First Summer by Ekin Oklap is a tender, atmospheric coming of age that starts with a simple premise: a new girl moves in across the street, completely upending the narrator’s life.
Clara and the narrator melt towards each other during a frizzling summer heat wave, eating ice cream several times a day and dozing under the shade of the trees; dangling their feet in the creek and riding their bikes to the local pool.
The narrator is rescued from herself, entirely transported and transformed by Clara’s attentions, until the summer comes to an end and Clara is gone, her brief visitation over as quickly as it began.
I had the opportunity to speak with Ekin Oklap about her writing process, teenage friendship and loneliness, and how her work as a translator helped her write her debut. The conversation below has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Lior Torenberg: First Summer is such a perfect capsule of the season, and it’s so clear and deliberate about the type of story it wants to be. Where did the idea for the book first come from?
Ekin Oklap: None of my summers have been as exciting or eventful as the particular summer in this book. I’m not sure when the kernel of the story came to me, but one thing I always had in mind was a betrayal of trust, of intimacy. That part came to me fully formed, and everything else developed from there.
I also always had a parallel narrative in mind, something that would mirror the world but also provide an escape valve. So these two elements were already there when I started writing.
LT: How interesting that you had betrayal in mind before romance or friendship, which are so central to this book.
EO: It was a very specific type of betrayal: betrayal by omission. When you feel strongly attached to someone, and then you discover that there is actually a huge void of knowledge between you, that can be very difficult to deal with.
That betrayal would have been meaningless without an underlying friendship or romance, so they’re not actually separate; one couldn’t exist without the other. It would just be “Oh, you didn’t tell me this thing.” But when you care really deeply about someone, then not knowing that thing can feel like an enormous breach of trust.
LT: Your book plays on such a soft emotional register, but everything is of great consequence to the characters. Everything is both ordinary and innocent, and the most important thing in the world at the same time. How did you achieve this very specific teenage register?
EO: I was a teenager so long ago, and you couldn’t pay me to be a teenager again. I found being a teenager difficult and chaotic and confusing. It can be lonely as well, or it can be the opposite—too un-lonely. Too much going on and not enough time to properly deal with or process any of it.
It was a time that I wouldn’t wish to relive but that I had to in writing this book because it was such a formative time as well. And I do think it’s kind of always there. I don’t think any of us really “escape” what happened to us when we were teenagers. We carry it with us, in the same way that we carry our childhoods with us.
So my teenage years feel very far away in terms of time, but I still carry them with me in the way that I relate to people, how I react to things. They’re present all the time.
LT: Even though your summers were nothing like the book, and you didn’t love your teenage years, it seems like this was an easy world and register for you to access nonetheless.
EO: The specifics aren’t mine. I never swam in creeks and I didn’t ride a bicycle much. I grew up in a big city, not a small town. But the emotional experience of the summer of the book feels fairly universal, and that shared experience is what I was hoping to achieve.
LT: In a parallel narrative to the central summer, we follow space explorers Nadia and Rosa on their intergalactic adventures. You mentioned that you always knew there would be a parallel narrative, but did you already have them and their specific dynamic in mind when you started writing?
EO: The parallel narrative wasn’t fully formed in my mind, no, but I was looking at an old laptop and I found something I had written about two women having an epic adventure. I think it took place in a medieval time period. It was quite bare bones, but the seed was there. That story had been on my computer for so long. The shape of it and the characters were completely different in the end.
LT: I’m also curious about your decision to leave your narrator unnamed—can you tell me about that?
EO: If I could have gotten away with not naming anyone, I would have. That’s not my general preference as a writer, but I made a conscious decision to be a bit more vague there, and give the reader more space to project themselves.
I was wary of creating too much distance by introducing specifics in character or setting that would be distracting in any way, like the specific flora or fauna of a given area. I wanted the reader to feel immersed, and I wanted the narrator to feel like an extension of the reader.
LT: In a way, Clara takes the narrator out of the real world and into this separate, dreamlike world of intimacy. In that separate world, the narrator undergoes a transformation. And when Clara leaves, the narrator is able to re-enter the real world more fully than she could before. I thought that spoke more to the power of friendship than romance. How did you think about balancing the two?
EO: I’m so glad to hear you say that because the central theme of First Summer, if I had to pick one, would be friendship over romance. I think the great betrayal would have felt just as awful if the two girls were best friends and there had been no romance.
I didn’t think about balancing friendship and romance too consciously. Especially when you’re young, intense friendships can shade into a different kind of love, so it felt like a natural progression.
There’s a part at the end where Clara’s son comes to visit the narrator, and they talk about how you have to be friends with the love of your life. You always hear that, and as much of a cliche as it is, it’s true. It’s very hard to sustain romantic love without deep friendship.
LT: At the end, we go forward in time: our narrator is much older, and Clara is dead, and her son finds the narrator, and they have a conversation. Was that always the ending in your mind?
EO: I always knew that Clara’s child would want to find Clara’s first love. And the second ending, the space odyssey ending, came later. But I always had this idea of a coda that brings some sort of closure for the narrator.
LT: I also enjoyed the pure fantasy and wish fulfillment of the space odyssey ending, because it has this implication of “in another life” or “in a parallel dimension.” It seems like you started writing with a lot of the book already planned. What was your writing process like more generally?
EO: First Summer is not a plot-heavy book, so there wasn’t a lot of planning to do. I knew the tone I wanted and some of the emotional beats. But I’m working on something now that is more plot-driven, and I’m finding it easier. Writing is very rewarding, but also extremely difficult—its like chipping away at a rock with a toothpick. With this plot-driven draft, I’m finding it easier because I don’t have to worry about making sure things happen—things are always happening.
LT: Not to put you on the spot, but I read an interview you did in 2017 with World Literature Today where you said that writing a novel “requires a level of determination and stamina I don’t seem to have.”
EO: I don’t remember saying that! Ha. I do a lot of translation as well, and I also find it very difficult. You’re basically a brain in a jar, and the only brain you can talk to is your own. And I thought: translating is hard enough, writing must be even harder. And in fact, writing is harder. You have nothing to fall back on. When you take physics in school, you learn that creating something out of nothing is impossible. But here we are doing it.
I really admire writers who have full time jobs or other responsibilities. When I said that in 2017, I had a full time job, and I no longer do. If I did, I don’t think I’d be able to have the determination and stamina to write novels.
LT: Did you want to be a writer at that point in time?
EO: I’ve always wanted to be a writer. I don’t have a wonderful story about reams and reams of stories in notebooks from when I was a kid, but I was always writing stories in my head. I did that a lot, and with a high level of detail. If anything in this book is autobiographical, it’s that element of rewriting and reimagining something in your mind over and over again.
LT: Going back to your work as a translator, I’m curious which skills carried over, which didn’t, and if anything surprised you?
EO: The actual process and discipline is what carried over the most. When I have a translation to do, I’m quite good at doing a specific number of pages a day so I can meet my deadline. You have to be quite disciplined.
The times when I’m most productive are when I sit down every morning with my notebook and treat writing the same way: I have to fill two pages of my notebook before I can do anything else. As soon as I skip that, and let go of that discipline, I stop writing. So the thing that has helped me the most is chipping away at something every single day, otherwise it just will not happen.
Another skill that has carried over from translation is a focus on voice. Something I have to be good at is not flattening a given voice into my own voice, otherwise I’d be doing a disservice to the writer. In the same way that I aim to be true to the voice of the author I’m translating, I can be true to the voices of my characters. The space chapters in First Summer are very different from the summer chapters, voice-wise. I wrote the space chapters on a computer and the summer chapters by hand.
LT: With a translation, of course you are invested, but once you finish your job, there’s a layer of emotional separation as the book goes out into the world. Does your debut feel different in that respect?
EO: It’s definitely more exciting, although I’m trying to not get too excited about this or that because I can’t really control any of it. I’ve translated some incredible books, and I feel very proud of that work—it’s exciting in a different way. There’s a real craft and camaraderie between translators. Talking to other translators about translating is so enjoyable and I never get tired of it. So the worlds are quite different.
LT: Would you translate your own book?
EO: No, I wouldn’t. It would be exhausting on a mental level, and it would feel like: oh god, I’ve already written it once! Now I have to write it again. All of my schooling has been in English, and I mostly write in English. Translating to another language like Italian or Turkish would take me twice as long.
LT: Do you think you’ll carry any of what you learned in writing this book back to your work as a translator?
EO: We’ll see, but I don’t think I can let too much of it carry over. Ultimately, when you’re translating, you’re paying tribute to the original text. There’s always a discussion about being faithful to the text versus being fluid in your approach, and there is a balance between those two elements, but what you never want to do is think: oh, I would have done this differently. It’s just not relevant.
I’m sure this experience will support my translation work in some way, but I can definitely say that the opposite has been more true: my translation work has helped me with my fiction writing.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ekin Oklap was born in Turkey, grew up in Italy, and lives in London. Her translations from Turkish and Italian have been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and John Florio Prize, among others. First Summer is her first novel.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER: Lior Torenberg’s work has been published by One Story, MAYDAY, the Poetry Society of New York, and others. She received her MFA in creative writing from New York University and graduated from the Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s Book Project. Just Watch Me is her first novel. Learn more at LiorTorenberg.com.