Ayşegül Savaş

Ayşegül Savaş is a Turkish writer living in Paris and the author of three novels, most recently The Anthropologists, along with numerous essays and short stories that have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She is also the mother of an eighteen-month-old—an experience that gave her the grist for The Wilderness, a ravishing meditation on the first forty days following birth, published by Transit Books in October. The Wilderness is Savaş’s nonfiction debut—a book that captures the postpartum period in all its oneirism and viscerality (and offers, in the process, a refreshing post-pandemic makeover of quarantine). I found myself wishing I’d had the pleasure of its company after welcoming my Canadian-American baby in Germany, six years ago this fall. Chatting with Savaş from Cambridge, MA via Zoom, we bonded over our daughters’ shared first initial, the elations and estrangements of expat life, and how parenthood lowers the stakes of writing in surprisingly productive ways.

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Elizabeth Brogden: First of all, I loved this book! One of the principal pleasures of reading it, for me, was situating it on my own personal meander map of postpartum literature by writers like Rivka Galchen, Sarah Manguso, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Rachel Cusk, Kate Zambreno, etc. I had also recently read a couple of books that you’d blurbed—Yasmin Zaher’s The Coin and Tezer Özlü’s Cold Nights of Childhood—so my encounter with the text was sort of steeped in the intimacy generated by a shared literary sensibility. I’m eager to hear who you imagined to be your main interlocutors while writing The Wilderness.

Ayşegül Savaş: I want to start by saying that this is the first interview I’m doing for The Wilderness. I’ve been doing a lot of promotional events for The Anthropologists, so it will be interesting for me to hear what I have to say! In terms of the books I was in conversation with, I had read Little Labors by Rivka Galchen and A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa years earlier; but I didn’t read them again while I was writing The Wilderness, because I thought they might end up being too influential, or I might end up mimicking their style. I wrote The Wilderness differently than I would a novel with respect to the intertextual dimension, actually. A novel would typically begin, for me, with a stack of reading that grows as the novel takes shape. With this one, I already knew what it was going to be about, and the “reading” for the book was living the forty days. So that lived experience is the material that informs it, whereas the material that informs my novels and short stories is more that invisible dialogue with other authors.

I did start researching the mythology of the number forty and this idea in Turkish tradition that the mother has to be protected in the first forty days after birth. I was interested in finding an angle that was expansive, in the sense that it was about more than just birth or postpartum depression or the transformation to motherhood. I was writing this book three months postpartum, and that perspective seemed almost claustrophobic to me. I wanted to break out of it and think: Where is this story located in the universe? Where am I in relation to nature? The discourse of postpartum felt too restrictive to me. So that’s where my training in anthropology informed some of the reading that made its way into the book, like the spell of the sensuous and ideas from shamanism.

I’m curious about this sense that the postpartum was too narrow, as a thematic framework, and the formal compactness and minimalism of the book, which is divided into forty sections—I hesitate to call them chapters—that are not sequential. Did you have any stylistic lodestars in mind when writing? How did you conceive of it in terms of genre?

I was guided by the structure of the lecture, since I was invited to write it as part of Transit’s Undelivered Lectures series, and I was told to think about it as a lecture I was delivering on a topic I wish I could talk about. I was about to give birth when the editor approached me, so I wanted to write a chronicle of this time and explore what this transitional period means. But I had to be conscious of bringing in outside materials to enrich it, so that if I were delivering a lecture I’m not just talking about myself, but also being in conversation with other thinkers. The other way I guess I would describe it is as an episodic work, even though it’s not strictly chronological. I’ve been writing books in this episodic form for some time, and this approach really culminated in The Wilderness. It felt right to write it as an episodic work not only because of the forty days, but also because I was only capable of thinking in small chunks in that period. I didn’t have a grand narrative. I didn’t have one idea of what it meant. I had many ideas of what might be happening to me, what sort of transformation this was, or what sorts of fields might feed into the experience of giving birth and becoming a mother, but they were a little all over the place—I wanted to leave room for that uncertainty and that process of making up my mind.

Speaking of process, I wonder about what I would call the para-academic or academic-adjacent quality of your work. How do you balance personal narrative and research?

The fact that I didn’t study English or literature at college is possibly the basis of this interest. Also, the fact that I would have loved to study art, or have been an artist. On the one hand I’m not trained in a literary tradition; on the other hand I have certain yearnings for what I wish I could do. And these two things inform my writing. I always think, for example, “Since I’m not a painter, it would be so cool to write about a painter.” I also know that I don’t have the thinking of an academic; I’m not meticulous in those ways. I have to find ways of using the material without giving myself away. You know, I’m not an anthropologist, and I’m not a historian. But they represent ways of understanding what’s happening to me. I really think in terms of simile, and that is sort of the pattern of my writing: Here is one thing, and here is this other thing, and let’s see what happens when I put them side by side. For example, I’m working on a novel that’s set in Mexico City, and it has this archaeological component from the Mexican empire. And the protagonist is a contemporary journalist. And I’m thinking, how is her contemporary subjectivity going to interact with the remnants of this ancient civilization? How are the Aztecs going to inform the inner life of this young woman?

I guess my process is sort of like, for a while I’ll read a lot, or I’ll talk to scholars, and I’ll take a lot of notes, and the whole time I’m thinking, oh my God, I can’t wrap my mind around this or I need to know more about this because I feel like an imposter if I write about it. At some point I have way too much information than can actually go into the novel.

I am fascinated by the tension between the ethereal and the corporeal in postpartum literature. In The Wilderness, you are very interested in motherhood’s atmospheric, nebulous, translucent, invisible dimensions. At one point, you describe an Anatolian legend that cautions postpartum women against exposure to the wind, because they are unstable and it might knock them over. There is this notion of hollowness or lightness, on the one hand. At the same time, you speak about the physical overload of this period, specifically with respect to bodily fluids—milk and blood, in particular. So there is also this dense embodiment and quite literal wetness (Ní Ghríofa talks about this liquidity being a characteristic of “female texts,” especially vis-à-vis lactation). Was this juxtaposition on your mind as you wrote?

I’m not sure that I consciously thought about it. But I definitely felt that these were two components of the experience. This feeling that your body is a bit out of your control, and so is your psyche. It might seem that you are haunted in some way, or you are being assaulted by some invisible being, in the same way that your body is taken over by hormones. I tried to distill these two extremes into episodes to say, “It was like this thing. No, it was like this other thing.” And those two poles really came forth.

The “Scarlet Woman”—one of the “invisible beings” that are borne on the wind, who is imagined as “a demon in human form who attacked the postpartum mother and baby”—seems to me acutely emblematic of this bipolarity. When she was first introduced in section 2, I automatically read her as postpartum hemorrhage and the risk of hysterectomy, based on my own birth experience, while the book itself is much more attentive to her psychological and affective dimensions. She instantiates the polyvalent threats to the postpartum mind and body.

She is all that and more. The weird thing about writing about mythology is that the figures are both literal and metaphorical. When I was researching the book—by which I mean asking my cousins and aunts, “Have you heard of the Scarlet Woman?”—everyone would say, “Well, yes, of course!” and everyone would say something a little different, or say, “Oh, is she really called that?” or “Are you talking about jinn?” Mythology is this very shifting thing. It’s not academic; it doesn’t have facts. It’s embodied in different ways. You can practice or believe in it in different ways. And I think that’s what makes it so pervasive in some sense. That’s what makes it a real cultural phenomenon—it informs a certain way of thinking about the postpartum experience that’s not purely medical.

Fairy tales also suffuse your book. I was sort of randomly teaching a course on the Brothers Grimm while I was pregnant with my daughter, and Vladimir Propp’s morphology ended up being helpful to me in coping with the aftermath of my own unplanned C-section, when I found comfort in thinking of my surgeon (who saved my life, really) as a “donor”or “helper,” who comes to the hero’s aid in an emergency. I realized at some point that twenty-first-century birth stories are often narrated—on social media or mommy blogs, anyway—as Bildungsromans in which the hero overcomes the obstacle (labor) and achieves the goal (healthy baby), undergoing a transformation (matrescence) in the process. But the reality is usually so much stranger and messier and less linear than that—more fairy tale-esque, basically. And I’d love to hear more about how you see the role of the fairy tale in the postpartum phase.

The postpartum period itself has a fairy tale quality. I experienced a type of intimacy with my mother that we’d never had before. Not that we weren’t close, but we’d never gone through this experience of being bonded to one another through another creature or being so in need of one another but also not knowing what to do or how to react. I guess the ambiguity of this period—the ambiguity of the threshold—is very similar to the ambiguity of fairy tales. I often find them very puzzling in their morals and meaning. Like, who is the bad guy? Is this supposed to be in praise of evil? I think the postpartum period does have a fairy tale quality in this respect. My mother and I would find ourselves around the breakfast table recounting dreams, which has never happened to me in my life. It was as if some portal had opened, and we were having these very strange conversations with one another. Or, you know, the way my mother was remembering things from her past, as if she had taken some potion that released something in her—there was the spell of the period.

That’s a great point. I love the part in The Wilderness when you go for a walk in Paris in the weeks after giving birth, and every person’s face is the face of an animal, and your baby’s face is also creatural. It is as if you’ve entered another dimension, where the laws of reality are different.

And I mentioned that to a friend of mine just a few days ago, and she doesn’t have kids, and I could see that she heard that, again, as a metaphor. She was laughing, and I was like, “NO. Literally I would look at a pigeon and see the baby’s face.” And she was like, “Oh! Um, were you ok?”

I think The Wilderness beautifully captures the fascinating hyper-relevance of the postpartum experience: Your word for it is “surfacing.” Things arise from your past, or emerge in your day-to-day, with this astonishing lucidity and immediacy. Everything is chaos, but at the same time there is this clarity and peace. The starkness of this contrast is so definitive of this  particular moment in time.

Yes! Every action is in the service of survival. There is nothing superfluous. If you were to record the actions at any moment, it would be about taking care of the baby or taking care of the mother. Men became totally irrelevant. Like, if you can’t talk to me about breastfeeding or how the baby is sleeping, then I have no interest in talking to you. And it was a lucid period in this sense, too. I knew exactly who I wanted to talk to and what I wanted to talk about.

Exactly. There is a triage and prioritization that happens almost unconsciously. But I am curious (and I realize that this is a binary question specific to cis-het coupledom): Where is fatherhood or the male partner in all this? Do men experience the wilderness, or is it an exclusively female space?

Well, of course my husband was the one exception, because he was going through the same experience, and he is the one person who can understand all of this. Like, he knows how important this inch of milk I pumped is. And of course, men can experience it; but what seemed so incredulous to me after giving birth were stories that were familiar to me from growing up about the father who comes to the hospital, kisses his wife, and then goes to work. After I gave birth, the story of the man who does not enter the wilderness but goes on with his life seemed like the most impossible thing. How could that happen? How could you step away from the jungle and go on with civilization? It’s not that men don’t enter the wilderness; the extreme surprise is that some of them choose not to or stand aside from it.

My daughter was born in Berlin, so your exploration of an immigrant birth experience and raising a “third culture kid” in a country that is not one’s own, nor necessarily one’s partner’s (even though by the time she arrived my husband and I had already made the decision not to stay abroad), was extremely compelling to me. Did you have any reservations about giving birth in France, or did it already feel like home?

I’ve lived in France longer than I’ve lived anywhere, but I do still feel like a foreigner in France. Honestly, I think I hadn’t taken it seriously enough. I was quite chill about it, like we’ll follow the instructions at the hospital and give birth—everyone does it. And afterwards, when I thought about what it might have felt like to give birth in one’s home country and have an entire family helping you, that’s when I started to feel sort of angry and sad about everything I was missing out on.

I remember that my daughter was born in late November, and our parents came over from the US and Canada for Christmas and New Year’s, so our first forty days were solo. And I remember, on the one hand, feeling a certain amount of relief that no one was making demands (besides the baby) and, on the other, feeling quite isolated and regretting that I had not asked my mother to come earlier.

And I assume that this just continues throughout parenthood: that you’re constantly torn in these ways. That there’s not one “right” way to do anything. You’re constantly making sacrifices or negotiating. Like, our child will be autonomous and multi-cultural but our child will also be rootless. Birth is just a very intense initiation into this ongoing struggle.

I love that The Wilderness ends on that note, where you’re with a friend whose due date is approaching, and she’s very focused on the labor itself (I mean, you have to be to endure it, right?), and you are reflecting on how minor this incident is within the larger epic of parenthood. And this myopia that is only recognizable in retrospect ties back to the idea, which you attribute to Rachel Cusk, that not having children would have trapped her in a “minor” mode. How do you think about the relationship between motherhood and “major”-ness as an artist? Do you think it’s changed you as a writer?

Well, first of all, I thought of motherhood—prepartum—as a personal growth project. Like, how will it advance me or make me a better artist? And I would always ask other writers, “How has it changed you?” and they would always say, “Oh, I don’t know. I’m exhausted.” And that would never satisfy me. But now it’s so difficult for me to understand how I failed to understand: It’s about another human being! And I guess the crumbling of that selfishness is quite shocking. Having to let go of selfishness is so shocking. And it’s not like I became selfless overnight, but the realization of how much selflessness motherhood required was quite shocking. It’s a shocking reality to recognize: that this is about another human being and not about me—when you’ve only thought about yourself for the past three decades.

It’s interesting to think about how that crumbling of ego and self-importance and self-centeredness might have something valuable to contribute to the art that you subsequently produce, perhaps precisely because that enrichment is beside the point.

When I heard that anecdote about Cusk, I thought that it meant she had started writing stronger sentences, and her style became more impressive. I thought, “Oh, that would be so cool if that happens to me, if my style changes overnight and I acquire the transformed style of a mother artist.” What has happened to me, in fact, is that my writing has changed really dramatically since I gave birth. But it’s not that my style became more polished or something, but that I had never been so productive in my life. I mean I hear it from everyone: I no longer waste time. And I guess the minorness that has fallen to the background is I no longer sit around wondering how I should find inspiration or making cups of coffee until I come up with a good idea. I don’t have any time to waste, and it’s a bit like the surfacing that we discussed earlier. When I have a bit of free time, I get to work and I focus on what is most important, and I am very intentional.

I want to end with the question of luck, which you talk about in The Wilderness. Do you think it’s possible for writers to consider themselves fortunate in terms of career success?

With some humility, I hope, yes. Of course, talent and not giving up play a huge role; but I think writing is definitely a profession that requires some luck. You tell yourself, “If only I had an agent” and “If only I was published” and all of those steps require a huge amount of discipline and skill, but they also require some luck. You need to be writing in conversation with what’s deemed interesting in that era. That doesn’t mean you’re a good writer or a bad writer; it just means that you’re writing things that people want to read. And an agent or editor has to read your work on the right day, when they haven’t acquired too many things.

Can a writer be satisfied with their level of literary achievement? How does parenthood affect the relationship to (perceived) success and failure?

To some extent, once you get something, you want the next thing. That’s how capitalism and human desire work. I had my third novel come out this summer, and I had to go to New York for the book launch, and I was away from Ida for a week, which was the longest I had been away from her. And another writer whose first book debuted on the same day was asking me, “How does it feel? Does it feel different now that it’s your third?” And I was thinking, “It feels different but not because it’s my third novel. It’s because I have a child.” The stakes are no longer so high. And I think my career has sort of come into perspective. On the one hand, I’ve fully come to realize that that’s what I care about and that’s what I want to prioritize in the time I have. I know that there’s nothing I’d rather be doing. On the other hand, I really now viscerally feel, it’s just a book. Compared to raising a human, or the anxiety of the things that could go wrong in her life—or, God forbid, her health—it means nothing. That’s why there is this very natural diminishment of what the work means and what would happen if you weren’t to get the things that you desire.

Elizabeth Brogden is a writer and editor based in Cambridge, MA. She can be found online at www.golightlyeditorial.com or @golightlyeditorial on Instagram.