This week’s story, “Many Worlds,” is about a young Turkish couple, Defne and Mete, who met as graduate students in California and are now back in Istanbul. By chance, they run into their former American housemate, Aleksi, who now looks so dishevelled that Defne mistakes him for a homeless man. When did you first start thinking about this scenario?

This past January, I spent a night during a layover in Mexico City with my friend the writer Catherine Lacey. Perhaps because of my fatigued, half-dream state, or our short time together, we started talking immediately about the most essential things. For me, such encounters outside the habitual order often give rise to dormant stories. At one point, Catherine and I landed on the topic of smugness as an obstacle to creativity. When Catherine asked me about this again a few weeks later, I specified that being smug in one’s coupledom might get in the way of artistic exploration. And, as I did so, I realized that I had come upon an angle for a story.

For some time, I’d been thinking about a scenario involving a woman who runs into a friend from her past and does not at first recognize him. But in talking to Catherine I figured out the attitude for the story. I now knew why it was that the woman would not have recognized the friend. It had to do with smugness, the way she would have grown certain of her choices. Her certainties were like a wall between herself and the world; I knew that they would have to be shaken in some way. I thought, following the conversations with Catherine, that the story would work better if these certainties involved a couple, because the situation would be less binary.

And there was something in this scenario about creativity, too. At one time, the friends had discussed philosophical questions late into the night, letting their practical lives fall apart, a little bit. But now the woman and her partner were less curious in their lives, in their attitudes—that is to say they were a little less open in their thinking. You asked me, while we were editing, what their philosophical conversations were about, and, coming up with the topics of their inquiries—consciousness, multiple worlds—I understood that the couple’s lack of creativity was in fact an inability to imagine other consciousnesses, other worlds.

In California, they’d been great friends with Aleksi. What did they find in him that reminded them of their Turkish friends?

His hospitality, his warmth. His lack of rigid personal boundaries—he is up for cooking together every day, staying up discussing abstract concepts. The assumption is that Mete and Defne are already hospitable and warm. But we discover that perhaps this isn’t exactly the case—it’s an image they have of themselves, just like the image of community they hold on to but cannot quite realize.

The story is told in the third person, but we see events almost entirely from Defne and Mete’s perspective, never Aleksi’s. As the story unfolds, though, it becomes evident that this is more Defne’s point of view than Mete’s. The idea that there can be any kind of misalignment between them, though, disturbs her. How deliberate was this gradual shift?

It seemed natural that I should start from a joint perspective—the couple’s world view is so similar, their bond so assured. I also knew that the meeting with Aleksi would disrupt something, and it quickly became clear that the best way to show this disruption would be through the story’s own structure, which is why I started to single out Defne’s perspective. I was worried, however, that this shift would signal that she was solely to blame for the end of the friendship. And perhaps she does precipitate it, but she is also able to identify the certainties that make up Aleksi’s world view, and that have also created a distance.

Aleksi, though a visitor to Istanbul, is experiencing a city Defne and Mete recall from childhood, it seems, not the rapidly gentrifying version of the city they now live in. He’s also made friends with a group of asylum seekers. Do Defne and Mete feel judged by him or does he make them judge themselves?

Aleksi certainly makes Defne and Mete feel judged, and I think he does so deliberately. But this is also because Defne and Mete have insecurities about the way they live, about the restrictions and niceties of their social class, and about how they have changed since their student years.

Did you enjoy charting their walks around Istanbul? Did it make you feel as if you were back home?

You know, Cressida, I was a bit on edge while writing those bits! I was so worried about getting the details wrong. I was confirming with my cousin that it makes sense for people to meet up for a picnic in Moda, and with my father and brother the direction one would walk from Kadıköy to get to a tea garden that was not in Moda. My experience was not unlike the estrangement Defne and Mete feel in subtle ways upon their return to Istanbul. ♦