IT IS A TRUTH UNIVERSALLY ACKNOWLEDGED THAT WOUNDS forge artists. Elif Shafak, one of the epochal storytellers of our times, doesn’t necessarily agree. On my much-awaited Zoom call with the writer of The Forty Rules of Love, I wait for her to say it in her own way.
“You don’t have to have a very unhappy childhood in order to become an artist.” Something about her faraway look suggests she’s plucking her thoughts from the poetry of the quiet, idyllic corners of the life she received instead.
“Maybe all literature comes from a wound or a scar. But I don’t want to paint a bleak picture either,” she says. “When I look at my own upbringing, there are a lot of beauties. Presence of love. But there was also the absence of love. And, sometimes, absences also shape us, don’t they?”
She recalls being born in France. “The first flat I came to as an infant, I don’t have any memory of. So, only in retrospect do I complete that picture. [The complex] was full of Leftist students, smoking Gauloises, from very different parts of the world. Very idealistic,” she recalls.
“When my parents’ marriage collapsed,” which was when Elif was still an infant, “my father stayed in France and got married again, and my mother brought me to Turkey. Eventually my father came to Turkey as well with his family, with his new family.”
Thereon, Elif was raised by her mother and grandmother, years that truly left an impact on her. “There was a lot of love. My grandmother was a very compassionate person. But there was also the absence of love. My father almost never contacted me, and I never understood why he was so aloof.”
It took her long years to realise that he was actually a very good father to his other children, she says in almost two registers. “I think, in many ways, I felt like I was the forgotten child or the other child. So this feeling of otherness came to me at an early age. At the same time, I think about grandma’s house. She was not a well-educated woman, pulled out of school for being a girl, which broke her heart. And she wholeheartedly supported her own daughter’s educational independence, which changed our lives.
“So grandma’s house was full of folktales and superstitions, and I would observe her and all these women coming to the house. And it made me more attentive to oral culture, not just written culture. I’ve never looked down upon that world,” she adds.
It was out of that fabric of informal, everyday storytelling, that the worlds of Elif Shafak emerged. The writer—most famously of The Forty Rules of Love, which sold 750,000 copies in Turkey and France and another 500,000 copies internationally, in addition to being translated to over 50 languages, has her new work out—a retelling of the life of Gustave Flaubert and his writing of Madame Bovary, the seminal 19th-century novel.
The Forty Rules of Love, with its Persian-inflected cover, is among our age’s great and ubiquitous footprints. Seventeen years after publication, it continues to find place in the smallest cafe library selections, ‘recommended’ e-commerce carousels, airport bookshop displays and well-rounded care packages.
Her new novel, In One Brief Moment All Eternity, reaches inside the belly of Flaubert’s novel, one of the most debated, dissected and decorated works of literature, grabs it by the spleen and turns it inside out. Shafak tells the story from the perspectives of 30 different female voices, both real and imagined, and human and abstract.
“I read Flaubert for the first time in my 20s, and I didn’t like it very much. I didn’t like Emma Bovary much—she felt selfish and spoiled. I read his other works—Salammbô and Sentimental Education—and he stayed with me, but it wasn’t just a huge love,” Shafak tells me.
Over the years, the French novelist kept coming back to her through the letters he had sent to his lovers, friends and family. “In those letters, I found immense delicacy, vulnerability, honesty. And with that knowledge, I went back to his novels and I was intrigued with what he had done with his characters,” she says.
Flaubert, who was considered the “connoisseur of the female mind”, and his ability to empathise with the complicated Emma Bovary, “obviously not a saint but not wicked either […] yearning for another life but doesn’t quite know what it is”, intrigued Shafak no end.
“On the other hand, he gave that character arsenic and made her suffer. It took her 13 pages to die. I thought Emma has every right to speak up,” she adds.
One of the book’s non-human POVs is syphilis, which contends that suffering from it was probably the primary force behind the creation of Madame Bovary.
“In poetry, just like opium was always regarded as female, syphilis was always associated, unfortunately, with women. As if women were responsible for it. Syphilis was a difficult subject to talk about and shaped the lives of so many people. It’s manageable today, but back then, patients were treated with mercury tablets, which was again quite toxic.”
For Shafak, this is the story of a lonely boy who was misunderstood and unloved by even those nearest and dearest to him. “To the extent that he was regarded as a loser, as the family idiot,” she says, adding that the book is dedicated to that same outcast, othered experience. This is just the kind of in-between experiences she has ingeniously narrativised in 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, her novel depicting the things that go on in the mind of a sex worker after she’s murdered in an Istanbul street: “People thought you changed into a corpse the instant you exhaled your last breath. But things were not clear-cut like that. Just as there were countless shades between jet black and brilliant white, so there were multiple stages of this thing called ‘eternal rest.’”
Shafak, who recently spoke about going through “valleys of despair and anxiety and depression” during the writing of any book, on a podcast, wants her fiction to be a “bridge-builder between written and oral culture”. Being exposed to Eastern, Middle-Eastern and Levantine traditions of storytelling early in life, she learnt to associate the creative process with a primordial call to the creation and reproduction of the story.
“When I sit at my desk, I always feel like I’m tapping into something definitely much older, bigger and wiser than me. We’re all storytelling creatures—we’re all story-remembering creatures—and that has been the case for millennia, ever since we sat around the fire, exchanging tales to give meaning to life, find refuge from our fears and to locate an answer to our mortality,” she tells me.
As a writer who practises a meditative form of writing and frequently reaches for philosophical conceits in her books, Shafak believes that the threat of AI can only be countered with the admission that we do not know.
“Putting any question to AI gives us the illusion that we know something about everything, but that’s not possible. We have forgotten to say ‘I don't know’. ‘I don't know’ is a very precious thing to say; it was so for Socrates. It was the core of philosophy,” Shafak says.
The only way, she suggests, is to turn it upside down. “Let’s spend less time with sources of information, and more time with knowledge. For that, we need slow journalism, podcasts, cultural festivals and literary conversations where we slow down and listen to each other,” says Shafak, whose treatment of mysticism and Sufism has certainly been a momentous step in the direction.
The author, who has consistently highlighted the disproportionate percentage of men and women reading and writing fiction, has successfully blazed a trail even in a world that surges ahead with higher, more mobilised ideological misogyny and sexism. That is probably why the image of the novel-reading man has become particularly precious and charming.
“Every time I do events, I see more and more young men coming to literary events—and they're very interested in the kind of fiction that brings together politics and history. For a long time, I saw more male novelists because the novel was very much associated with cerebral activity. I was looking at the data for last year, the year before, across places like India, Brazil and Mexico. And I’m very happy to see that something is shifting. And I think it’s incredibly important.”
To read more stories from Esquire India's October 2026 issue, pick up a copy of the magazine from your nearest newspaper stand or bookstore. Or click here to subscribe to the magazine.