The Dutch-Turkish writer Lale Gul at the office of her publisher in Amsterdam, in June. Credit...Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times
THE NEW YORK TIMES:
Lale Gul’s autobiographical and sexually frank tale of a woman breaking with her conservative Muslim culture, and her strict parents, is a best seller in the Netherlands. “I’m done hiding,” she says.
AMSTERDAM — Perhaps naïvely, Lale Gul thought she could continue living with the same people on whom she had based her best-selling novel: her strict Turkish-Dutch migrant family.
But just weeks after the February publication of her book — the autobiographical tale of a young woman breaking with her conservative Muslim culture — “a war broke out” in the family’s tiny apartment in a migrant neighborhood in Amsterdam, said the author of “Ik Ga Leven,” or “I Will Live.”
As years of building frustration erupted into open conflict that March evening, Ms. Gul, 23, fled her house in the middle of the night and has not returned since.
Looking back, Ms. Gul admitted that after writing an unbridled book revealing her journey to secularism, the thought that her parents would simply not hear about it was maybe a little foolhardy.
They did hear about it, as has most of the country: The novel quickly became one of the most read in the Netherlands, and she was in demand for TV interviews.
The publicity made it impossible not to address the book with her family, but she wanted to stay with them.
“Even after the book came out, I was still trying to negotiate with my parents, I wanted to make it work, try to combine their lives and my own life,” she said on a recent afternoon in the 17th-century canal house where her publisher has an office. “Despite everything, they are my family.”
But in her family’s view, what Ms. Gul had done was beyond repair.
» | Thomas Erdbrink | Friday, August 13, 2021
