First thing, let me get something out of the way: I’ve known İnci Atrek, author of Holiday Country, for a long time. We went to Wellesley College together and both took an especially memorable travel writing class our senior year. I saw the earliest glimmers of Holiday Country in the personal essays Atrek shared during workshops for that class––reflections on visiting her grandmother each summer in a seaside town in Turkey, grappling with complicated mother/daughter relationships, and figuring out her identity as someone not-quite-from-California but also not-quite-from-Turkey either. When I finally got to read Atrek’s breathtaking debut novel, I saw all those themes there, but expanded out and enveloped in a new cast of characters and a gripping plot, and set in the same seaside town that has been the pulse in all of Atrek’s work.
I had the honor of chatting with Atrek about exploring the same topics in different genres, writing about real places we love, finding ways to feel a sense of belonging, and eating ice cream.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
E.B. Bartels
How did Holiday Country evolve from personal travel essays to a novel?
İnci Atrek
My pieces for that travel writing class took place in Ayvalık, which is where I spent my summers, and, at the same time, I remember writing a short story for another class at Wellesley about a mother and a daughter. There was always something tugging at me to write about Turkey and mother daughter relationships, again and again, until I got it right. That’s what finally led me to write Holiday Country, a novel set in Ayvalık, about a daughter, mother, and grandmother.
E.B. Bartels
I get that. I had a professor in grad school who said once that every writer is always writing about the same themes, even if in different genres. We all have our things we can’t stop thinking about. Did you directly pull any material from your previous writing about Ayvalık to use in the novel?
İnci Atrek
I didn’t necessarily pull specific paragraphs or lines from my travel writing, but I did take a lot of scenery and emotions from my own life that were also central to those pieces. Even though Ayvalık was like a second home, I often felt like I didn’t quite fit in. My writing since college hasn’t really strayed much from themes of identity, culture, place, and belonging. I’ve also lived in other countries in my life––France, England, Singapore, and Ireland––and have always been chasing that thrill of connection, that feeling of I’ve got this, I belong now.
The main driving force behind all those pieces, which I didn’t realize until I wrote this book, was that I wanted to show how when you love a place, that love is valid. Whether you’ve been there for a day, or for ten years, or your entire life, I think the relationship that we have with places is something difficult to describe. People can challenge you on how you feel about a city, saying things like, oh, well, you haven’t been through this or you’ve never had this experience there. But for everyone who has fallen in love with a place, I hope they see themselves in this book.
E.B. Bartels
How did you find the right characters and plot for Holiday Country? Are the daughter, mother, and grandmother based on your family?
İnci Atrek
When I began my first attempt at a novel in 2013, several characters were very similar to me and the people in my life. The story was interesting to me, but no one else thought it was. [laughter] I realized that just because I see a narrative in my own life, it doesn’t mean that it translates to the page. So, I had to think more about plot and tension, and create characters with very different qualities that would make the type of story I wanted to tell interesting and believable. It’s funny, sometimes you put a scene from real life into a piece of writing and the decisions the characters make don’t make sense to anybody, because often our real-life decisions don’t make sense. You have to reconfigure everything in fiction so that it feels both believable and dramatic.
E.B. Bartels
Ha, I totally get that. I think that’s why I write nonfiction––because some of the things that happen in real-life just seem to be “too much” or “too surreal.” This fall I attended a baby shower and a wake back-to-back on the same day, and I feel like if I ever put that in a short story, readers would say, “This circle of life sequence of events is too on the nose, take it out, this would never really happen.” But it did!
İnci Atrek
Definitely. My dad was one of my early readers and I remember when he was going through my first novel he circled one thing that I had lifted directly from my own life, and wrote, “But would someone really make a decision like that?” And I was like, oh god.
E.B. Bartels
Wait, your first novel? An early version of Holiday Country or something else entirely? Will we see this novel on shelves one day?
İnci Atrek
Oh, you’ll definitely never see it. [laughter] That was the one I started in 2013, it was totally different. It still was answering the question about what does it take to belong somewhere, but it mostly took place in Istanbul. There was only one chapter in Ayvalık. I revised it for years, but kept thinking, this isn’t working. Eventually I realized that the only part I had fun writing was the part about Ayvalık, so I decided to try writing a whole new novel that took place there.
E.B. Bartels
So writing about Ayvalık was fun––what else was fun or rewarding about the novel-writing experience? And what was challenging?
İnci Atrek
One thing that was really rewarding was getting to share a place I love so much with readers. But when you’re writing about a place you know so well, you have to be careful because a lot of the story lives in your head. You fill in the blanks yourself. It really helps to get early readers who don’t know the place at all, so they can ask about the things that seem obvious to you, that maybe you’d skipped over.
The hardest part was probably mapping out the character arc and character development. I’d think, shoot, wait, this person is supposed to learn something at the end or oops, the relationship between these two people needs to evolve. You can talk about strange situations or interesting characters or beautiful settings for a long time, but in the end a good novel needs a story with a beginning, middle, and an end. My biggest challenge was really focusing on creating that sense of progress.
E.B. Bartels
After all that, do you have a character who was your favorite to write? Or who you feel most attached to?
İnci Atrek
The grandmother! I love her. I love her so much. I had a grandmother in my attempted first novel, but she only appeared very briefly. All my readers really liked her, so I decided to make the grandmother a more prominent and complex character in Holiday Country.
E.B. Bartels
I loved the contrast of the grandmother with the mother and daughter. Just all such great characters! I also liked how you wove in descriptions of life in California or of visiting Istanbul to show the contrast of life in a small seaside Turkish town.
İnci Atrek
Palo Alto is an easy place for Ada, my main character, to live, because she’s lived there her whole life. She’s also part of this Bay Area Turkish American community, which celebrates Turkey and being Turkish, even though they live elsewhere. In Ada’s mind, these are people who are neither here nor there. She feels as though they don’t really belong to one place; they just belong to themselves.
But then in Ayvalık, the one place she also knows really well and the part of Turkey where she can find her footing, doesn’t really feel like it “counts”—it’s just this teeny tiny place with a market, some tennis courts, and a beach club. So, by contrast, I wanted to show Istanbul, because she feels like if she were to really know Istanbul, which is this huge, complicated city, that’s when she can really win. And that ties back to the whole question of what does it take to feel like you belong in a place? When I was living in London, I remember the first time I was trying to figure out how to get from one place to another and realized I was referring in my head to the Tube lines by their real names instead of just “the blue one,” etc. I finally felt like, yes, I got it. I belong here.
E.B. Bartels
I know you live in Istanbul now––did you add any of your favorite Istanbul haunts into the novel? Or favorite foods? I noticed there were a lot of mentions of ice cream.
İnci Atrek
I didn’t notice that, but I guess we do eat a lot of ice cream in the summer in Turkey. [laughter] But yes, they do go to a café I love in Istanbul, and they also visit the modern art museum. I had an American coworker in London who mentioned once, “Oh, my sister is in town from California, she’s writing a novel that takes place in England so she’s here for research.” It’s such a great idea to write about places where you want to spend your time, so you go there guilt-free in the name of research.
E.B. Bartels
In addition to places, were there other influences on your novel? What about other books?
İnci Atrek
I loved Hot Milk by Deborah Levy, which is also a mother/daughter story that takes place in a Spanish beach town, and American Fever by Dur e Aziz Amna, which is about a young Pakistani woman who goes to the United States for an exchange program. I love reading about cross-cultural experiences.
E.B. Bartels
Dare I ask if you’re working on a new novel?
İnci Atrek
It’s too messy right now for me to say anything that won’t be untrue next week, but I have to tell you––and this is so relevant to our conversation about writers revisiting the same themes and ideas over and over––the other day I got stuck and put my head in my hands and said, it’s the same story just different words.
If you’d like to see İnci Atrek talk about Holiday Country in person, she will be doing an event in Los Angeles at Book Soup on January 9th. in San Francisco at Green Apple Books on January 10th and an event in New York City at Books Are Magic on January 29th.
FICTION
Holiday Country
by İnci Atrek
Flatiron Books
Published January 9th, 2024