5 Questions with Eda Gunaydin
Eda Gunaydin is a Turkish-Australian essayist whose writing explores class, race, diaspora and Western Sydney. She has been a finalist for a Queensland Literary Award and the Scribe Non-Fiction Prize.
Her debut essay collection Root & Branch is out now with NewSouth Publishing.
No.1
In a recent essay in this same publication, you write that you were ‘unable to prevent’ yourself from writing Root and Branch. So instead of asking you how the collection was conceived or what seeded the idea for it (which as some previous interviewees have noted isn’t such a clear-cut process), I want to ask: what drove the impulse?
I was at George Haddad’s book launch the other week (for his fab novel, Losing Face), and he said something that I think a lot of writers feel at one time or another, which is that it’s his book that wrote him. I think I’ve always leaned on writing as a way to narrativise, externalise and make meaning of my experiences, as well as to regulate my emotions. It’s kind of dark— and an anecdote I tell in the book—but I started off journaling and writing quasi-suicide letters as a teen, but ended up finding the act of doing so so useful that by the end of each session I didn’t feel all that suicidal anymore. To be clear, I don’t think books are the same as journals, and I note this is an accusation levelled at women writers a lot: that they’re just publishing their diaries, without thinking about craft and holding things back. A lot is held back in this book, and it is an edited and intentional work, but at the same time the key impulse driving the work is my grappling with a question that has kind of haunted me for years and years, which is, basically: how do I be here? I often feel like I shouldn’t exist, but exist I do.
The same question is probably replicated for a lot of people in different ways—those of us who exist in diaspora often wonder how to be here when this isn’t our home but when our homes are also not [or no longer] our homes. I’ve tried to find a novel answer to that question, and to proffer the answer that I’ve personally hit upon, which is that all of us— children of migrants or not—often struggle to ‘belong’. Receding into acceptance that we are simply deficient half-people dissatisfies me, and overlooks all the ways in which our lives are full, and stops us from finding ways to be present (engaged with people and politics) where we are.
Jhumpa Lahiri recently commented that [in her book In Other Words], “Because of my divided identity, or perhaps by disposition, I consider myself an incomplete person, in some way deficient,” and I felt compelled to publish this book in response to that. So I suppose I have both personal and political rationales for this book, but the bottom line is that my thoughts always return to the subject matter of the book; I wake up with these questions, I go to sleep with these questions, and when my emotional skin is at its thinnest (when I’ve had a few drinks, or it’s late at night, say) my mind fills with these questions. They’re my symptoms, and this book is the treatment.
No.2
Your writing has a very intimate quality, yet it has a certain remove, which to me feels novelistic (as opposed to memoiristic). What is it like writing about people close to you in your life? Do you tell them? Do you care to?
Depends on the person. The people that I can tell I tell—the characters ‘Tex’, ‘Tim’, ‘Justin’, ‘Kyle’ and so on, have vetted their role in the book, and often even picked out their own names. But the reality is that, when you’re writing about a topic like emotional abuse, the person inflicting that will never agree to be depicted as such, right? But what are you supposed to do, not say anything? I think this is something a lot of writers grapple with (Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House being a recent example).
I’ve tried to tell only the parts of the story that are mine to tell, or to recede into the novelistic (sometimes fictionalising parts of stories). I am pretty hard-line on giving myself permission to write about abuse I have experienced, though. This isn’t to say that it’s all totally fine and everything should be open slather. There are many, many private things that I know are private that I would never disclose. I have found ways to incorporate elision, gaps, silences, etc into my practice, actually: not everything has to be said, and it can actually improve rather than negatively impact your craft in interesting ways to hold some things back (maybe that’s what’s novelistic rather than memoiristic about the work).
For people who are no longer in my life, I de-identify them. And I try to come at everything from the position that I’m the one putting the most out there, and I’m the one who should most humiliate myself or make myself look like an asshole. That’s the way it should be, because I’m the one who is into this whole personal essay thing. If you’re writing your memoir or non-fiction and you’re emerging in the story as a perfect person surrounded by assholes, I strongly suggest you re-draft.
No.3
Because we’re friends, I know you read very widely and eclectically. What do you think makes for the distinction between an ‘interesting’ and ‘uninteresting’ story?
Side note that I love that we are friends! Your friendship is a great balm to me. I think my answer is going to be the same cop-out as before in question one: I have such little insight into myself that I find it nearly impossible to account for why I find some stories gripping and others not, why I wake up thinking about some and never spare another thought again to another.
[But] I can tell you what themes I am attracted to at the moment: redemption, accountability, trust; trauma, healing; whether this is all kind of meaningless and what to do with that knowledge; leftism, zeal … but, I don’t know, others’ answers no doubt vary wildly on this point. And obviously craft and pathos play a role: how a story is presented makes a big difference. But it’s hard to explain why some things hit and others flop! Why does some food taste good to us, and other dishes we find revolting? I’m sure someone else knows, but I don’t.
I think that interest is not only in the eye of the beholder, but that the ability to be interested is also something that we on the receiving end must bring with us into any kind of artistic encounter. Sometimes when I don’t feel like reading a new book, or even making chit-chat at a party, I remind myself to be curious (not to sound all twee like Ted Lasso), and to remember that there is always something that I want to know about the lives of others. Maybe I’m describing being nosy (which I also am).
No.4
We’ve spoken about this privately before, but I want to ask you about your relationship to the category of ‘memoir’, which Root and Branch is yet isn’t. Are you interested in the distinction(s) between classifications such as “cultural criticism” versus “autofiction” versus “novels from life”, etc? Why/why not?
I think that these kinds of classification systems serve two functions. The first is to satisfy the market, which needs to know how to categorise a book in order to best sell it—writers are all always having to ‘situate’ our books in the ‘market’, tell a prospective buyer what other voices or books they’re similar to. ‘For readers of X!’
I saw Root & Branch in the ‘Australian studies’ section in a store the other day, which is fine, although I did baulk for a second and think, ‘wait, not Essays?’ Vanessa Berry talks about her book Mirror Sydney resisting categorising, and finding it in the ‘travel’ section of bookstores sometimes. I’m so grateful to my publisher for letting me write an eclectic work, which may mean it’s not a commercial work. I appreciate that they have accepted that risk, which helps us push back against market forces, which I think can cause toxic feedback loops that prevent new and innovative work from getting made (look at the Marvelisation of the film industry, for example). This maybe links up with my response to your previous question, that we don’t really know what we like till we’ve tasted it, and the push to categorise everything neatly in order to deduce taste (à la Netflix’s recommendation algorithm) can be really limiting.
More generally, I’m kind of weirdly hostile to the injunction placed on all kinds of worldly phenomena to be categorisable. It’s kind of disciplinary, the way that all that is hard-to-define, measure, calculate (and therefore control) about the world has to give way to legibility. Maybe I feel this way because I read the book Seeing like a State at an important point in my life. We’ve developed classification systems to try to introduce order into the world, which is a fine enough desire, but when we mistake these classifications for the world itself, then I think that’s when problems start to crop up! I’m always talking to friends (this is so irrelevant…!) about their mental health and they often say, ‘Oh, well, I don’t quite fit the diagnostic criteria for X disorder, but then I don’t fit the criteria for Y disorder either’, and I always respond that textbooks and diagnostic manuals are simplifications and approximations of the true complexity of reality, just as there are thousands of exceptions in the animal kingdom to the various taxonomies we’ve set up to categorise biotic life. They are poor facsimiles that I try not to put too much stock into. I like chaos.
Second, I think that these kinds of categorisations are helpful for theorists and scholars. I’m not a scholar of literature, though, so I’ll leave that there! I’m sure they have much more sophisticated responses to this question, and very clear ideas about what distinguishes these forms.
No.5
Besides what I’ve asked in the second question, what I find inherent to your essays is this cerebral and humorous tone, which evokes a mood similar to when I read theorists such as Lauren Berlant and Mark Fisher, even though, of course, your styles vary. What books and/or writers did you turn to for inspiration and humour while you were in the process of writing Root and Branch?
Thanks for comparing me to Berlant and Fisher! I blush. I love Fisher, as you know—he’s all over the book. Augusten Burroughs is the reason I started writing memoir; I read him when I was about twelve and it changed the course of my life. Fiona Wright is also an early influence; Small Acts of Disappearance is impeccable, as is Maria Tumarkin’s Axiomatic.
I was in a pandemic critical theory reading group that helped me keep reading and keep connected to others during lockdown, during which I wrote the last parts of the book. I adored Gavin Mueller’s Breaking Things at Work, and re-reading Sophie Lewis’ Full Surrogacy Now. And, not to harp on about it, but re-reading James C. Scott’s Seeing like a State was extremely important to Root & Branch.
Also, shout out to Bessel van der Kolk and all the psych textbooks I read while writing this book, for helping me keep developing layers of insight, and helping me stay sane enough to finish it.
I have come to see that I am an argumentative person who is frequently convinced that my angle, my take, on a matter, is the right one. This kind of delusional self-belief is not rewarded in many other spheres of social life, so I write essays.
There is a Turkish saying that one’s home is not where one is born, but where one grows full—doğduğun yer değil, doyduğun yer. Exquisitely written, Root & Branch unsettles neat descriptions of inheritance, belonging and place. Eda Gunaydin’s essays ask: what are the legacies of migration, apart from loss? And how do we find comfort in where we are?
Get it from NewSouth Publishing here, or at all good bookstores.
Eda will be launching Root and Branch at Brunswick Bound, June 22, 6.15PM. RSVP here.