[♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪

Elf Batumann is an author and a journalist at the New Yorker with a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University.

Her debut novel, The Idiot, came out in 2017 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer.

In it, a young Turkish girl named Celine recounts the lessons, travels, and the crush that defined her freshman year at Harvard,

with many doses of dry humor and winning insights.

A New York Times book critic wrote in her review of The Idiot,

there is more oxygen, more life in this book than in a shelf of its peers.

Batumann's second novel, Either Or, is a sequel to the first and drops in on day one of Celine's sophomore year.

[♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪

Let's start with our time period. Why are we in the mid-90s?

The most literal level is because those were by formative years, that's when I was in college.

The new one is in the Celine sophomore year, which is 1996, which was my sophomore year.

But the larger reason for that is I started writing either Or in 2017, which was a few months before me too.

And then, after that, there was the Kavanaugh hearing.

And it was a time when we were thinking about Monica Lewinsky and Anita Hill,

and all these things that had actually happened in the 90s.

And it was a time when sort of as a culture, we were retelling these stories, using terminology we didn't have then,

and vocabulary and concepts we didn't have then.

And I think a lot of women my age after, especially after Christine Blasey Ford's testimony,

were narrating their earlier lives to themselves in a different way.

And that was a project that I was doing too.

And this either Or is very much a project of revisiting that time through the lens of what I know now.

...