My Life and Thoughts

Proliferating readers! It was a joy and an honor to meet so many of you last week in New York and Boston. Over 100 people turned up at McNally Jackson where I had a long conversation with my first editor, Keith Gessen, during which my oldest childhood friend, the prominent novelist Dara Horn, was so carried away by the emotion of the moment that she threw a small plastic dinosaur at my head.

Wednesday’s reading at Brookline Booksmith was also attended by numerous valued readers of My Life and Thoughts, including my aunt Deniz and her oldest childhood friend, who doesn’t believe in pasteurization, and who had commemorated the occasion by baking a wonderful chocolate cake made with nonpasteurized buttermilk.  We were joined for cake by super-guest-blogger Peli Grietzer, who attended the Manhattan event and the Brookline event, and asked questions on subjects ranging from Shklovsky’s Third Factory to a paragraph from my dissertation which it turned out I had sent him in like 2007, so you just tell me if he deserved some cake.

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Thanks to the inexorable Dave Lull for the link to this amazing A-to-Z insomnia cure by the Possessed super cover artist, Roz Chast. Apparently, when Chast is lying awake nights (probably, from wondering whether The Possessed will drop from the Amazon top-1,000 list), she passes the time by trying to think of physical afflictions starting with each letter of the alphabet. I forwarded her list to my father, a nephrologist, with a note to check out the letter K:

I just received the following response:

Elif, thanks!! And today is world kidney day, really.

dad

Yes, dear readers, March 11 is really World Kidney Day and has been officially recognized by French president Nicolas Sarkozy, American rock icon Meat Loaf, world superpower China, and now C-list writer Elif Batuman.

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The other day, my intern Friday and I were home working and started to get a bit fretful and snappy.  Normally I pride myself on maintaining a positive work environment so I was really disappointed with myself for letting things slide like that, and resolved to take drastic steps. Given that it was a beautiful sunny day, the natural course of action seemed to be for me to take Friday outside for a stimulating walk.

Here at My Life and Thoughts, we are all about occasionally letting the staff see the light of day—but only when they feel like it.  Join us on our three-part epic journey:

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Inexorable readers!  I write to you with wonderful news!  It looks like FSG finally caved under the pressure of all those 3-star reviews… because The Possessed is now available on Kindle!  My one regret is that there is now pretty much no incentive to develop the S W Foska’s brilliant idea about making the paperback edition convertible into a Brita filter.  I guess it’s proof that great minds think alike, because my my smartest intern, Friday, who is also in charge of R&D here at My Life and Thoughts, actually explored this idea a few months ago by spilling a large glass of water onto my copy of The Brothers Karamazov, which promptly expanded to approximately 250% of its original, already non-negligible, size.  Notwithstanding these spectacular results, there are still a few bugs that have to be ironed out before we can go commercial—e.g., the water that actually made it through the “filter” looked sort of gray and unpalatable (I guess these are the visible traces of literary knowledge).

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Loyal readers!  I’m completely thrilled to relate that, thanks to your support, The Possessed made it to #19 on the New York Times best sellers list for paperback nonfiction, right below No Angel: My Harrowing Undercover Journey to the Inner Circle of the Hells Angels!  I’m so happy and honored to learn that the American people are only slightly less interested in my harrowing undercover journey to the inner circles of graduate school as they are in the significantly more harrowing journey of Agent Dobyns!  Thanks to all of you, including my new friend T. Mercer!

Hells Angel photograph by Paul Ryan	Fedor Dostoevsky painting by Vasily Perov

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