I Never Planned to Write a Book
When I came to Tbilisi in 2023, I was not looking for a new subject and certainly was not planning a book. I expected to stay for a little while, which is a very convenient way of living somewhere because it allows you to treat almost everything as provisional: the apartment, the neighbourhood, the strange little routines you acquire without noticing and even the people whose names you suddenly know despite having no idea when, exactly, they stopped being strangers.
At first I did what most people do in a new city. I compared everything.
The streets were compared with streets I already knew, the prices with prices elsewhere, the food with food from home and the way people behaved with the way I thought people were supposed to behave. Gradually, though, comparison became less interesting, because the city had started accumulating its own details and I had begun paying attention to them rather than deciding whether they were better, worse or simply different.
I started writing some of those details down, not because I thought they belonged in a book, but because I did not want to forget them.
That was the beginning of the story behind Nobody Told Me About Tbilisi.
How the Story Behind Nobody Told Me About Tbilisi Began
A city rarely becomes real through its landmarks. Those are the places you photograph when you arrive, the things you dutifully show visiting friends and the names you learn before you know which supermarket stays open late or which bakery is most likely to have warm bread in the morning.
The part that interested me came later.
It was the hot shoti that somehow never survived the walk home intact, the old lifts that demanded either confidence or faith, the conversations in small shops that were supposed to take thirty seconds and developed relatives and backstories before anybody remembered what you had come in to buy, and the neighbourly arrangements that seemed completely mysterious until one day they simply stopped seeming mysterious.
There was the salt being lowered from a balcony because walking downstairs would clearly have been an excessive solution to a very small problem, the chair near an open doorway, the people who knew exactly who belonged to which courtyard and the strange moment when I realised that I had stopped checking Google Maps for routes I had once considered impossible to remember.
None of this looked important enough to become literature.
That was precisely why it interested me.
A city begins to belong to you somewhere in those insignificant repetitions, when the bakery is no longer a bakery but the place where you buy bread, when a street stops being a name on a map and becomes the road you avoid at six in the evening, and when the people around you acquire histories instead of remaining part of the scenery.
I kept writing these things down, and for quite a long time that was all they were: notes.
What Twenty Years of Legal Practice Taught Me About Writing
I had already spent more than twenty years working as a lawyer before I began writing these stories, and I do not think it is possible to spend that long in the profession without developing certain habits that follow you everywhere.
A lawyer listens not only to what someone says but to what has been omitted, notices when one detail does not fit the rest and learns that the most revealing part of a story is often something the person telling it considers completely unimportant.
You also learn not to trust the first version of anything.
People remember selectively, explain themselves generously and frequently become much more interesting at exactly the moment when they are trying not to be.
That way of looking at people turned out to be surprisingly useful outside a case file. In Tbilisi I began noticing a pause, a hesitation, a gesture, a phrase that did not quite fit and the tiny social negotiations taking place around me all the time: the taxi driver who asks one question and somehow ends up telling you his entire family history, the shopkeeper who appears rude until you realise this is simply the opening stage of a perfectly normal relationship, or the neighbour who knows much more about your life than you remember telling anybody.
There is one important difference, fortunately: a book does not require me to prove any of it beyond reasonable doubt.
When Notes Became a Book
For quite a while I did not realise that the notes were becoming anything larger.
One observation led to another, and the stories accumulated almost accidentally because Tbilisi continued producing material with absolutely no respect for my plans. I would notice something, write it down, return to it later and discover that the thing I thought was about a taxi driver was actually about the way strangers talk here, while the piece that began with an old lift had somehow become a story about trust, neighbours and the peculiar compromises people make with buildings that have been behaving badly for decades.
At some point the notes stopped feeling separate.
There was a common voice, a common city and, underneath all the jokes, a change I had not consciously been writing about at all: I had arrived as someone observing Tbilisi from the outside and had slowly become someone living inside it.
That was when I understood that the stories belonged together.
Each chapter still began with something small, because I did not want to write a guidebook, an explanation of Georgia or a grand declaration about what Tbilisi means. There are plenty of people willing to explain cities after a weekend, and I had been here long enough to become suspicious of anyone who could summarise the whole place in three adjectives.
What I wanted to keep were the ordinary scenes, the things nobody warns you about because nobody thinks they are important enough to mention.
Those scenes became Nobody Told Me About Tbilisi.
When a Foreign City Becomes Home
There is no single day when a foreign city becomes home.
Nobody hands you a certificate.
You simply notice that certain things have changed: you know which route will be faster without opening your phone, you recognise people you have never formally met, you have surprisingly firm opinions about supermarkets, and a taxi driver asks how long you have been in Georgia only for your answer to sound much longer than you expected.
More importantly, you stop experiencing every difference as a difference.
Some things that once seemed surprising become normal; others remain completely incomprehensible, but you have stopped expecting them to improve merely because you disapprove.
That shift is probably the real subject of the book.
Not relocation in the practical sense, although moving countries is inevitably part of it, and not tourism, because tourists and residents look at the same street in completely different ways. It is about the quiet process by which somewhere you did not plan to stay begins filling with habits, memories, irritations, favourite places and people you would miss if you left.
By the time I understood that this was happening, I was already writing the book.
Why I Did Not Want to Write a Guidebook
Tbilisi does not need another person explaining that the sulphur baths exist, khinkali should be eaten in a particular way and the Old Town is picturesque.
All of that is true, and none of it was the reason I kept writing.
I was more interested in the things that disappear from conventional guides precisely because they are too ordinary: how conversations begin, how long they continue, what neighbours consider normal, what happens in lifts and courtyards, why a simple errand sometimes develops into a social event and how quickly a foreigner can become emotionally invested in a shop, a street or somebody else’s dog.
A guide tells you where to go.
I wanted to write about what happens after you have already arrived.
It is one person’s Tbilisi.
Mine.
The Story Is Still Being Written
One of the strange things about publishing a book about a city where you still live is that the material does not stop just because the manuscript has ended.
Tbilisi continues to provide new stories with absolutely no respect for my plans. A trip to buy one ordinary thing can still turn into a twenty-minute conversation with somebody I have never met, a taxi ride can acquire an argument, a family history and unsolicited advice before we reach the second traffic light, and I still occasionally come home with a story I had no intention of looking for.
Perhaps that is why I still think of Nobody Told Me About Tbilisi less as a conclusion than as the point at which I finally admitted that all those notes belonged to the same story.
I came here expecting to stay for a little while.
I began writing because I did not want to forget the details.
Somewhere between those two things, Tbilisi became home and the notes became a book.
Start Reading Nobody Told Me About Tbilisi
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