A Conversation with Aria Aber
BY EMILY COLLINS
Aria Aber was born and raised in Germany and now lives in the United States. Her debut poetry collection, Hard Damage, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and the Whiting Award. She is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford and graduate student at USC, and her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, New Republic, The Yale Review, Granta, and elsewhere. Raised speaking Farsi and German, she writes in her third language, English. She recently joined the faculty of the University of Vermont as an assistant professor of creative writing. She divides her time between Vermont and Brooklyn.
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I first encountered Aria Aber’s work in the May 3rd, 2021 issue of The New Yorker. “Notes from a Ruined City,” a dazzling free verse poem, explores the fragmented nature of memory, grief, and belonging in the Afghan diaspora. While some poets rely on overt political commentary, Aber places her trust in the subtle song of the line—the ways the music of a sentence can resonate with the reader’s experience. Throughout her poetry, Aber’s intuitive ear and deep compassion transform mass devastation into something universal yet personal.
Good Girl brings the best aspects of Aber’s poetry into a beautifully-crafted narrative. The novel follows Nila, a daughter of Afghan immigrants, as she navigates Berlin’s underground art scene in search of identity and a sense of belonging. Raven Leilani has praised Aber’s prose as “kaleidoscopic, full of style and soul.” Readers will find Good Girl as graceful as her poetry, with richly-layered historical contexts and fully-realized characters. In it, Aber aspires to teach us; not just about Nila’s journey of discovery, but also how we can untangle our own complicated heritage and understand the many-sided nature of the self.
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Emily Collins: In Good Girl, you delve into themes of identity, creativity, vulnerability, and a young woman’s desire to suppress them, with continual reference to Franz Kafka.
How did you first encounter Kafka’s works, and how did he influence your first novel?
Aria Aber: Though I love all of Kafka’s writing, and The Metamorphosis is one of my favorite books, it was really Kafka’s letters and diaries that influenced Good Girl. I was about 13 or 14 years old when I picked up a copy of Letters to Milena from a bookstore in my hometown, Münster.
I was entranced by the often quite suffocating ways Kafka professes his love to Milena, the intellectual nature of their correspondence, and the tragic trajectory of their romance. They were never in an official relationship (they didn’t even meet in person more than a handful of times, and she was married at that time). Milena Jesenska was a powerful woman, a translator and an activist, and she ended up dying in a Nazi camp. At the time, as a teenager, some of the political dimensions of their friendship went over my head––and yet I felt so close to Kafka’s descriptions of unrequited and impossible love. Those epistles were formative to my own development as a writer, and it was illuminating to return to them as an adult and read the letters through a more historicizing lens.
I tried to bring my own youthful interpretation of that romance into Good Girl, especially in Nila’s refusal to see her relationship with Marlowe as affected by politics until the very end. But I also feel a real kinship to Kafka’s relationship to the German language––he is a minor writer, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, and I, too, always feel like a minor writer, regardless of whether I’m writing in English or German: I’m a foreigner in both languages.
EC: In Kafka’s Zürau Aphorism no. 103, he writes, “You can withdraw from the suffering of the world. You are free to do so and it is in keeping with your nature. But perhaps this very withdrawal is the one suffering you could avoid.” Like many of Kafka’s protagonists, Nila begins with a desire to withdraw. But as a would-be artist born to Afghan parents in Germany, her reasons for withdrawal are particularly nuanced.
Why is Nila withdrawing? What suffering—real or imagined—drives her to do so?
AA: This is a wonderful question, and your reading of her suffering being both real and imagined is spot-on. The real suffering is, the novel argues, of a structural nature––the kind of violence perpetrated by nation-states, by war and exile. As a person of Afghan heritage, Nila’s also suffering from the post-9/11 stereotypes perpetuated by the German society around her. This manifests in macroscopic, systemic ways, as well as within more microscopic and interpersonal dynamics that affect her daily life (a person on a subway harassing her, the students at school making fun of poverty, and even some of Marlowe’s comments).
Nila internalizes these instances of racist violence and microaggressions, however, in much more intense ways than her family and peers. She sees the world as this deterministic grid of preconceived customs and traditions, and because of her young age, she has the solipsistic and overly dramatic tendency to believe that she is the only person alive suffering from the conundrum of not knowing where she belongs within that grid. Nila is scared that no one will accept her as who she truly is; she is propelled by the fear that the people outside of her family will judge her for her foreignness and poverty, while the people within her family will ostracize her for her desire for freedom, her promiscuity, her excess. Hence, she withdraws from everyone and believes to be inherently unlovable across the board. Eventually, she traps herself in a web of lies about her identity and class position.
While sketching out Nila as a character, I drew inspiration from Kafka’s life and his texts. Kafka felt hemmed in by social norms and his role as a son within the nuclear family, especially by the demands of this ubiquitous and ominous father figure. You can see this in almost all his novels and novellas, but in The Metamorphosis, this relationship is symbolized, somewhat famously, with the apple that Mr. Samsa throws at Gregor’s giant bug body. There is so much misunderstanding at play in that scene––what is sustenance, what is a weapon, how can the family speak to each other––and so much melancholy. In that respect, Nila is quite like Kafka’s male protagonists––she is disgusted with herself, with the nature of her being. There are several of these familial apples rotting in her chest.
EC: You examine the existence of parallel societies in Germany—the immigrant community, grappling with poverty and racism, and the artistic underground, where intellectuals navigate voluntary dangers like drugs, betrayal, and unhealthy relationships. Nila, caught between two worlds, doesn’t seem to belong in either. Yet all the characters in the novel are portrayed with compassion and depth.
What inspired you to explore these contrasting societies and the spaces in-between? What commonalities, if any, do they have?
AA: Berlin, like any metropolitan city, is incredibly diverse and has many faces. There is, for instance, the immigrant and refugee community on the one hand, and the very rich and thriving club scene on the other. Those are perhaps the most famous and extreme cultural pockets of the city, and the ones I’m most familiar with personally.
Nila made sense as a protagonist because she can easily navigate both worlds; she can code-switch and shapeshift and deliver accurate observations about both milieus without veering into judgment or caricature, while still brushing up against facets of the city she doesn’t know that well.
What makes the inhabitants of these parallel worlds similar is their refusal to adhere to normative standards of German society. Insular immigrant communities often get criticized for failing to assimilate to the dominant culture, while the club kids tend to abstain from steady employment or the kind of careerism that would make them instrumental in furthering the production of capital. Because of the still relatively low cost of living in Berlin, this is easily achieved. I’m generalizing here, but there are members of both groups who benefit from social welfare, and that remains a sore thumb in the eyes of the good German citizen.
Both lifestyles, while entirely different in their practices and ideologies, exist sideways to normative hierarchies. This reality, to me, harbors the imaginative qualities needed for revolutionizing, abolishing, and ultimately also restructuring society. And Good Girl is not trying to imply that a parallel society is revolutionary by default, but that such self-sustaining communities can teach us about alternative ways of coexistence.
EC: The weight of family, memory, and inheritance are felt throughout the novel. To quote Nila’s Aunt Sabrina, “Exile is like fate. You don’t get to choose what happens to you.” But Nila, unlike her mother and other members of her family, does have a choice.
Is this choice a blessing or a curse? How do you “name again, with care and purpose,” such intimate topics?
AA: To have a choice is a blessing. It’d be dishonest to claim that her positionality as a girl born in Germany would be a curse, or somehow make her life less fortunate. She hasn’t witnessed war, so isn’t traumatized first-hand. On a very basic level, she has the advantage of speaking the language fluently, which allows her to assimilate and navigate all bureaucratic and structural hurdles with ease, without an accent, even if she wears her otherness on her face (late in the novel she admits that even when she’s masquerading as Greek, she is read as a foreigner, a “Kanacke,” in Germany).
While her family is disenfranchised and financially disadvantaged, they’re culturally rich. They foster her education and her love for books, a habit that makes Nila an articulate, shrewd, and relatively cultured person, even if she is terribly naive at times.
Writing about such a complex and nuanced topic necessitates, I think, deep imaginative work. As an author I had to write from a point of compassion and love for my characters, even the ones Nila bristles against, such as the men in her family. As the author, it was important to me to end Nila’s trajectory with a political awakening that allows her to view her father and the men of her community with greater clarity.
EC: Nila’s relationship with Marlowe, an American writer, is marked by tension and power imbalances. In some ways, Marlowe resembles Henry Wotton, the charismatic catalyst for Dorian’s downfall in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Yet, Marlowe also serves as a bridge between Nila’s self-doubt and her creative ambitions.
What does Marlowe represent in Nila’s journey? What do you think draws her to him despite their complicated dynamic?
AA: I love to think of Marlowe as a type of Henry Wotton! There’s definitely a lineage between the two. Marlowe represents everything Nila yearns for––a life of excess, freedom, and artistic creation. She’s enamored with a literal image of him, one that she encountered in a magazine once. On the surface, he leads what to her looks like the ideal life, which is one without boundaries, supplemented by his artmaking.
But Marlowe’s character arc functions as the inverse of Nila’s—as she gains confidence in herself and her artistic vision, he starts deteriorating. The image crumbles, and his character development follows a downward trajectory. While writing their relationship, I wanted to carve out moments of genuine connection between the two, so that the romantic encounter doesn’t just dwell on the stereotypical surface of abuser vs. victim. The eros between them, I think, is based on this mutual passion for artmaking and intensity: he is attracted to the glimmer in her, the youthful power she possesses and which he is beginning to lose, while she is attracted to his wisdom and worldliness. And despite the violence, Marlowe remains instrumental in her journey towards self-acceptance, most notably because he functions as a mentor for her art.
Of course, this doesn’t take away from the fact that their relationship just perpetuates her own subjugation. It’s quite ironic, really––fleeing her family’s standards of a “good girl,” she becomes another type of good girl in the bedroom with him.
EC: The way you write about Good Girl’s tender and difficult themes reflects a poet’s eye, particularly in choices such as “Moonlight coruscated on the surf” and “time like the frail skin of a soap bubble.”
How does poetry inform prose? As a seasoned poet, what aspects of writing your first novel were the most exciting?
AA: To be honest, I had to activate a completely different part of my brain to write this novel, because I was intent on writing a story with at least a little bit of a plot, with a narrative, and a moment of change both for Nila and the other characters around her. In this book, the larger story of Nila’s journey is as important as the smaller, more concentrated element of the image.
And yet, on a more granular basis, the language, including so many of the imagistic descriptions, such as those you highlight in your question, are a testament to my training as a poet. I’m always thinking of a particular craft element Eduardo C. Corral once discussed in an interview about his poetry: that he unlocked the real potential for the lyric once he moved away from fact and towards the music of the line. On a sentence level, I am always guided by the music; I think of sound first, while logic becomes more important during the revision stage.
But there are also the childhood chapters, which occur early in the novel, and where I allowed myself to use my poet’s eye and ear more clearly and abundantly, because I could focus on memory and move away from the technical restraint of “just” furthering the narrative.
EC: What advice do you have for someone attempting a first novel? In particular, how do you mine your life for material without veering into autobiography?
AA: The best advice I can give is to read as much as possible. I never attended an MFA for fiction, so I had to teach myself how to write a novel by studying my favorite books. For other autodidacts, I’d suggest asking yourself: What kind of novel do you want to write—plot-driven, character-driven, or both? Do you want a fragmentary narrative, or a linear story? Whose writing makes you feel alive, and why?
Go back to your favorite writers and map out their sentences, their plot points and narrative elements, so that you can learn the craft. I’m mostly obsessed with the moment a character experiences an awakening or some kind of change that they have been resisting and running from. For Nila, this was both a political awakening and a moment of self-acceptance about her heritage.
As for the second part of your question, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with writing autofiction, as so many people are doing it these days. But the great thing about fiction is that you don’t have to be true to the facts of your life. Even in my poetry, I’m not married to factual representation, but rather to the emotional truth of the lyric.
I believe that real life is actually much more clichéd, boring, and arduous than fiction, especially when it comes to the treatment of time and a character’s emotional development. Interestingly, once I have a fictional character who feels fully realized on the page, they tend to make decisions that feel out of my authorial control. Of course, this sounds absurd and esoteric, and I’m aware that even “creative accidents” emerge from my subconscious, but getting the page to open itself in creatively limitless ways means that I have to trust artistic intuition enough to follow it to surprising places.
For example, I remember writing the scene when Nila and Marlowe return home from the festival and find that the apartment has been robbed. This plot point was not planned––it was just something that happened because I let myself be guided by the rhythm of the story until that point. Again, I want to refer to Eduardo C. Corral’s advice to follow the music of the line. Incredible things can happen on the page if you listen closely and take your ego out of the composition process.
