Helen Stuhr-Rommereim Interviews Elif Batuman at Full Stop

"Well, I have been thinking about how a lot of the writers that I know are incredibly good email writers and a lot of the time I find their emails more compelling than the things they are writing at the time. It is connected to this thing that I quoted from Chekhov in The Possessed, about how everyone has two lives and one is the open one that is known to everyone and one is the unknown one, running its course in secret. The email is kind of the unknown life, and the published writings are the known life. This is something that I tried to do in The Possessed, especially in the 'Ice Palace' piece. I tried to take the piece that I wrote for The New Yorker and fill out the human dimension that didn’t make it into the New Yorker story. I want to go back to some of the stuff that I wrote, and fill in the personal story that contextualizes it. Otherwise, you have this New Yorker journalist, a professional dilettante, who is just going from thing to thing to thing, and none of them are connected to each other. When you’re lucky enough to like your work it’s a huge part of your thinking. And one of the things that I really like about the classic novel is that it shows you all of the layers of thought that people have; their job, their marriage, their friends and their thoughts about politics are all woven together. But I want to write more about sex in this one; I think sex is a really big problem that people don’t acknowledge enough. And I wasn’t able to do that in The Possessed because it was non-fiction."