FIRST SUMMER Reminds Us That Teenage Relationships Never Fade Away

Electric Literature interviews Ekin Oklap about her debut novel, First Summer. Oklap is best known as a translator, particularly of Orhan Pamuk. The novel follows a teenage girl who forms an intense bond over one summer with Clara, the new girl across the street, and then loses it. Oklap tells interviewer Marisa Wright that much of loneliness is the feeling of not being understood, and that being understood is the kernel of deep friendship. The narrator is an adult woman looking back, so an adult perspective shapes the story. Oklap says adolescence is so intense that it never really leaves a person. Translation, she says, gave her the habit of weighing every word and listening for rhythm. The science fiction passages woven through the book are meant to mirror the main narrative, and she deliberately left their source ambiguous. Clara's grandmother grew partly out of a childhood memory of a feared old woman on the Turkish Aegean coast, and partly out of Oklap's own two grandmothers. On the ending, she says first experiences of profound sadness are memorable because they come as a shock.