I decided to write my book From Life Itself in 2018 out of a sense of disorientation. I’d spent a decade living in Istanbul, Turkey, and the country and the region had become mired in tragedy and violence. The hopeful first months of the Arab Spring had given way to a terrifying war in Syria, which was sending millions of Syrian refugees over the border and into Turkish cities. The war was also drawing the participation of thousands of young men and women in various militant groups, such as ISIS and other al-Qaeda offshoots, many of them flying into Istanbul and then gathering in towns in southern Turkey.
The country was engaged in a new war with the P.K.K., the Kurdish militant group, along its southern border, as well as in northern Syria, and by the fall of 2015 bombs were going off in Turkey, far away from where I lived in Istanbul at first, but soon closer and closer, some just blocks from my house. Then the Syrian refugees began launching rafts into the Aegean Sea, trying to make it to Europe, and right-wing nationalism started to spike—we heard the sinister warnings about the death of “Western civilization”—from Greece to the United Kingdom and all the way to the United States, transforming so many countries’ politics forever.
