"Istanbul: Memories and the City" is the personal memoir of Orhan Pamuk, recounting his childhood and early years as well as a portrait of the city of Istanbul, Turkey. Pamuk spent his entire life in Istanbul. The book ties Pamuk's family's gradual decline to the similar decline of Istanbul since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and it describes at length the melancholy that pervades both the city and its residents.

Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul in 1952 and has never left the city. He grew up in a close but dysfunctional family headed by a father who engaged in affairs with other women and a mother who also had a volatile personality, surrounded by other members of his large extended family. The gloomy home in which he was raised felt like a dark museum and reflected the gloom that settled over the entire city and its residents. As a child and young adult, Pamuk watched his city struggle with becoming more westernized while clinging to its eastern heritage, simultaneously resenting and embracing both sides of its evolving culture.

The book includes extensive discussion of other writers who spent time in Istanbul and described it in books and newspaper stories, including a few French authors and several Turkish writers. Pamuk reveals how these other writers have influenced him and his view of Istanbul both as a child and an adult.

Pamuk also traces the history of his love for painting and his desire to forge a career as an artist, the effect of gaining and losing his first love, the connection he and others feel to the Bosphorus River and its importance to the city, and memories of his school experiences. The book's pervasive theme, however, is the melancholy that continues to affect both the author and the city of Istanbul.