This paper is about Tezer Özlü’s novel “Cold Nights of Childhood” [Çocukluğun Soğuk Geceleri], a novel with biographical traces and a sensitivity to time. In this novel, written in the second half of 1970s, through writing, she delivers her past to her own present. In her text, she walks about in the past, which she constructed again today. She places her yesterday’s story at the centre of an exhaustless fight between her past and present. We read this novel thinking on two major issues: what is like to write the past, living in the present time? Also, what does it tell us when a woman writes to rescue her life story from loneliness, oblivion and from remaining her private black box?
Past/present, life story, écriture féminine