How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - Elif Shafak - ‘There’s only one thing that scares me - and that’s indifference’

Episode Date: July 31, 2024

I could listen to Elif Shafak speak for HOURS. The eloquence of this woman! She speaks like most of us would aspire to write. I cannot get over it. Shafak, the Turkish-British author, combines ferocious intelligence with a captivating turn of phrase so it’s little wonder she’s garnered so much critical acclaim. She has been nominated for countless literary awards, including the Booker Prize and made the BBC’s 100 Most Inspiring Women list of 2021.  Elif and I talked about the importance of outsidership, why it’s her mission to champion ‘otherness’, the fluidity of chosen family and how growing up without her father’s love shaped her for years to come. We also discuss gender, sexuality, prejudice and why the only thing that terrifies her is indifference. There are truth bombs in every sentence. And we talk about her fantastic new novel, There are Rivers in the Sky. As always, I’m desperate to hear about your failures. Every week, my guest and I choose a selection to read out and answer on our special subscription offering, Failing with Friends. We’ll endeavour to give you advice, wisdom, some laughs and much, much more.  Have something to share of your own? I'd love to hear from you! Click here to get in touch: howtofailpod.com  Production & Post Production Manager: Lily Hambly   Studio and Mix Engineer: Gulliver Tickell and Josh Gibbs Senior Producer: Selina Ream  Executive Producer: Carly Maile Head of Marketing: Kieran Lancini How to Fail is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment Production.   Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up y'all? It's your man Mark Strong. Strizzy. And your girl Jem, the gem of all gems. And we're hosting Olympic FOMO, your essential recap podcast of the 2024 Olympic Games in 20 minutes or less every day. We'll be going behind the scenes for all the wins, losses and real talk with special guests from the Athletes Village and around the world. You'll never have a fear of missing any Olympic action from Paris. Listen to Olympic FOMO wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to How To Fail, the podcast that firmly believes you learn just as much from failure, if not more, than you do from success. Before we begin, I just want to remind you about my subscriber series, Failing With Friends, where every week my very special guest and I go through problems, failures, questions that you, our lovely listeners, have. And this week with the marvelous Alif Shafak, to everyone out there, here's a taster. This is the age of speedy consumption, you know, a short attention span. Everything is just narrowed down to snippets of information, which I find dangerous because I think it's the exact opposite of knowledge.

I would be thrilled to hear from you. Follow the link in the podcast notes to share your failures now. I just wanted to remind you that for the first time ever, How to Fail is going on tour and will be presented by HeyU, the home of reality TV. Each show I'll have a very special guest sharing their three failures on stage, so you can expect the usual uplifting, hilarious and moving conversations. Tickets are on sale now. Head to feyn.co.uk or follow the link in the show notes. On the social media platform X, Alif Shafak describes herself as a storyteller, reader,

learner, human rights advocate, feminist, introvert, and citizen of humanity. On the first count, she's being modest. Not just a storyteller, Shafak has in fact published nineteen books, twelve of which are novels, several of which have been shortlisted for major literary awards including the Booker Prize. She's been translated into 57 languages and is an honorary fellow at St Anne's College Oxford. Her 20th novel There Are Rivers in the Sky is published this August and is an epic tale of one lost poem, two great rivers, and three remarkable lives, all connected by a single drop of water.

Shafak was born in Strasbourg, France, but was taken to Turkey by her mother after her parents separated. When her mother became a diplomat, Shafak moved around with her, including a spell at school in Madrid. This itinerant existence is perhaps why Shafak has always identified with the role of the outsider in her

work and also partly explains her extraordinary facility with language. She writes fluently in both Turkish and English. An outspoken critic of repressive regimes, her political activism has not come without cost. In 2006, she was put on trial for insulting Turkey after the publication of her book, The Bastard of Istanbul, which referenced the Armenian genocide. Had she not eventually been acquitted, Shafak would have faced a maximum prison sentence of three years. And yet her belief in the power of stories to change the world remains more fervent than ever. As she wrote in her powerful 2020 manifesto, How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division, stories bring us together. Untold stories keep us apart. Elif Shafak, welcome to How to Fail.

Thank you so much. What a beautiful introduction. Thank you. Well, I'm so honoured that you are sitting opposite me today. You are a personal inspiration of mine and I know for many women and men across the world. And I wondered if I could begin by asking you quite a big question, which is whether you feel writing has always been a political act at some level for you. If you come from a country such as my motherland, Turkey, and you happen to be a storyteller, you don't have the luxury of saying, I'm only going to write my stories. I'm not going to be interested

in what's happening outside the window. I am a feminist and I've learned lots of things from past generations of women's movement. And of course, one of the crucial things that they have been telling us is that, wherever there's power, there is politics. In that regard, you might be writing about marriage or sexuality or seemingly unpolitical things, gender, identity, body.

All of that can be quite political as well. So wherever there's inequality, some type of injustice, power imbalance, there's politics there. And in that regard, I think a novelist cannot be apolitical or non-political. That doesn't mean, however, that politics is the guide. That doesn't mean that at all. For me, what matters is to be able to ask questions in my fiction and then leave the answers always to the reader, because every reader is going to come up with their own answers. And I have to respect that diversity. So I don't like the kind of fiction that tries to preach or teach or lecture at all.

I don't know the answers myself. All I know is that I care about the questions, including difficult questions. Some of those questions can be political questions. I really like this idea of fiction as dialogue and that it changes with every single individual reader. And I know that you said in the past that you have readers who, for instance, might be homophobic, but they will say to you, oh, I loved this trans character you wrote. I loved this gay person that you wrote. So in a way, that's part of your political activism, isn't it? Some of my readers in Turkey, for instance, they come from very, very conservative families.

And so they grow up with a certain narrative. And if you ask these people in the public space, their opinions about minorities, about various identities, they might tell you lots of stereotypes, cliches, biases, and even dogmas. And yet, some of those people come to my book signings and they say, I read this book and this is the character that I felt the most. And it always surprises me because the character they are talking about can be Armenian or Kurdish or Jewish or gay or, or bi, or trans.

When I say normally, generally in their daily life, maybe they're biased towards all these people. But when they're reading fiction, I think they're more ready to connect. That's what happens to us. Because in our daily lives, we're always in the company of other people that synchronize energy and we just go along. But when we're reading a novel, we are alone. And in that space of solitude, we're more ready to open up our hearts and connect with

the people that we've regarded as other. And then you realize actually the other is my brother, the other is my sister. I am the other, you know, I'm not that different. Those connections are very important for me. I wanted to ask you about the quality of your prose, because you're sometimes described as a magical realist novelist, and I'm not sure that that's quite right. I feel that it's more magical naturalism almost, because you embody nature in so many of your books. The island of missing trees had a talking fig tree, there are rivers in the sky, starts

so beautifully with this single raindrop landing on the neck of a king, and we follow this drop of water and what it becomes. And that kind of embodiment of the natural world, how important is that to you? I love magical naturalists, much more than magical realism. What I do know is that for me writing a novel is about connections. I mean no one said it more eloquently than Umberto Eco when he talked about connections are everywhere. You do not have to invent them, you just have to see them, right, as a novelist. So life as I see it is always interconnected. Our destinies, our stories are connected.

And it's a myth, it's an illusion to think that there is the East, there is the West, these are the boxes where everyone has to stay. And nature is the best teacher actually, if we are interested in interconnectivity. Trees are the best teachers because both under the ground and above the ground, trees are so interconnected. I'm very tuned into ecofeminism. I like that. We see ourselves as the center of the universe.

We have become consumers of nature rather than seeing ourselves as the center of the universe, we have become consumers of nature rather than seeing ourselves as part of an ecosystem. We're neither inferior nor superior, and everything in that ecosystem matters. So rather than understanding the importance of living as part of a circle of life, we have started to believe that we're above everything else and that just turned us into consumers and I think it's ruining the planet. Tell us about the inspiration for your new novel because we were chatting before we started recording and you live next to the River Thames. So how much was the inspiration for this novel, that fact of geography?

River Thames was a big, big inspiration for me. I love water. I think I love listening to water. I know it's going to sound weird, but just sitting by the water and trying to think. I appreciate such things. But I've also been thinking a lot about the river Tigris and the river Euphrates, which are the main rivers in the part of the world where I come from, which is today regarded as the Fertile Crescent. It's a fascinating geography. Unfortunately, in today's world, it's associated with maybe not wealth or big culture and all of that, but actually when you go back in time, this was the center of major, major civilizations. This is a land that has gone through, again, massive ecological crisis.

And today when you look at the rivers and their stories, these rivers are drying up. And when rivers dry, this has massive political, social, cultural consequences. Women are the carriers of water. So wherever there is a water crisis, because climate crisis is primarily freshwater crisis, it affects primarily the lives of women and children. Women now have to walk longer distances in order to fetch water and they're more subject to gender violence etc. If you care about gender violence then you must care about racial injustice. If we care about racial injustice then we care about also class and regional imbalances and so on. So all I'm trying to say is those connections are very important and the Middle East and

North Africa are very susceptible to climate crisis and water crisis at the moment. Of the 10 major countries that are experiencing acute water crisis, seven are in the part of the world where I come from. So I think I feel very connected to the story of water. I wanted to write a novel that honors a single drop of water. Do you ever feel overwhelmed by how much suffering and injustice there is in the world? And do you ever not know what to say about it? Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, there are some days when I feel so overwhelmed by anxiety.

Don't we all? I mean we feel angst. I think this is the age of existential angst. Some days we feel angry because there's so much going on in the world and it breaks our hearts. Other days maybe we feel depressed. This fatigue, you know, almost just getting out of bed is difficult, and all of that is okay.

I think what is not okay is to try to sweep all these emotions under the carpet and to think that emotions are a source of weakness. Every emotion, even those that seem negative at first glance, are actually a source of energy. So it's okay to feel these things. It shows that we are human. It shows that we care, that we're not numb. There's only one thing that scares me a lot and that's numbness, that's indifference.

The moment we become desensitized, when we stop caring. I think that is a very difficult threshold. But anger, angst, depression, fatigue, all of these are so human. The crucial thing is what do we do with that source of energy? And Toni Morrison, she has this beautiful essay. She says, some days I feel so angry, you know, and then I go and sit down, I sit at my desk and I write. So I love that.

That's what she does with her anger. Maybe someone else turns it into music. Another person plants trees. What do we do with our emotions I think is the crucial question. We're talking at a time when many people with significant social media followings, of which you are one, are under a lot of pressure to make public proclamations, particularly about the genocide being perpetrated against the Palestinian people after the terrorist acts of October the 7th. And you have been someone who has been brave enough

to use your voice for that. And I suppose I just wanted to ask your advice about how you navigate that with a public profile. I'm aware that asking this question comes fraught with complexity because so often whatever we say is taken out of context, only short clips are listened to and not the whole conversation which comes redolent with nuance. But I just want to ask you, Elif, how you navigate all of that. What's your take on this? Yeah, I think we all, each one of us, we find it so difficult to navigate, especially social media,

the digital space, because unfortunately, it has become a space where there's no room for nuances or having longer conversations. Everything is just narrowed down to almost slogans, especially on Twitter, we have to talk about the major tragedy, humanitarian catastrophe that is taking place in Gaza as we're speaking right now. We're talking about mass starvation. We're talking about famine. We're talking about there's 155,000 pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers on the edge of starvation. And we're talking about women and children and civilians suffering immensely. How do we find the language that serves peace and coexistence? How do we make it clear that we are against

all forms of violence, perpetrated against all human beings? How do we put humanity first? And how do we empathize and how do we care? I think these are very, very crucial questions and we cannot remain silent to what's happening in Gaza at this moment. Talking of the importance of people brings us onto your first failure. And Selena, my wonderful producer, said when she received Elif's failures, I think these are the most beautiful failures I've ever read. And they really are so exquisite and so beautifully nuanced in the way that you've written them that I almost feel I'm betraying you by asking you to talk about them. But maybe we'll put the full essay somewhere. Your first failure is to do with your father. Can you tell us the story?

Yes, I was born in France in Strasbourg. My father at the time was pursuing his PhD in philosophy, if I'm not mistaken. They were very young, both of them. My mother had dropped out of university thinking love was enough, and she had come to France with my father. When the marriage failed, I think my mother felt a little bit helpless because she had no diploma, no career, no money, nothing to fall back on. So what happened was my father stayed in France, he got married again, he had another family, and my mother brought me to Turkey because for her Turkey was

home. But for me it was a new country completely. So we came to Ankara to my grandmother's house. This was a very conservative, very patriarchal and inward looking neighborhood and I think I always felt like we were the odd ones out. Women in my mother's situation, like a young divorcee, they would immediately be married off usually to someone older. And this is what the neighbors were trying to do. But it was my grandmother who intervened, my grandmother who had not been given a proper education for being a girl, she had been pulled out of school. So she said that my mother should go back to college and she should graduate, she had been pulled out of school. So she said that my mother should go back

to college and she should graduate, she should have a diploma, a career, choices. And when people said yes, but she has a child to take care of, my grandmother said I will take care of my granddaughter until her mother is ready. And that changed our life. So I was raised by grandma until I was 10 years, 11 years old. My mother eventually graduated with flying colors. Afterwards, we lived in Spain, Jordan, because she started to work as an attache. I think there's an absence of love in my life because from my father, I did not receive any love. He almost never connected with me as I was growing up, and this created a lot

of confusion on my part. And I think for a long time I felt like it was my failure. And the reason I started to think that way is because around the time I was a teenager, I realized that I had half brothers or half siblings because I didn't know their gender at the time. I didn't know anything about their family. I had never been invited to my father's house. I don't have any pictures with my father except one picture probably that was taken as a baby. I don't have memories with my father. But later on in my 20s, I met my brothers, one of them fueled by coincidence and the other one came to my book signing. And that was a very, very awkward moment, interesting moment because he came and he said, I'm your brother and

he brought a book for me to sign and for a moment I didn't know what to write. And later on we became good, good friends. He's a very, very gentle soul. But I think what shook me was to learn from them, especially from my younger brother, that my father had been a very good father to them. That part was very difficult for me to comprehend because I guess in my mind I had thought all that vacuum because you try to fill in a void, you know. I filled in with this narrative in my mind. I didn't think he was a bad person but I thought maybe he didn't have the capacity for empathy, for love, for compassion, for fatherhood. But when you realize that he had been

for compassion, for fatherhood. But when you realize that he had been a very good father to his sons, then you feel very confused because how come a father can celebrate, for instance my younger brother's birthday coincidentally is a day after my birthday. And he told me how every year you know that he had celebrated his birthday with so much care and love, the day before is my birthday, he never celebrated mine. So you don't understand how can a father disconnect like that. And I think for a long time in my early youth, I felt angry and I felt like as if it was my failure, Like I was the other child. I always felt like the other. You speak of your father in the past tense. Is he no longer alive?

Yeah, he passed away several years back. And I'm sad about that because, you know, there are lots of things that felt that we couldn't say to each other. Nonetheless, later on in life I connected with him. I tried to communicate with him. I also invited him to our house because I wanted him to meet his grandchildren. Because I think that's the problem, you know? When people are angry at each other

or somehow something is broken, let's say between my parents, you should not reflect that to your child. I think the child is an individual, right? So I wanted him to connect with my children as individuals. Whatever happened between us or could not happen, that void should not affect his relationship with them. So I tried to mend to the best of my ability. He tried to mend as well. But of course, some things remained broken.

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Sony Music Entertainment original podcast. Let's talk about how much stories provided a refuge for you in this childhood with very strong maternal energy, but yet possibly a sense of confusion about where you belonged and going to school in Madrid. And I understand you always felt like an outsider there. It was a bad time to be a Turk. And stories provided a kind of shelter, didn't they? They always did, actually. I had a very lonely childhood and it was books that showed me that there were other worlds, other possibilities. For me, writing is almost a transcendental experience. I have a lot of respect for authors who start from a more autobiographical point of view, but

for me fiction is not necessarily autobiographical. What I'm more interested in is becoming someone else and looking at the world through their eyes. Going beyond the boundaries of the self that has been given to me by birth, I want to transcend that and art enables that or facilitates that. I think books made me feel less lonely. When I moved to Madrid from my grandmother's very conservative neighborhood, suddenly you end up in a very international school where again I did not fit in. I think again it was books that helped me because this time there was an additional element of alienation. You need to learn languages fast, you need to learn Spanish very fast, English very fast. There's always a gap between you and the others. You're trying to keep up, you're trying to catch up,

but always feel like you're failing. That immigrant experience is something that I started learning from an early age onwards. And once again, I think it was the world of imagination, the land of story land, that helped me to balance my own anxieties at the time. ALICE There is a character in your novel who is a nine-year-old girl called Narin living in Turkey, whose father is absent for various reasons. How much do you think, I mean, you mentioned there that fiction for you provides a way, an entry point to other people's souls. How much are you writing your own relationship

with your father in a quest to understand him? I think my experience, my journey or lack of journey, with my father, shaped my fiction in a slightly different way. It helped me to understand that human beings are very complex. Someone might be a very good academic, someone or might be a very good politician, but they might be a very bad husband. Or they might be a very good academic, someone or might be a very good politician, but they might be a very bad husband or they might be a great you know husband but they might fail in another area of

their life. They might be a very bad father maybe to one child or another child. So it's actually very very layered, very complex. This helped me to understand when I started thinking in this way, This helped me to understand when I started thinking in this way, I maybe became a bit more, I don't want to say kind, but my anger disappeared because I was very angry at my father and the anger wasn't helping me at all. It is a big burden to carry anger inside. And the thing about anger is it's high energy. It keeps you going, you know. And one might enjoy their anger, but in the long run anger becomes very toxic and it starts

to poison the soul. To think of human beings in a different way and to try to understand my father as best as I could, also to try to understand myself, my own failures or my own layers helped me perhaps as a fiction writer to approach fictional characters in a different way. I love nuanced characters. I do not like one-dimensional. I think as a novelist, you're always interested in, you know, there are moments when a courageous person is afraid. There are moments when a person who's very timid suddenly becomes brave. It's always those contrasts that as a novelist you're interested in, and these things happen in life, that dialectical, you know. I love the dance between sorrow and humor, which

exists in every person in different degrees. So all I'm trying to say is I think my relationship with my father hopefully helped me to approach fictional and real life characters in a much more nuanced way. What a perfect answer. Just a couple more questions on this particular failure. One is that I understand your grandmother, as well as being this incredibly before her time kind of woman who was really passionate about female education, had a spiritual side and she read coffee cups. Did she ever read yours?

She would read coffee cups. But the good thing about reading coffee cups is actually it's in the moment. So it's not like palm reading or anything else. It's good thing about reading coffee cups is actually it's in the moment. So it's not like palm reading or anything else. It's not like destiny reading or anything like that. And that's what I loved about her approach because it was very water-like. It was very fluid. It was open to change. This is who you are. This is how you feel right now. And you can always change if you're not happy with how you feel right now, right? So it's a more river-like approach, coffee cup reading. And her house was full of superstitions, spirituality, not in a very religious way, interestingly. Maybe I'm always interested in faith and I'm interested in doubt as well.

I never want to separate them. I think too much faith without doubt scares me because it becomes a dogma and I think dogmas are dangerous. But complete certainty of maybe doubt without elements of faith also scares me. I think I like agnostics or mystics who are a bit more like misfits, you know, walking a very thin line between faith and doubt, sometimes failing. I always felt close to people who can say, I don't know, I really don't know the answer. My final question on this is, I know that there will be lots of listeners who really

relate to what you're talking about and have less than ideal relationships with one parent. And I wonder what advice you would give someone who is going through that feeling where they feel abandoned by their parent or they feel unloved by them. What advice would you give? You know, one of my earlier novels, 10 Minutes, Thirty-Eight Seconds, In the Strange World, I wanted to write about family in two different ways. There's our blood and genes, DNA families, but then there's also water families. But do you genuinely think of this as a failure? Would you like to enjoy silence? I would like to enjoy silence.

I mean, I always say what's wrong with me. And I know people are genuine and it helps them to focus and concentrate. And when I'm in nature, I don't hear silence. I love listening to the wind and the water and the flowers and you know, everything speaks in nature so what I get is not silence. To me silence feels like the opposite of life. Are you scared of silence then? Am I scared of silence?

Yeah I'm disturbed by silence I think. I feel uncomfortable. Yeah I'm not on good terms with silence. Because the character Narin that I mentioned earlier in your new novel is losing her hearing. So is that partly you exploring one of your biggest fears? That's such a brilliant question. And I hadn't made that connection. You're so right. She's losing her hearing. And also I think in her case, it's incredibly important also because she comes from the Yazidi minority background and the Yazidis are one of the most persecuted minorities not only in the Middle

East across the world, not only in 2014 with the genocide perpetrated by ISIS but throughout history and this is a culture that most heavily relies on oral stories. So the stories that you hear, the music, the song, the ballads, that gives you a sense of identity and belonging and rootedness. So when you lose the sounds, actually you lose so much. I think, yeah, I wanted to explore that feeling of almost being deracinated from a place and identity by losing the sounds. And that brings us neatly onto your third failure, because although you are fearful of silence in the literal sense, so much of what you do is about bringing silent stories to the fore. It's telling

the untold story. And that is very related to your final failure, which is the immigrant experience as it pertains to writing. So you will put this far more beautifully than I do. What did you mean by this? I'm an immigrant not only in the UK, but also in English language. I consider UK and London my home. I also consider English language my home now. However, when you're an immigrant author, I think you're always aware of the gap between the mind and the tongue.

The mind always runs faster and the tongue is trying to catch up. You want to crack better jokes, but you quite can't. There's a slice of void between what you want to say and what you're able to say. And that can be very intimidating. If we manage not to be intimidated by that, it can also be very inspiring because it urges you to pay more attention to nuances. And I think it was Salman Rushdie, if I'm not mistaken, who said, if you want to understand the culture better, you need to pay attention to those words that can't be translated immediately from one language to another. I like that. What are the

words that I can't translate, bring with me? All I'm trying to say is I think the immigrant experience always has an element of resilience, of course, but also failure, an element of maybe renewal, but also melancholy. And that's also okay. That's part of the experience. It's a very fractured experience. Does that mean when you read back your work or when you come to writing the end of a novel that you've written in English, you are so aware of the imperfections of the failures within that work because you feel that you might not have expressed

something appropriately? It's crazy. I mean, I can keep on editing forever, but there comes a moment when you have to say, okay, this story needs to be born, you know, and you have to respect because there comes a moment after which books belong to their readers. Otherwise, I think many writers are like that. We're just obsessed with imperfections. What I can tell you is over the years I realized if my writing has more melancholy, sorrow, longing, I find these things much easier to express in Turkish still. And when it comes to humor, which I love, I adore humor. I think humor is the oxygen we need in life to

be able to laugh at ourselves, not in a cruel way, in a compassionate way. So when it comes to humor, satire, irony, I think I find it much, much easier in English. Are you ever minding your own business and start to wonder, is the Great Pacific garbage patch real? How do the Northern Lights happen? Why is weed not legal yet? I'm Jonathan Van Ness, and every week on Getting Curious, I sit down for a gorgeous conversation with a brilliant expert to learn all about something that makes me curious.

Join me every Wednesday as we set off on a stunning journey of curiosity on a new subject and dive into the archive of more than 370 episodes. Listen to Getting Curious wherever you get your podcasts. Are you ever minding your own business when you start to wonder, how do killer whales work? Who are Hollywood's paparazzi? Did British sailors get it on in the 1800s with each other? I'm Jonathan Van Ness, and every week on Getting Curious, I sit down for a gorgeous conversation with a brilliant expert to learn all about something that makes me curious. Honey, we explore everything around here with scientists, historians, activists,

entertainers, and other brilliant guest experts. You can join me every Wednesday for an all-new topic with an all-new expert on Getting Curious. Listen to Getting Curious wherever you get your podcasts. There has been this process in Turkey over the last few years where the language of Turkey has been purged from outside influences. So vocabulary taken from Europe, Persia and Armenia, there's been a sort of loss of words. How does that affect you? Yes, I mean, this, the Turkish language is very interesting. Grammatically, it's so different than English language. Actually, the linguistic family is closer to Finnish, Hungarian and Turkish. Wow!

Yeah, absolutely. And it's based on agglutination in the sense that it's like a train, you keep adding suffixes. So with one word, I can say the translation of one word in Turkish can be six, seven words in English, just because I've added more suffixes and played with the subject and object. So it's a completely different grammar, which can be fascinating. However, when it comes to the vocabulary, I think our vocabulary has shrunk. As you know, this was a multi-ethnic, multilingual, multi-religious empire, the Ottoman Empire. So within the language, there were words coming from Arabic, Persian, Armenian, Ladino, Greek. It was a mixture of, and Turkish of course, when many of those words were taken out. For instance, I can say red in Turkish, I can say yellow in Turkish, but the shades in between, they used to come from Persian. And as a writer, I long for those shades,

I long for those nuances. This is a very polarized subject in Turkey, controversial subject in Turkey, and I don't like that polarization because depending on whether you are modern or conservative or liberal or conservative, it's almost as if you use old words or new words. But I want to use all the words, both the new ones and the old ones, because we need nuances. So language for me is a passion. And when you speak English, when you say chutzpah or when you say kismet, nobody says, wait a minute, the first word is from Hebrew and the second word is from Arabic.

Nobody says that. I like that. They're both part of the English language organically. I think languages are like rivers and words live longer than us and we need to respect their lifespan. You mentioned there the fractured nature of the immigrant experience and this sort of shifting sense of what home is within the language. Tell me how that has affected you in terms of your empathy for the quote unquote the other.

Yeah, I think it had a huge impact for various reasons. I mean, since my childhood, I have felt like the other in so many settings, so many circumstances. Also, I am bi and I found it very difficult to talk about this, even though I think it's very clear, obvious in my writing. I've been very vocal about LGBTQ plus rights, but I never had the courage to say this is also my story. So the reason I'm mentioning this is because I think for many reasons I felt like the other from time to time. And so anyone who feels like the other for whatever reason,

there's a part of me that naturally goes in that direction and tries to understand. I think literature does this naturally in the sense that when you're a writer, you're not only interested in stories, you're also interested in silences. I know I am, and those who feel silenced. So it's rather than the center, you go towards the periphery, the margins, and you try to bring the periphery to the center. I think literature has a potential to rehumanize people who have been dehumanized and make the invisible a little bit more visible and the unheard a bit better heard. So it's that transformative part of literature that I love. So

you have to, in a way, swim against the current a little bit. We're back to fluidity. Swimming against the current. And when you went on Desert Island Discs, the book that you took with you was Orlando by Virginia Woolf. Is that because the central character is the embodiment of fluidity in so many ways? There are a couple of reasons. Number one is, yes, fluidity. It's a water-like book in so many ways. But until I read that novel, and I've read it several times, each time with a different perception, I didn't know you could write novels like that. I didn't know you could transcend geographical boundaries, the boundaries of time. A character could live across centuries.

You could play with rationality, logic. And I love that because it was very close to the world that my grandmother was talking about in her Middle Eastern oral stories. They might be completely different works of art, but those stories were very fluid as well. So I think I associate Orlando with freedom, but I also associate literature in general

with freedom. That's where I feel most, most free and myself. In our daily lives, we're never allowed to be multiple. We live in a world where we're always put inside a box, and we're expected to stay in that box once and for all. But inside us, there's a multiplicity of voices. That's the truth. We always think of democracy as an external concept,

but I think inner democracy is so much harder to achieve, because sometimes there's a dictatorship inside when one voice suppresses all the others. That's not healthy. So do we recognize, respect, and honor all the different. That's not healthy. So do we recognise, respect and honour all the different voices, try to understand different sides of our personality? So I love it because when I'm writing fiction, I can be multiple. Oh, I think that's such a good way of putting it. The inner democracy and sometimes a dictator

takes over. If someone's got a very vociferous inner critic, that's your dictator taking over. Absolutely. And it's so sad that we always associate, you know, we're looking for strength in all the wrong places. We think strong men, strong personalities, you know, they will lead us in times of crisis. I think just the opposite. People with capacity for empathy, compassion, people who can cry, people who can't show their emotions. I would love those people to lead us in times of crisis. Alif Shafak, you are exquisite in word, in voice, in person. I am so, so happy you came

on How to Fail and you're staying because you're going to answer some listener failures over on Failing with Friends. I know that if you're listening, you will want to hear more of what this impressive woman has to say. But for now, I just want to say thank you so much for coming on How to Fail. I'm so inspired and very grateful. Thank you so much. Thank you. And remember to follow us to get new episodes as soon as they land on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. And please, please share a link with everyone you know. This is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment original podcast. Thank you so much for listening.