Intimacy

I first became acquainted with the author through mutual friends from our part of the world.

- By Ayşegül Savaş

Even though they were all well established in the city, they hadn't given up on the old ways. They introduced newcomers to the group, helped them with logistics—finding housing, doctors—whenever they could. I, too, had benefitted from their warm welcome when I moved to the city, even though I was usually suspicious of such generosity—not of receiving it but of offering it up, as if such openhandedness might make a fool of me.

It was a surprise that the author agreed to meet with me. In fact, he was the one who suggested it. I was far enough along in my career to know that people like him didn’t usually have time for such meetings. I could now reëvaluate my disappointment of earlier years when writers I admired had politely declined to read my books, or to meet me following a public event that had brought them to the city. At one time, I had felt angry at them; I took their refusal as selfishness, a hardness toward the world. But years had passed, and, though I had not gone as far in my writing as I might once have dreamed, I, too, received messages from strangers—readers, countrymen, students—who wished to connect, to discuss, to marvel at all that we had in common, and I had no qualms about ignoring them.