New York Times Debuts ‘Imprint’: Writers on Places that Inspired a Book

Hooray! Vendela Vida kicks things off with a piece on two towns in Turkey that inspired her latest book, “The Lovers.”

Still, I was slightly disappointed to find it not exactly as I remembered. It seemed louder, and more popular, but its blemishes less romantic and more ragged. I suppose this is what happens in travel, and why we enjoy it. We know when we are traveling that we’re experiencing a particular moment in time. We know that every vacation is ephemeral and can’t be relived.

I began to think about what kind of character would return to a town and be disappointed to find it was not as it once was. And that gave rise to Yvonne, the protagonist in “The Lovers,” my most recent novel. Yvonne is a 53-year-old widow who returns, 28 years later, to the place where she and her husband had honeymooned. Because of the twin towns, I made her the mother of grown twins—one the golden child, the other troubled. The story grew from there.

This promising new feature wins back some of the love I lost after the New York Times killed its regular travel essay.

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