“Intimacy” (fiction):
I could not help feeling bored by the accounts whenever I encountered them—how granular they were, how tedious. How often they repeated the same material facts: the little clammy hands, the sleeplessness, the lack of time, the mess and splintered focus, the wonder of new speech and its ingenious formations. The problem, I thought, was that these descriptions never reached beyond themselves, beyond the concrete reality of the situation. But what was the purpose of their repetition? Was it just that we yearned to be heard? Was there a genuine need within this yearning, as basic as nourishment?
[T]he writer started talking about a book he had read in his youth which he had recently come across by chance. At one time, he had included this book among the titles that made up his formative reading, but now he could remember nothing about it. Rereading it, he found it confusing. In fact, he had no idea what it was about.
“What I can’t figure out,” the author said, “is whether I was smarter back then or just pretending to understand what I read. That wouldn’t be unusual, you know. One is in such a hurry to get an education, to have read it all.”
Ayşegül Savaş, the author, discussing the story:
We meet the narrator at a moment when her identity is in flux. She is holding on to an idea of what a writer should be, even though this model no longer seems authentic to her. At the same time, she is not very comfortable in her identity as a mother, or, rather, how this identity has merged with her life as a writer—that is to say, with her imagination. It’s easier for her to keep these two parts of herself separate, but it also means that her identity as a writer is not true to who she really is.
What is striking to the narrator about Marian is that she is so comfortable with who she is—she does not compartmentalize her different selves. The narrator does begrudge the fact that Marian has made her husband’s writing life very smooth, but, ultimately, I think that she is resentful about the various dead ends in her own life, the experiences that she tries to keep contained, without allowing them to merge or interact.
The narrator plays at being intimate with the author and his wife, following some rules she has set for herself, and then one day discovers, almost to her surprise, that she cares deeply for Marian. It’s as if she is trying to correct her faulty compass [for intimacy] by overstating the closeness.
ChatGPT:
The final paragraph is a quiet self-indictment. After trying—and failing—to prove closeness to Marian through a secondhand anecdote, the narrator wonders if she “didn’t relate the story very well,” or “missed some details,” or “hadn’t listened carefully enough.” She recognizes her unreliable memory and borrowed intimacy: the story didn’t belong to her, and her need to “belong” bent it out of shape. As an ending note, it leaves her with regret and acceptance of limits—of her art, her memory, and her right to narrate others—closing the story on self-awareness rather than consolation.