Stitched Twice 💙❤️
Saturday, 6 June, 2026
I clicked a button this afternoon, and a book became a real thing in the world.
Not in anyone's hands yet—that comes in August. But the proofs are approved, the files are locked, and At the Angle of Blue now exists in the space between the work and the world, where the writer waits.
The novel is dedicated to my father, the surgeon, who taught me — across a childhood spent watching him at the kitchen table after long days in the operating room—that precision is a form of kindness, and that the careful suture, the second pass, the willingness to do the work twice rather than once-and-quickly, is the hand's expression of love for what is being repaired. Stitch twice.
But I am learning, this week, that he was not the first in the line to teach me. My maternal grandfather, Dr. Şemsettin Arif Üstel, was a pioneer of radiology who studied at the University of Vienna after Cerrahpaşa and did research with Marie Curie at the Institut du Radium. He died in 1946 of the science he had helped advance — one of many early radiologists whose bodies paid the cost of the field's first decades. He had stitched twice too: every careful exposure, every measured dose, every return to a science whose cost he came to know in his own body. In the novel, the chemist Joy works inside her grandfather's notebooks. I did not know, while I was writing, that I had been doing the same thing my whole life.
This week, the calendar arranged itself. My grandfather's eightieth was on May 25. My mother's sixth is June 7. The book was approved between them. My brother Mehmet danced Swan Lake. I cannot prove a thing—but no one can prove love, or joy, or the feeling that the people who shaped you are still in the room with the work. Some things you receive on faith.
I have been told, in various ways across my life, that I have had two careers — the chemist and the artist. I have always known they were one. At the Angle of Blue is the book in which they finally lay down side by side and admit it. And I see now that the lineages are not two either. Surgeon and radiologist. Father and grandfather. The hand and the eye.
August 27. Until then, the work goes on the shelf where finished things wait, and I will move to the next thing. Water, having done its quiet labor, always finds another stone.
— M. Turandot, Miragwyn Books
