In Good Girl (Hogarth, Jan.), poet and debut novelist Aria Aber follows a club kid’s coming-of-age in Berlin’s underground scene.
What inspired Good Girl? Is it auto-biographical?
I was a party girl, and I always wanted to write about a character who inhabits this dialectical tension between self-destruction and self-fulfillment. Like my narrator, Nila, I come from a traditional Afghan family, and though I also rebelled, we’re much different from her family. I started writing this in 2020 when I moved back to Berlin after studying poetry at NYU. There was a nightclub opposite my apartment, and I was flooded with waves of memory from when I would spend hours there.
In addition, earlier that year, right-wing terrorists walked into shisha bars in Germany and shot people who looked to them like migrants. I once romanticized Berlin as a haven of diversity, but now there was a feeling of being unsafe. That cemented the framing of the novel, and I found its voice from thinking about the parallel societies in Germany. The immigrant society that can’t assimilate, and the counterculture movement of the club kids who don’t conform. It’s a tension that doesn’t really get talked about.
You won the Whiting Award for your poetry. What made you want to write a novel?
I always wanted to write a novel. Even my poetry has always had a narrative bent—I structured my first collection, Hard Damage, like a bildungsroman. But I want to tell so many stories that just don’t fit into poems. As I tell my students, poetry is like a photograph, but sometimes you want to make a film.
Why do you write in English?
I grew up between German and Farsi, which was the language of my household. There’s so much pain and trauma with being a refugee and not many opportunities to assimilate properly, while English felt like freedom to me.
You portray raw emotions and write so poignantly about sex, friendships, and love. Tell me about that.
I mean... [laughter]—I read a lot of Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, and James Baldwin, and one thing they all have in common is the experience of an exiled person, lost in Europe. Those three writers are also very good at writing about sex and desire. I learned so much from them, especially Duras, about how to let the language flow and follow the music.
In the novel, Nila pretends she’s everything but Afghan.
After 9/11, I met so many people who were lying about where they came from, Muslims particularly. It was a difficult and traumatizing time. I remember teachers asking me about my family’s religious beliefs, and I got a lot of comments from classmates about my Afghan heritage. So I wanted to write about how self-hatred can be formed by the society around you.
