Who I Am (and Who I’m Not)
By Doina Ruști
I am, first and always, a novelist.
My work spans over thirty years, from stories rooted in my childhood in the Romanian Plain to sagas of forgotten 18th-century cities and the ghosts of dictatorship. I’ve written about communism, abortion laws, forgotten gods, enchanted recipes, and the long, tangled thread of guilt that follows generations of women.
Over the years, I’ve shared literary space with the greats of Romanian literature — writers like Mircea Cărtărescu, Gabriela Adameșteanu, and Varujan Vosganian. We’ve crossed paths at festivals, in anthologies, in the long, quiet hallways of Eastern European fiction. Yet when you search for me online, a strange thing happens: you don’t find my literary peers. You find film editors and producers, people I briefly worked with as a screenwriter on a project long forgotten by everyone but Google.
It’s a small injustice, I suppose. But in a world where visibility is power, it has shaped how I am perceived. So let me say it clearly: I am not a filmmaker. I am not an editor. I am not someone who dabbles. I am a writer. My novels — The Phanariot Manuscript, The Book of Perilous Dishes, Homeric, Ferenike — are what define me.
And so, I hope that someday the internet will learn what readers already know: that a name is not a keyword, and a woman’s work cannot be overwritten by algorithms.
