REYHAN BIRLIK. 32. PR Consultant.
Midtown.
tw: parental dysfunction, alcoholism
Reyhan Birlik was born as a last-ditch effort to save a marriage between two people too selfish to ever truly love anyone but themselves. Her mother, an insecure Turkish soap star already edging past her prime, didn't want to risk the stretch marks or the bloating that came with pregnancy, but her husband, as the face of a burgeoning health and lifestyle empire, insisted he needed a complete family unit to really sell the brand. Not that it mattered - they were divorced by the time Reyhan was five, and that same year Birlik Enterprises™ reached a record profit of $85,000,000 in sales. Her father didn't make much of a bid for custody, so he didn't put up a fight when her mother married an American producer and relocated them to Los Angeles two years later.
On paper, it was the glamorous childhood. She attended the best schools, where her friends and classmates were the children of the Hollywood elite. She visited her father's compound in Turkey every summer, and for her 16th birthday, she got a brand new BMW. She wanted for nothing. And yet, she was miserable...
Her parents were little better than self-absorbed toddlers, and despite the continents separating them, they fought in ways that had Reyhan constantly playing the middleman. Her stepfather was no help, and once Reyhan's mother realized her new husband couldn't help her break through to American markets, her grip on stability slipped further. As for Reyhan's father, he was questioned by the MIT no less than 8 times over the years for charges ranging for potential money laundering and suspected cult activity. And always in the middle was Reyhan, clinging on for dear life.
College provided her with an escape she desperately needed, and she jumped at the opportunity to get as far away from Los Angeles and her parents' influence as she possibly could. It was there that the man that would one day become her husband, and he was so different from everything she'd known that she couldn't help falling in love with him. With him, she found a new family — one she actually wanted — and on the night the MIT finally found a charge that stuck and her father was indicted for tax fraud, she asked him to marry her. He accepted.
Maybe it was because she only had her parents to look to as role models, but the marriage didn't last. It was possible she'd just never learned how to be a normal human being. But she stuffed her heartbreak in the same place she kept all her trauma — a tiny compartment deep in her chest — and just as she had before, she ran away.
It turned out her childhood spent enabling her parents made her uniquely qualified for a career enabling egotists and corporate sociopaths. And so, almost by accident, she became a corporate PR consultant. She spent the next several years traveling the world, cleaning up messes for companies with oil spills, CEOs with leaked tapes, and any other assortment of public relations nightmares. Her latest assignment has brought her to Wilmington, where she has been hired by the city to help rehab their image in the wake of recent scandals.
