Writing Into Uncertainty: Exploring Identity in YA Literature, a guest post by Leyla Brittan

My writing career began in elementary school, when I started writing short stories as a way to try to embody and understand experiences outside my own. My earliest stories were all inspired by things that didn’t quite make sense to me: things I learned about in school or heard on the news. It seemed obvious to me that the most effective way to work through this confusion was to step into the mind of someone experiencing those things firsthand.

At that time, I wasn’t particularly concerned, as a writer, with questions of my own identity and experience. However, as I grew older and expanded the range of literature that I read, I recognized in myself a deep affinity for books with characters who shared a family background that looked anything like my own. The first time I ever remember reading about a character who shared my name was in a book published by a toy company, as a tie-in product to a doll, whose story took place in eighteenth-century Türkiye. Nothing about her life resembled my own, but I was fascinated by the experience of seeing my own name in print and reading about a young girl’s experience in the country where my mother grew up—even if that experience was hundreds of years ago and purely fictional. I had never read an American-published book with a Turkish character, let alone a Turkish protagonist. It made me wonder what it would feel like to be someone who shared a name with many characters in the books they read in school, who saw their identity regularly reflected on the page.

With a mother who grew up in Istanbul and a father who grew up in Montana, I spent much of my childhood traveling between those settings, figuring out how to exist in both, and grappling with questions of identity and belonging. Was “home” the suburban New York town that I grew up in? Was it the town on the Aegean coast where I went swimming in turquoise water and walked out to the lighthouse night after night every summer? Or was it the ranch with its rolling hills and tall golden grasses where I rode horses and hurled myself off a rope swing into a deep swimming hole filled with trout? Could it possibly be all three?

In the writing workshops I attended in high school, I saw some of my classmates exploring their identities and family experiences in their stories, and I realized how meaningful it might be for me to do this too. I began to jump back and forth between the landscapes of my childhood, writing stories set in the Rocky Mountains or Istanbul apartments. But often, especially when I wrote into the Turkish side of my identity, I felt like an imposter, trying to write these characters who were truly and simply Turkish, when my relationship to that part of myself was much more complex.

Beyond that, I became frustrated with the reactions I received. I noticed that when I wrote protagonists whose identities resembled my own, my classmates (and teachers too, sometimes) tended to assume that my narratives were entirely autobiographical—and that bothered me. My stories were fiction, and I wanted them to be read that way. I found it frustrating that if I wrote a piece with a half Turkish protagonist, some people would assume that everything that happened in the story was true, even when I told them it wasn’t. But something about this made me even more determined to keep writing stories that featured protagonists who didn’t fit the “standard” identity that these readers were used to finding in their fiction: it hammered home the importance of representation and diversity in literature.

 

The characters in Ros Demir Is Not the One all have different relationships to their families and identities. Two of the main characters, Ros and Aydın, are both Turkish American, but their relationships to that identity are very different. Ros, the book’s outspoken, messy antiheroine, is half Turkish, with one parent who grew up in the U.S. and one parent who grew up in Türkiye. She has a complicated relationship to her Turkish heritage: as a child, she felt that it made her classmates see her as different from themselves, and she believed that it was an impediment to her fitting in, which she so desperately wanted. At the moment in her life when the book takes place, she has spent many years trying to hide and distance herself from her Turkish side. Aydın, whose parents are both Turkish, has a less fraught relationship with that part of his identity. He holds a lot of love for the country and especially for the city of Istanbul, and he’s open about his Turkishness in a way that Ros isn’t, although he has sympathy for her insecurities about not fitting in as well. Ros’s complex feelings about her Turkish heritage inform her relationship with Aydın in shifting and surprising ways throughout the book.  

Ros’s foil is the half Korean Chloe, who Ros believes also had a hard time fitting in with their classmates when they were younger. However, in the book, Chloe has come into her own and become popular and confident in herself and her identity—so much so that it confuses and upsets Ros, who has always felt that she would be the one of the two of them who would figure it all out.

As I grew as a writer, I came to realize that I didn’t have to feel like I had a totally simple and figured-out relationship with my identity and family history in order to write about it…in fact, I realized that there could be immense value in writing into that question, just like I had written into the questions of experiences I didn’t understand as a child.

Ros Demir Is Not the One is a story about a teenage girl learning how to shift her priorities and care for the people around her, but it’s also about a teenage girl figuring out who she is. At the beginning of the book, Ros thinks she knows exactly who she is (or, at least, she wants others to think that she does). But over the course of the novel, she learns how to admit the things she doesn’t know, and she makes steps toward figuring herself out just a little bit more. This book isn’t autobiographical, and Ros is very different from who I was as a teenager. But in it, through the lenses of various characters and their different relationships to their family backgrounds, I’m writing into the uncertainties I had as a teenager (and some that I still have) about my own identity. I hope that it resonates with young people who have grappled with the same questions, and perhaps give them some comfort that it’s okay not to have a simple answer.

Meet the author

Leyla Brittan is the author of the young adult novel Ros Demir Is Not the One (Holiday House 2024). Originally from Chappaqua, New York, she graduated from Harvard College in 2019 with an A.B. in English and a secondary in Computer Science, and she received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Wyoming in 2023. Her short fiction has appeared in Pigeon Pages, 5×5, and The Harvard Advocate, and has been nominated for Best American Short Stories. In addition to writing fiction, she has worked as a technical writer, actor, and outdoor sports journalist, as well as in film and television production. You can find her online at leylabrittan.com or @leylabrittan. 

About Ros Demir Is Not the One

Ros will do whatever it takes to get the guy. At least… she thinks she will.

Sixteen-year-old Ros is a go-getter. When she wants something, she makes sure she gets it.

But a lingering rumor (and maybe some ambivalence about her half-Turkish heritage) has kept Ros from achieving the kind of reputation she deserves. So, after years of plotting her big comeback, she just needs one thing: a hot, adoring guy on her arm at junior year homecoming. And when she meets charming new classmate Aydın at the Pine Bay resort over the summer, she thinks she’s found The One.

It doesn’t work, though. And things get messy when Ros’s plan ends up hurting the only friend she has left… poor, sweet, forgiving Eleanor. This has happened before—things tend to get messy with Ros around—and it’s getting harder for her to ignore the pattern of hurt feelings. Plus, it seems like Ros and Aydın aren’t really meant to be. What kind of a plan results in everyone ending up unhappy? Not a very good one.

A not-quite rom com starring a bold, outspoken antiheroine, this Turkish-American Romeo and Juliet remix is refreshingly snarky. Witty, whip-smart dialogue plays with the complexities of multicultural identity and female friendships, from Ros’s very first screw-up to her unconventional happy ending. Perfect for fans of Crystal Maldonado and Michelle Quach.

A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection

ISBN-13: 9780823457137
Publisher: Holiday House
Publication date: 10/01/2024
Age Range: 12 – 17 Years

Filed under: Guest Post