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Nila, the 19-year-old protagonist of Aria Aber’s debut novel, Good Girl, will be eminently recognizable to readers of contemporary literary fiction: she yearns, she parties, she disappoints her parents in a constellation of large and small ways. Yet the circumstances Aber has ably placed her into are entirely original: Nila is the public housing-raised daughter of Afghan parents doing her best to locate some sense of self within Berlin’s legendary party scene, and following her journey through a complex affair with Marlowe, an even-more-complex American writer, as the city around her is roiled by racial tension makes for delicious, propulsive reading.
Vogue recently spoke to Aber about shifting to fiction from poetry, taking inspiration from refugee artists and artists living in exile, and what drew her to render Berlin’s magnetic hold on generations of creatives.
Vogue: Can you tell me a bit about the genesis of this novel?
Aria Aber: I had always wanted to write a book about a party girl who drifts through Berlin’s subterranean worlds, but I didn’t seriously start writing this novel until 2020, when I had just moved back to Berlin from the Bay Area for a few months. Both landscapes seeped into my consciousness while composing the first draft, which is why Nila and Marlowe come from Berlin and Northern California, respectively. Walking through the deserted streets of Friedrichshain and Neukölln that summer, I was almost electrified by my grief for the world. And I vividly remembered my own life a decade prior, when I was stumbling through those same streets with big dreams and a penchant for danger.
What was it like to make the shift from poetry to fiction?
I recently described myself as having a novelistic disposition rather than a poetic one. By that I mean that I tend to think of certain periods in my life, or other people’s lives, as story arcs rather than as poems. Narrative has always felt very natural to me, probably because I was raised in a household of storytellers, and because formal linearity affords me a sense of aesthetic control over my very haphazard, exilic life. I am also one of those poets who lie in their lyric poems—I will make up settings, scenarios, and objects in order to bring across the emotional truth of the particular poem. So fiction didn’t feel as alienating as one might think, even though it was extremely difficult to maintain pacing and tension in long-form fiction. I diligently studied and deconstructed some of my favorite novels for inspiration, and I also read a lot of movie scripts and theater plays to learn more about dialogue. It was an exciting project as an autodidact.
What about Berlin, specifically, spoke to you as a setting for this novel?
It’s one of my favorite cities in the world, and perhaps the only place in Germany where I’ve ever felt at home. I didn’t grow up there, but I remember always feeling quite captivated by the diversity and pulsing energy of the city when we visited our relatives there. It’s an unruly and yet extremely generous place. And it’s a place where history is very tactile: you can touch it, you can walk through it, you live within it. Berlin, like any cosmopolitan city, houses so many variegated communities, and I was drawn to writing a character who can navigate the worlds of different milieus. On the one hand, we have the refugee and immigrant community, and on the other, we have the thriving club and techno scene–Nila is a product of both, and she seamlessly moves through them. I guess in some ways, the novel functions as a love letter to Berlin, in all its complexity.
Do you have favorite works of art created by refugees or artists living in exile that helped provide inspiration for this book?
The novelists I kept reading and re-reading throughout the process were James Baldwin, Marguerite Duras, Shirley Hazzard, and Jean Rhys. Although these 20th-century writers were not necessarily refugees, their novels often feature an exilic character adrift in a European city. More contemporary authors whose work on exile is very important and inspirational to me are Solmaz Sharif, Aysegul Savas, Isabella Hammad, Yasmin Zaher, Ocean Vuong, Sahar Muradi, and Jamil Jan Kochai.
On a similar note, do you have any favorite literary representations of “going out” or the international club scene?
There are amazing scenes in Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, if not of parties or bars, then at least of that particular feeling at the very end of the night, when everything peters out and the lights of the city turn back on, and you dread going home because you’re so terribly lonely. And then there’s the whole catalogue of drug novels, such as Trainspotting, Junky, Fear and Loathing, and so on. I remember loving the ’90s New York club-kid book Disco Bloodbath by James St. James when I was in high school, though I haven’t read it in years, but I actually struggled with finding good party scenes in novels, and instead drew inspiration from movies such as Head-On by Fatih Akin, Millennium Mambo by Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Boogie Nights by Paul Thomas Anderson, The Great Beauty by [Paolo] Sorrentini, and even classics such as Breakfast at Tiffany’s and La Dolce Vita.
Your depiction of Nila’s desire—for Marlowe, for art, for a different life—is so poignant; is there anything you think she could reasonably get that would begin to quell it, or do you think she’ll always be yearning?
It’s so hard to think of a future for a fictional character, but I have often wondered if there is something that would stop her endless need for intensity. But part of the excitement of inhabiting her consciousness for the duration of the novel was that she is so restless, and a true yearner. I hope that sublimating her hunger into devotion to art and doing good for the larger world would be a way to quell her urges…after all, her trajectory does lead to the beginning of a political awakening.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
