Letters From A Pink Hotel takes its name from the epistolary novel The Idiot by Elif Batuman, The Idiot by Dostoevsky, the essay ‘Goodbye To All That’ by Joan Didion, and the popular literary Bildungsroman-form of ‘letters from a version of self’.

 

It is a very well-lit place where we keep assignations with ourselves. Our worlds are made possible and bound by anything from language, to ideology, to time.  What are the consequences of placing such a singular individual at the centre of conflicts, desires, passions, and egoisms of the world? Both for the individual and for the people around them? Whenever we write—create—we think we’re writing of the world but really we’re just drawing from the vantage point inside our own world. An internal world becoming external? This place where we keep assignations with ourselves—where we keep ourselves—is somewhere you might not be seeing what you're seeing. And who can say. 

 

That is Letters From A Pink Hotel.  

 

To Batuman’s main character, Selin, the pink hotel is a courtyard in California. A memory. It's a painting she attempts. It's a maze she’s locked in. It’s someone else entirely; a whole family living in Tokyo. It’s an exposé of pink paper plastered all over her dorm room wall to which she invites her friends asking them where they are and how they feel. An internal world. An external world. Something else around the corner.

 

What do you do when you find yourself literally somewhere you’ve always wanted to be, but non-literally (figurative has too much of a metaphorical underpinning, I mean non-literal to encompass all those things derived from and of life that are not your physical geographical location) you find yourself exactly where you’ve always been?

 

So, I’m not different here, or there.

 

My first wine! My internal world becoming external. We look backward. Inward. And didn’t get anything that we wanted from a period of life, but the attempt to write an external world from an internal place, to write versions of self is also about discovery. It’s about not finding the thing you were looking for but finding something else that you didn’t know you were looking for. Something you maybe didn’t recognize at first. 

 

That is Letters From A Pink Hotel.