Womanhood

“I am a woman. I like being one. That’s what I want to talk about.”

What being a woman means is illustrated by each individual life: beauty, implicitness and questions.

Mely Kiyak talks about all the details that make life meaningful. She reflects on conversations about wisdom and ignorance that she and her father had after his shift at the factory when she was a girl. About cousins who talked about desire and found pictures to explain to their innocent relative what lust was. About growing up between countries and classes, saddled with the baggage of foreignness and curiosity about unknown experiences. About being alone, finding yourself and about family. What is femininity if you overcome being gazed at in public and are left alone? Sincere, fun-loving, tender and disarmingly clever, Mely Kiyak reminds us that conditions teach us how to love and live.


“Exciting, poignant and full of humour.”
- Woman, 09/2020

“Kiyak’s examination does not aim at making general theses, but at the individual. At creating a female self that wants a freely chosen existence beyond the usual coordinates of emancipation. This book, which is small only in appearance, is written in clear, pleasing language, and is a major achievement: it gently rescues female identity from the clutches of norms.”
- Ursula März, Deutschlandfunk Kultur Lesart

“Womanhood is a slim book that cannot be reduced to one genre: it is poetry, autobiography and a treasure trove of anecdotes all in one. Mely Kiyak digs for memories and holds them like broken pieces of glass against the light. And you can’t help but look, and let yourself be carried away, as you keep on blinking and start thinking.”
- Kristiane Harthauer, SWR2 am Morgen

“Womanhood is a sequence of observations, scenes and dialogues. The description of Kiyak’s grandmother, who got worked up and threw volleys of insults – with such vehemence that she ended up a lonely woman – is hilarious. When the grandmother is no longer physically able to do this, the family plays out their failures until there is nothing left to laugh at. The way Mely Kiyak tells it! It sweeps the reader away. You long to be in that little house in Anatolia with everyone getting on each other’s nerves. [...] Kiyak knows how to entertain an audience, get them excited, and writes beautifully, which is inseparably linked [to this book’s success]. Her most personal and most wide-reaching book so far, it is her crowning achievement as a writer to date.”
- Arno Widmann, Frankfurter Rundschau

“[...] All these experiences inevitably make Kiyak a political writer who places those on the periphery of society, who are usually deliberately excluded from representation, at the centre of her literary work. And she does that in an outward-looking, clever, critical and fun-loving way. What else does womanhood mean, if not that.”
- Rebekka Adler, MDR Kultur