FIRST SUMMER Reminds Us That Teenage Relationships Never Fade Away
Ekin Oklap’s debut novel traces a single, intense summer friendship between two teenage girls and shows how that experience shapes an adult narrator’s sense of self.
Useful takeaways from this story.
The novel follows an adolescent narrator who forms a near-mirror friendship with a new girl, Clara, during one hazy summer.
The story is told by an adult remembering adolescence, which allows the text to hold both immediate teenage feeling and retrospective meaning.
Oklap weaves brief sci‑fi asides and spare, musical prose to capture how fantasy and reality overlap in youth.
The useful part
Her debut novel, First Summer, showcases her own remarkable talent as a writer. It follows a teenage girl as she forms an intense bond with the enigmatic new girl who moves in across the street. During one hazy, languid summer, they spend their time together reading, lying in the yard, and trusting each other with their inner selves.
How it works
- Oklap and I spoke about loneliness and the desire to be understood, achieving musicality in writing, and emotional frameworks developed in adolescence.
- How did you access the way teenage interiority feels both immediate and emotionally complex without imposing an adult perspective on it?
- I think you're asking how we reconnect with that mode of being when we're no longer teenagers.
- How has translation influenced your own writing style and editorial process?
- I remember accidentally watching a scary movie as a teenager and then being unable to sleep for a week.
What to take from it
MW: I'm very glad you asked about those sections because I really enjoyed writing them. Not because the novel itself is autobiographical, but because I've always used stories that way. Obviously, summer is practical for coming-of-age stories because school is out of session, but summer also evokes desire and the possibility of transformation.
Example or evidence
- To comfort myself, I would invent stories in my head every night, building them scene by scene until I fell asleep.
- FIRST SUMMER Reminds Us That Teenage Relationships Never Fade Away.
- In detailing a fleeting relationship over the course of one summer with deep tenderness and sharp observations, Oklap reminds us that these moments will invariably shape us long after they've passed,...
- They remind you that these feelings are not uniquely yours.
Details worth keeping
Interspersed with brief asides detailing the adventures of a sci‑fi heroine central to their childhoods, the novel deftly captures a fragile moment in youth when fantasy and reality overlap, and how a first love can leave an enduring mark. Early on in the book, when the narrator meets Clara, she realizes that she's met a "mirror" of herself. At the same time, we also get the sense that some of this closeness is born out of an intense loneliness and isolation they each feel.
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