Aria Aber published her debut novel, Good Girl, earlier this year. It follows Nila—a 19-year-old daughter of Afghan refugees—through Berlin’s vibrant underground techno scene. Caught between a controlling relationship with an older American writer and longing to find her artistic voice, Nila distances herself from her family and identity in an attempt to escape, chase, and feel.
“I will always be drawn to wayward Afghan women, or Middle Eastern, West Asian women, because I wouldn’t say it’s an unusual type in writing or media portrayals, but it’s still a character type that isn’t welcomed,” she says. “I wanted to create a female character who comes from a traditional background, even more traditional than my own, and feels oppressed by these standards and her family’s expectations, and tries to break free—sometimes making poor choices or hurting herself along the way—while also living fully.” Coming from a background in poetry, Aber is the author of the award-winning poetry collection Hard Damage, which won both the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and the Whiting Award. Despite her accolades, she humbly prefers the more flexible title of “writer.” “I always thought that the term ‘poet’ is really intimidating,” she says. “It comes with a lot of responsibility, and to me is the highest form of literary art because it’s really hard to write.”
To transition into writing prose, Aber immersed herself in the world of her favourite authors like Marguerite Duras, Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, and James Baldwin. “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she confesses. Taking more than two years to complete, she wrote in her third language, English, after being raised speaking both Farsi and German.
She started writing her novel in 2020 in Berlin amid a fountain of grief—mourning the loss of a friend, feeling the weight of the pandemic, and witnessing global political unrest. As she wandered through the streets of Berlin, once the backdrop of her own party girl era a decade earlier, the past and present merged into a palimpsest of experience. Abandoned buildings and clubs seemed alive with her memories, imagination, and fantasies. This exploration of the past became the foundation of the narrative, coupled with a desire to include the rise of right-wing extremist violence across Europe and the U.S. as a plot point creating an emotive tension that underpins the story.
For Nila, she wanted to write a protagonist who wasn’t repressed but dangerously free. “I wanted to show someone who is making a lot of mistakes and being a bad person sometimes. When I started writing the novel, I wanted a female character who was the opposite of repressed,” she says. “Nila is too uninhibited. I wanted to explore the contradictions of desire, self-fulfillment, and self-destruction, and how all of those things combine.”
Feature image by Natalie Aber.
