Teoman Hayatını Yazdı: Fasa Fiso
Published:
Teoman Hayatını Yazdı: Fasa Fiso
Time Out İstanbul — 12 June 2018
Interview by Nadir Sönmez
By the middle of 2018, Teoman is not merely revisiting old songs.
He is revisiting his life.
His autobiography, Fasa Fiso, transforms memories, old interviews, relationships, mistakes and professional experiences into a written self-portrait.
This interview is especially valuable because Teoman explains not only what he remembers, but how he chooses to remember.
That distinction matters.
An autobiography is never simply a container of facts.
It is an act of selection.
The Book Was Not Supposed to Become This Book
Teoman originally imagined something easier.
He planned to construct a book largely from approximately twenty years of interviews.
The archive already existed.
He would select material and organize it.
Then he began adding stories.
One story led to another.
The project changed.
Instead of simply curating old interviews, Teoman found himself writing intensively.
The book eventually consumed around a year, with approximately five months of concentrated work.
From Archive to Autobiography
This development mirrors what was already happening musically with Koyu Antoloji.
The first impulse is archival.
Collect the past.
Select from it.
Preserve it.
But once Teoman enters the archive, preservation turns into new creation.
Old songs become new arrangements.
Old interviews become new memories.
The past does not remain passive.
It generates another work.
Writing Like Talking to a Friend
Teoman decides early what kind of prose he does not want.
He does not want an elaborate literary voice.
He does not want to perform the role of the important artist writing his definitive memoir.
Instead, he wants the book to sound like someone remembering old stories with a close friend.
This is an important stylistic decision.
The autobiography should not manufacture grandeur around the life it describes.
No “Great Artist” Pose
Teoman is especially suspicious of the self-importance that can enter autobiographies.
Famous people know, while writing, that readers already consider their lives significant.
That knowledge can distort the voice.
Teoman deliberately tries to avoid what he calls the pose of the “cool great artist.”
The book should contain ordinary human stories.
Not a monument.
The Title: Fasa Fiso
The title itself reinforces this refusal of monumentality.
Fasa Fiso sounds dismissive.
Trivial.
Almost unserious.
This is a strange title for the autobiography of someone who has spent decades creating a carefully recognizable artistic identity.
But that is exactly why it works.
Teoman reduces his own mythology before the reader can inflate it.
Memory Is Selective
When Nadir Sönmez asks about childhood, Teoman explains that he does not remember everything.
The memories in the book are the details that remained.
They are the experiences that continued returning to his mind.
This is crucial for understanding autobiography.
The book does not claim to reconstruct every event.
It reconstructs what survived emotionally.
Checking Memory Against Other People
Teoman nevertheless tries to verify some details.
He speaks with his mother.
Friends.
Former partners and people from different periods of his life.
They remind him of small things.
This creates an interesting tension.
The memory belongs to Teoman.
But the past belonged to many people.
Other witnesses sometimes possess pieces that the autobiographer has lost.
Emotional Truth and Factual Detail
This makes Fasa Fiso different from pure confession.
Teoman wants the book to feel personal, but he also recognizes that memory can be incomplete.
The author must sometimes compare his private narrative against other people’s recollections.
This is almost exactly the problem we face in building an interview archive.
One source is useful.
Several sources are better.
Memory also requires provenance.
What Should Be Censored?
Teoman says he tried to avoid excessive self-censorship.
But he did censor some material.
The most obvious area was relationships with women.
He did not want the autobiography to become a catalogue of sexual or romantic encounters.
For the period after becoming famous, he generally chose to discuss only relationships that had real intensity.
Avoiding the “Womanizer Book”
This decision is important because Teoman’s media persona had long emphasized women.
If he included every story available to him, the book could easily reinforce that mythology.
He deliberately refuses.
The autobiography therefore becomes an attempt to correct the proportions created by celebrity media.
A life contains relationships.
But the relationships do not have to consume the entire life.
Alcohol Without Advertisement
Teoman takes a similar approach to nightlife and alcohol.
These subjects belong to his story.
Removing them would be dishonest.
But he does not want to glorify them.
He also does not want to turn the memoir into a moral warning.
His goal is description rather than advocacy.
This is an unusually balanced approach to one of the strongest components of his public image.
Looking Back Hurts
Writing about the past creates intense emotion.
Teoman says some episodes made him deeply sad.
But again he resists excess.
He does not want to look at his old life with exaggerated tears.
The past is the past.
This is almost an autobiographical version of the irony he has described for years.
Emotion must be present.
But sentimentality must be controlled.
The Dark Parts Have to Stay
Teoman is especially clear about his own bad behavior.
He writes about depressive periods.
Anger.
Arguments.
Aggression in professional life.
Situations in which he behaved roughly toward people he valued.
Removing these things, he says, would create an incomplete book.
This is one of the strongest ethical principles in the interview.
The Book Should Resemble the Person
Teoman gives a simple objective:
the book should resemble him.
That requires unpleasant material.
A polished autobiography that removes selfishness, cruelty, error and regret might create a better public image.
But it would create a worse portrait.
For Teoman, realism requires damage.
Regret
The interview makes clear that Teoman looks back on many choices with regret.
This is not unusual in itself.
What matters is his willingness to preserve those regrets in the official narrative of his own life.
Public figures often use memoirs to justify themselves.
Teoman is more interested in documenting contradiction.
He can explain why he behaved a certain way without necessarily claiming that the behavior was correct.
Autobiography as Self-Criticism
This extends one of the longest themes in the archive.
Teoman has always been unusually willing to diagnose his own flaws.
The difference in Fasa Fiso is scale.
An interview captures self-analysis in one moment.
A memoir allows twenty years of those moments to be placed beside one another.
Patterns become harder to ignore.
The Musician Who Is Not Always Happy Being a Musician
Nadir Sönmez asks directly about Teoman’s complicated relationship with his profession.
Teoman does not pretend that the problem has been solved.
His ideas about music continue changing.
His ideas about himself continue changing.
His ideas about work continue changing.
He still questions the profession.
“I Have No Other Profession”
Yet Teoman also acknowledges something practical.
Music is what he does.
There is no completely separate professional identity waiting behind it.
This creates a kind of long marriage between Teoman and music.
He may not always be happy with the relationship.
But leaving it permanently is difficult.
Music Has to Be Negotiated With
Teoman’s description is almost relational.
If he wants to remain with music, he sometimes has to compromise with it.
This is a very different attitude from the young musician fighting to make his first album.
Music was once the desired freedom.
Now it is a long-term relationship that requires maintenance.
Writing Was Enjoyable
The surprise of Fasa Fiso is that Teoman genuinely enjoys writing the book.
He does not rush to finish.
The process itself gives pleasure.
When the book is complete, he experiences not only relief but also a sense of emptiness.
A project that had occupied his attention disappears.
This is psychologically significant.
A New Creative Territory
For years, Teoman had struggled with declining motivation to write new songs.
Writing prose creates a different kind of interest.
There is no catalogue of previous Teoman novels against which the new work must compete.
He is a beginner again.
That can restore something aging artists often lose:
novelty.
Could Teoman Become a Writer?
His friends had apparently encouraged him to write for years.
After completing the book, Teoman does not immediately claim a new identity as a writer.
He remains uncertain about fiction.
A memoir begins with material already available: one’s life.
Fiction demands a different architecture.
Still, the possibility has appeared.
This will become important in later years as Teoman continues publishing books.
Songwriting Has Changed
Teoman also describes a change in his songwriting process.
When younger, he could work on songs for long periods because he was not sure when they were finished.
Now he can write a song in five minutes and know that it is complete.
Experience has improved judgment.
The difficult part is no longer necessarily writing.
It is deciding whether something deserves to be written at all.
Some Songs Wait for Years
Even so, not every song arrives immediately.
Teoman has compositions held back by tiny missing elements.
They may remain unfinished for years.
This provides an interesting counterpoint to his claim that songs can arrive quickly.
Speed is possible when the structure resolves itself.
When one element refuses to fit, experience does not automatically solve the problem.
Few Plans for Music
When asked about his next musical step, Teoman gives an answer completely consistent with the other 2018 interviews.
He has very few major plans left.
The important ambitions have largely been completed.
What remains is preservation.
Leaving the Songs in Order
His goal is:
to leave the songs to the future in an organized form.
This may be the most important sentence for our archive.
It connects Koyu Antoloji, Fasa Fiso and the collection of old interviews.
Teoman himself is already thinking archivally.
He wants the work to remain understandable after the immediate context of his career disappears.
The Artist as Archivist
By 2018, three projects are therefore happening together:
- Koyu Antoloji — organizing and reinterpreting the songs.
- Fasa Fiso — organizing personal memory.
- The interview archive — organizing the public record of Teoman’s statements.
These are not unrelated projects.
All three respond to the same problem:
How should a life be left behind?
Why This Interview Matters
This interview may be one of the most directly relevant documents to the archive we are building.
Teoman explicitly describes:
- beginning with twenty years of interviews,
- turning archive work into autobiography,
- verifying memories with other people,
- deciding what to omit,
- resisting the mythology of the great artist,
- preserving his mistakes and darker behavior,
- reconsidering his relationship with music,
- discovering pleasure in prose,
- and wanting to leave his songs to the future in an organized form.
The earlier Teoman wanted to become an artist.
The successful Teoman wanted to remain himself despite fame.
The middle-aged Teoman worried about what would survive him.
By 2018, the concern has become practical.
He is editing his own historical record.
The songs are being reorganized.
The interviews are being collected.
The memories are being written.
The important question is no longer simply:
Who is Teoman?
It is increasingly:
Which Teoman will the future remember?
Source Note
Original publication: Time Out İstanbul
Date: 12 June 2018
Original title: Teoman hayatını yazdı: “Fasa Fiso”
Interviewer / writer: Nadir Sönmez
Document type: Interview
Verification: Primary source
Confidence: High
The full interview remains accessible on Time Out İstanbul’s official website and is explicitly dated 12 June 2018 with Nadir Sönmez as the writer.
The interview directly documents Teoman’s account of how Fasa Fiso developed from a planned selection of twenty years of interviews into a full autobiographical project. It also contains his explanations of the book’s informal style, his attempt to minimize self-censorship, the selective treatment of relationships and nightlife, his discussions with family and friends to recover details, and his decision to include regret, aggression and other unflattering aspects of himself.
The same primary source records Teoman’s statement that most of his major musical ambitions had already been fulfilled and that his remaining musical objective was to leave his songs to the future in an organized form.
Because the complete original interview is still available from the original publisher, all central publication metadata is primary-source verified.
This page is an archival summary and commentary. It does not reproduce the original interview in full.