship is completely off-kilter.

It’s fun to explore the state of mind of someone who is perceiving another person in a drastically different light than who they really are. Often, I think the person on the other end has no idea about the extent of the significance that the other latches onto them, what their attention and companionship means to them.

Rail: I relate so deeply to Ada’s story because similarly to her, my mother moved to the US from Turkey and married an American. You write how Meltem “had been gradually declining into a different person” and “used to be someone who looked after herself”. The image we have of Meltem is completely through Ada’s eyes. Why do you think Ada views her mother as lacking autonomy?

Atrek: The story is told from Ada’s perspective, and it’s very difficult for Ada to see how her mom doesn’t have a strong foothold in the country, culture, and language. She gets lost while driving and she mispronounces popular brand names. Ada thinks, Oh my god, she’s just completely lost. She has no idea what she’s doing. Any signs that point toward this are always amplified in Ada’s mind.

Also, even though Meltem spends summers in Turkey with her daughter, she’s not there for most of the year. So she returns home, technically, but home has changed in her absence. She can’t quite belong there, either. She’s not even in Istanbul, she’s in this small town spending time with, mostly, her mother. This idea of Meltem not knowing a country she used to call home is so depressing to Ada, as though her mother is totally at the mercy of other forces. She doesn’t have control over where she is and her space. So how could she have control over anything else?

Rail: As daughters, we tend to view our mothers under an unfair microscope. We look to them as an example for womanhood, but then as we shift into teenage years and are searching for our own self-identity, we have a moment where we think our identity is stronger than our mothers’. That dissonance can be very jarring.

Initially Ada thinks the solution to her mother’s problems is reuniting her and Levent. However the story shifts to Ada pursuing Levent. How much of Ada’s actions are driven by her own obsessive identity crisis versus almost role-playing her mother?

Atrek: I would say they’re deeply intertwined. Throughout the whole book, Ada is looking for something to point to, something very concrete to be able to say, Look at this, I belong. Can you see this? One thing I think is super interesting is when a person who’s so steeped in that culture and country and language looks at you and sees something worthwhile in you and falls in love with you. For Ada, that’s the path that opens up before her with Levent. If she can entice him and keep his attention, then it’s proof for her that she belongs there.

The extra pressure here comes from Ada’s understanding of fate. Are children responsible for the failures of their parents? Can they fix them? Even if they can’t physically go back in the past and fix that mistake, maybe in their own way they stop that fate or mistake from happening to them.

Rail: It’s the idea of What does it feel like to walk in my mother’s shoes? Maybe I can understand her more if I insert myself in similar situations that she experienced?

Atrek: And what was that life like, when Meltem truly felt like herself? When she went to high school and there was only one Meltem she could be and was comfortably that person?

Rail: Holiday Country is a multi-generational story and often with multi-generational stories, each generation faces the conflict of assuming the burdens of the previous generation. Ada’s grandmother is in many ways a typical Turkish, critical, opinionated, controlling mother. I have seen this in my own Turkish family: members getting suffocated by the cultural and familial expectations and how that has impacted their decisions. How do you think this trickles down to Meltem and Ada?

Atrek: The grandmother character is very dominant and controlling and manipulative, but she also has so much love for her daughter and granddaughter, which is what drives her actions.

Meltem gives Ada her independence, which is nice, clearly, but it’s more of a reaction to her own mother’s parenting style than a separately thought-out decision. You may not know what’s right as a parent but you know what’s wrong, so you decide that you will do not-that.

One of the things that Ada sees through her grandmother is Meltem’s life growing up in Turkey and her command over the culture and language when she was living there. However, Meltem failed to continue that life. She failed to be in a place where she could really be herself and express herself and be in control. In the beginning of the book when Ada meets Levent, this man from her mother’s past, her initial instinct is to set her mother up with this man. It’s an especially easy decision since her American father has been unfaithful recently. This idea of reaching back into her mother’s past and fixing her mother’s mistakes is driven by Ada’s feeling that Meltem won’t be able to do it herself, since she’s apparently been unable to move forward with anything in her life with such a controlling mother.

Holiday Country is about inheritance of fate, and there’s always a strange sense that Ada’s fate with her mother’s was interconnected in some way, which makes her feel closer to her mother, but also somewhat trapped. Ada feels like if she can just solve the problem for her mother, she can solve the problem for herself.

Rail: What do you think Ada’s take away at the end of the novel is? Her mother’s perspective is flipped onto the reader and we are able to see Meltem in another light. How do you think this will change Ada’s perception of her mother moving forward?

Atrek: I have never thought about characters beyond the last page. It’s fascinating—and maybe we do it with parents more than we do with other people—how much of your own problems and what you’re grappling with come through in your interactions with your family. You can look at your family and say, Wow, this is a major problem that they need to work on, because taking that responsibility away from yourself and putting it on them is easier than personally dealing with it.

As for the future of their relationship, in the end Ada feels more comfortable with her own identity because she’s able to untangle herself from her mother. The lens she was viewing her mother through breaks, and she’s able to see her as a separate person with a clearly-defined identity.

Rail: What’s next for you?

Atrek: I definitely want to keep writing novels. Holiday Country is about identity and culture but my next work will likely tackle themes of power and won’t take place in Turkey. It’s very much still in the idea phase right now. The way I write is by branching out and trying every single wrong path until I finally find the right one. It’s extremely inefficient, but also the only way I know how to write.

I love writing novels because it’s a good way to say exactly what I want to say. The only other time I feel this way is when I write postcards. I take pictures of all the postcards that I send out in case they get lost in the mail, and I like having a little record. As soon as I reread them I’m like, Wow, I really got to the center of that emotion in three lines, how did I do that? Can I just take all of these postcards and put them in my next book? It’s only postcards and novels for me for now, nothing in between.