Just to know before we start, there is a little bit of cursing in this episode.

So, you've been warned.

Novelist Elif Batuman was still on book tour for her first novel, The Idiot, when she started thinking about a sequel.

She kept getting this response from readers that bothered her.

People were mad that at the end of the book, her protagonist hadn't had sex with the guy

she was supposed to have sex with.

The Idiot is a fictional account of Elif's first year in college.

Her stand-in in the book, Selen, follows this guy to Hungary, she's kind of in love with him,

but he's evasive. This is actually something that

happened to Elif when she was young, too. It was a very destabilizing feeling to be to be talking

to people who had read The Idiot, who had felt that like nothing had happened. And I thought,

just what an odd way to respond to a book. And then

it started to feel sort of familiar. And I was like, what is this reminding me of? And I was like,

oh my God, this reminds me of how I felt in my actual life when I went back to school in my

second year of college. And people would ask like, oh, how did everything go over this summer?

Did anything happen? And I would have to tell them, no, oh, how did everything go over this summer? Did anything happen?

And I would have to tell them, no, nothing happened, even though to my mind, a lot of things happened.

What does happen in The Idiot is that Selen makes friends in Hungary, mostly with women.

The guy's unavailable, but the summer is still transformative for her. She learns a lot. She's

growing into adulthood. And to Elif, it felt like the critics were missing the point. A woman's

story isn't only worth telling if it involves a man or if it involves some form of consummation.

So, she started to write a new novel in response. It's out now. And it's called Either Or.

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