Elif Shafak says her new novel, In One Brief Moment All Eternity, grew out of a creative crisis shaped by depression and anxiety. The 54-year-old novelist described the book as a fictionalised life of Gustave Flaubert, but also as a response to a darker period in her own writing life.
“This book is really my love letter to literature,” she said in conversation over coffee in west London. She has lived there with her husband and two children for the past 18 years, and she framed the novel around a lonely outsider who was misread by the people around him.
Flaubert, hüzün and 14 novels
Shafak said the book is about “a lonely boy who was misunderstood by almost everyone around him, including his own family members. He was regarded as a failure, as a disappointment, treated as ‘the other’.” That description points straight at the book’s engine: a writer using Flaubert’s life to explore exclusion, while also writing through her own struggle with hüzün, the Turkish word she used for the depression and anxiety she faced.
“I wanted to be able to say, ‘you’re my brother, you’re my sister’. That was the beginning,” she said. The idea turns the novel into more than a historical retelling; it becomes an act of recognition, with Shafak placing herself inside a lineage of writers who turned private unease into form.
Angst, Anger and AI
Shafak said the novel arose out of “The age of three As: Angst, Anger and AI”. That phrase gives the book a wider frame than her own experience alone: the personal crisis sits inside a public climate she sees as defined by emotional pressure and machine-driven acceleration, not just literary inspiration.
Her success makes the admission sharper. She has written 14 novels, her 2017 Ted Talk has been viewed more than 6.4m times, and There Are Rivers in the Sky was one of the UK’s bestselling literary novels last year. Yet the same writer, elected president of the Royal Society of Literature last December, says the latest book came from a period of depression and anxiety.
Shafak’s reading now
That contradiction is the point of the story. Shafak is publicly successful and widely read, but In One Brief Moment All Eternity shows her using a major literary figure to write from vulnerability rather than authority. Readers coming to the novel now have a clear starting point: it is not just a Flaubert book, but a book about what it takes to keep writing when the mind turns on itself.
