![]() ![]() ![]() She is a much admired New Yorker staff writer, who enriches her reporting with dry humour and self-revelation (her therapy, her unhappiness in love). She was like: ‘Oh, I’m sitting at the breakfast table with Flaubert,’ and would say, if she burned some food, or was late arriving: ‘Don’t put this in your novel!’” Such confidence turned out to be justified: Batuman’s The Possessed, a comic foray into the academic world of Russian literature, was a bestselling “bibliomemoir” before such books became fashionable. When we meet, Batuman laughingly tells me that “even when I was very small, my mother treated me like a great novelist. She has said since that its four letters suggest a fitting joke about writerly aspiration: if the initial desire in a novel is to capture all of life, what is actually produced is just another set of words, a file. The child of immigrants from Turkey, she had a first name that was unfamiliar in New Jersey, where she grew up, and which had to be constantly spelled out and explained. ![]() I n 1995 Elif Batuman started her first year at Harvard she was in love with fiction and determined to become a writer. ![]()
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