My name is Joanne Marinelli. Before you appeared on the round table with Charlie Rose to promote Snow, I had no idea who you were, but your interview with the zealous and cosmopolitan talk show host stayed with me, and I purchased an electronic edition of your novel long after its rippling effects on the circuit had simmered down, and I gained not a few page views from Turkey when I compared my own militancy to the threat your poet Ka felt from Hande during the family gathering in Kars. I write a rather esoteric blog called Disability in Entertainment Arts, and Google doesn't always know what to do with my equally acerbic outbursts. Google Blogger was going to privatize my account and then reversed itself, so you aren't the only one who's voice is occasionally hindered by authority, even if my manners aren't as subtle as yours, within your clever narration techniques.
I am a long suffering poet with spastic cerebral palsy, native to Philadelphia, with a small collection of poetry called Like Fire. I do not yet have a second, and at the rate my life is going, my oeuvre may be left as unfinished as that of your sad protagonist. I had a brief rise as a poet, a longer stint as an ineffectual case manager within disability and mental health intake, then earned 3,000 USD as a journalist, like Ka.
I suppose I am writing to you, as opposed to doing what can only now be a retrospective appreciation of your novel, because I identify with the alienation of your analytical observers within the text, and I was betrayed by people I trusted in a rather heinous fashion, and for an American, my situation is presently untenable, though perhaps not as dire as your suicide girls. I am not being beaten by my ex-fiancé, but I am being terrorized by the state welfare system as Pennsylvania administers it, presently engaging in a passive resistance which isn't much of a solution: a homeless cripple by the end of July is in a far worse position in a majority African city than a defiant cripple who gives in to the cruelty of compliance models given her age, hence this small trail of epistolary outreach to career academics.
After all the Modernist tricks I've learned, and even after the streak of lightning that was David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, a construct which brought me to tears because no matter how hard I practice I'll never achieve anything like that, you are a very gifted novelist, possibly a great one, breaking through all the stereotypical images Hollywood offers about what being Turkish means. I'm half rabid with poverty, inches away from being crushed by merciless regimentation, and though I never studied under a foreign national like you, you made me care, made me struggle with my own conflicts with pluralism in secular governance. I'm never going to be happy, but I am undoubtedly afraid to give a life afflicted with so much pain up to fate.
My best wishes,
Joanne
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