Interview with Aria Aber, author of Good Girl, shortlisted for Women's Prize for Fiction 2025

The Hindu

5 hours ago

Nila, 19, is in all respects a 'bad girl'. She is rebellious, she drinks, engages in substance abuse, and she dates a charismatic American novelist, Marlowe Woods, who is several years her senior. But the ironically titled Good Girl by Aria Aber (published by Bloomsbury), shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2025, is much more than a coming-of-age story. Aber explores broader themes such as immigrant experiences, racism, violence, desire, shame, and self-discovery in a powerful debut novel. Over a Zoom call, she speaks about her love for Berlin, and the characters she was forced to keep and kill. Edited excerpts:
Q: Like Nila in the book, your parents are from Afghanistan and you were born and brought up in Germany. Is there anything of you in this book?
A: Any work of fiction or art is autobiographical. I can give you an example of how I am every character in the book, not just Nila. When I started writing the book in 2020, I lived in North California and was working as a guest lecturer at Oakland University. I didn't have health insurance and I had to move back to Berlin to a small district, which was close to a club. Both these topographies ended up influencing the narrative of the book — specifically the biography of Marlowe Woods. So, there were things I took from my life that ended up in the book in unexpected ways.
Q: This book is as much about Nila as it is about Berlin. What do you love about Berlin and what aspects of the city did you want to bring into this book?
A: I love Berlin; it's one of the only places in the world, but specifically in Germany, where I have felt at home. It's diverse, alive, chaotic, and beautiful — and also a little rough, which is I think is aesthetically what I'm drawn to.
When I was first there in 2012, I noticed that a lot of English-speaking expats were moving into the city. Berlin had already been populated by a new wave of voluntary migrants — not Turkish workers from the 1980s, or refugees from the Arab and Muslim world, but young creatives with degrees. They had come from Italy or Spain or Greece because the economy had collapsed after the financial crisis and Germany was one of the last stable economies. And then suddenly, there was this new influx of creatives, of Americans and British people. Something shifted around that time. I heard for the first time the person behind the counter at a bar not speaking German, but English. I wanted to capture the period before that happened, when expats were still in the city, but they were not as visible.
I also really wanted to bring out the idea of parallel societies. Nila is ashamed of her heritage because she grows up in this post 9/11 world. She oscillates between two very intense worlds. One is her refugee community, which is not assimilated into the majority society properly, and the other is the underworld of the club kids, which is also not assimilated into the majority society properly. Both of these worlds are parallel and are being critiqued by common German citizens for not leading their lives according to the production and generation of capital.
Q: A lot of your characters have conversations when they are drunk or when they are engaged in substance abuse. How did you research those portions? Did you watch films, read, interact with people?
A: Dialogue comes pretty naturally to me, even though I do pay attention to it, probably subconsciously, when I watch films. I remember rewatching Lena Dunham's TV series Girls and just marvelling at how good and funny the dialogues were, and how realistic each character was. There are some writers I'm drawn to, such as Don DeLillo and Sally Rooney, who write great dialogue. So I think I look to other writers for dialogue. But for atmosphere and plot, I draw inspiration from films.
Q: Given the age gap between Marlowe and Nila and the occasional violence that occurs within their relationship, this is tricky terrain to write about. It seems predatory at first glance, but when you look at it, Nila does have agency. How do you navigate this relationship without giving the reader the impression that this is okay?
A: I wanted to explore the nuances and complications of a young person who believes they have full agency and control and then later on understand that the predatory aspects (of the relationship) that were not witnessed. So, what does that do to a person who is not a victim necessarily, but may have experienced some things within a relationship that were victimising her? Nila was looking for something exciting and she didn't know what it was. She didn't have the language for it, a way to articulate it, or draw a boundary. I wanted to write about juvenile confusion and self-destruction. Often, people who have self-destructive streaks seek them out in their relationships. I tried to go into the depths of that relationship and in order for that to feel human and realistic, I also had to understand Marlowe, so that he's not just a caricature. So I wrote some chapters from his perspective [which did not make it to the book].
Q: You're also a poet but your book doesn't read like a book by a poet, and that's not an insult! Was it a conscious choice to write differently?
A: It is fascinating you say that. My intention was to not write a poet's novel. Not because I don't like reading them; I love reading them. I love an experimental plotless book that is linguistically interesting with sentences so delicious that I want to eat them. But I like the concept of a narrative having a beginning, a middle, and an end. A climax where the character experiences change to a point of no return, et cetera. That partly has to do with the fact that in Afghan culture — and this is probably true in Indian culture too — storytelling is very important. When you're in a social gathering, you can entice everyone with a story.
Q: My favourite character in the book is Nila's mother. How attached were you to that character?
A: She's actually one of my favourite characters too. I had to kill her because she was taking up too much space in the book. I had to kill my darling in order to write what I wanted to write about, which was Nila and Marlowe. My next book will be set in the 1980s in Afghanistan, and it will follow feminist revolutionaries [which Nila's mother was].
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