Foreign Freedoms in Savaş’s Long Distance
Savaş’s precise descriptions confer luxury on the sparest of situations.
Long Distance: Stories by Ayşegül Savaş (July 2025)
If the news hasn’t already, this book might clinch your decision to pick up and move abroad. Ayşegül Savaş, herself a Turkish writer educated in the US, has lived her adult life in Paris, and her literary work, though not exactly autofictional, explores the space between the romanticized life of the foreigner and the emotional alienations of the working artist.
Making art requires solitude and discipline. Both must be chosen––especially as a woman, in a world that raises you to be everything to everyone, to subjugate your needs to men, children, family, and community. So while Savaş’s stories borrow some of their mystique from the romance of her adopted hometown of Paris, the real theme of her work might be the well-kept secret that is women’s solitude, and in particular the rigorous work women artists do to protect their creative space––its own kind of long distance.
One of my favorite stories in this collection is a simple one, with very little plot: “The Room.” Savaş conjures women writers like Dickinson and Woolf with a tale of freedom found within a self-imposed confinement behind a closed door. Dickinson famously called the privacy of her bedroom “freedom,” while Woolf had a system with her husband involving a chalk X on the door to her study, signaling her need for total focus. In “The Room,” Leyla, a young writer and private tutor in Paris, forgoes the conviviality of roommates and moves to a tiny one-room chambre de bonne not far from the Luxembourg Gardens: “The room is flooded with light. There is a sink in the corner, an old desk, a daybed fitted with patterned burgundy fabric. It’s the details she loves immediately––the worn wooden floors, terra-cotta tiles beneath the sink, the single drawer of the desk with a keyhole, the bed’s brass claws.” Details matter to a writer, and almost immediately, Leyla finds intimacy within the space’s limitations: “when she steps in through the door, she feels the room taking her in and sealing behind her,” Savaş writes. “She has the sense, every time she’s back, that she and the room are picking things up where they left, continuing their time together.” I related to these descriptions of the apartment as container for the artist, “the room where her thoughts have only just begun to settle.”
Routine and ritual also make art possible, so it’s unsurprising that they feature prominently in Savaş’s work. Like in her last novel, The Anthropologists, her characters crave and conjure routines as a way to make the unfamiliar comfortable. Leyla doesn’t have a place to bathe in her tiny room, so she swims for an hour each afternoon at her local pool (“tiled with tiny blue-and-green mosaics”) before showering and heading to her evening tutoring gigs. Details matter to a routine, even if those details are unglamorous: “She eats canned sardines and crackers sitting on the bed, she heats beans with the help of an electric kettle. Each morning, she retrieves clothes from two suitcases under the bed.” I love inhabiting Savaş’s stories for this reason; her precise descriptions confer luxury on the sparest of situations.
Many of Savaş’s narrators keep secrets, but this doesn’t make them unreliable so much as self-protective: guarded against that which they struggle to imagine.
The stories in Long Distance travel beyond Paris, too. A girls’ trip to Marseille reveals the growing distance among old classmates: “She didn’t tell her friends she’d like to go to a museum. They would joke that she was an old lady…Was that what it meant to be old––a spectator to interesting things?” In “We Are Here,” the pronoun “we” carries us into the story of a study abroad cohort in Russia, who collectively ease into their new environment with self-aware trips to KFC and competitive exchanges of host family anecdotes. In “Freedom to Move,” a woman makes a brief trip home to Turkey, where strange new power dynamics color her relationships.
The encounters in this story collection center on the experience of living abroad, but anyone who has chosen a home other than the one that raised or educated them will recognize the estrangement found in the inner lives of Savaş’s characters. Encounters in these stories are mirrors that incite surprising grief, nostalgia, or loneliness. Old friends, long-distance lovers, far-flung grandparents––each connection becomes an unsettling brush with the greatest stranger of all: yourself.
With The Anthropologists, an imprecise European setting allowed the author to center character interiority and mood. This might seem ironic for a novel titled after the study of specific human cultures, but this was precisely the magic of that novel: as readers, we were meant to see not the culture but the cultural observer, the one who wants to fit in just enough to participate, but not so much that she no longer possesses that “little anthropologist” in her mind capable of seeing through ritual to meaning.
In Long Distance, there seems a reversal of these roles. Savaş’s protagonists seem rather assimilated, with a more rooted sense of place. What unsettles these characters’ assumptions and beliefs is not foreignness in the setting but their own lives. Whether it’s a much-younger cousin or an old friend group from university, an elderly French landlord or a Russian host mother, these stories are encounters with outsiders to a tightly-held selfhood.
In the most mysteriously tragic of the encounters in this book, two young women work at a seaside restaurant for the summer. One will grow up to be a famous actress; the other is our narrator. It’s another “we” with the power to include the reader in an intimate confidence, but the narrator keeps much to herself. The pair hears legends of a local ghost: a woman, who visits other women before their weddings––“to warn them.” “‘About what?’”, the future actress asks. “I shrugged. Which was different than a lie. I patched things together vaguely,” admits the narrator, “like getting up for water at night.”
Many of Savaş’s narrators keep secrets, but this doesn’t make them unreliable so much as self-protective, guarded against that which they struggle to imagine. The narrator of “Notions of the Sacred,” soon after learning she is accidentally pregnant, is pleased to find non-alcoholic beer at a party, a private delight that echoes the unanticipated sense of belonging her pregnancy has conferred upon her. Another story, “Twirl,” seems to be about a lonely woman’s foray into online dating, but it becomes about half-truths between friends and the even more acute loneliness we feel when confidences turn out to be fictions: “not quite a lie,” she acknowledges, “but a deliberate presentation of facts.” The narrator of “Cry It Out” harbors private guilt when she and her husband start sleep-training their newborn––in the same month that a brutal war breaks out abroad. Soon, she can’t sleep either as the “rubble-smeared faces of children” start to resemble her baby. It is only through these personal and unexpectedly momentous encounters that these characters gain enough self-knowledge to change––or, sometimes, to stay put.
Indeed, the dramas in Long Distance, like in the very best short stories, snuck up on me every time, and I didn’t mind. Inhabiting these quietly fateful moments with these characters reminded me that distance leads to insight––something Savaş possesses in spades.
