Aria Aber: On the Throes of Girlhood, Generational Trauma, Writing Her Way Back to the Self, and Her Debut Novel ‘Good Girl’
I picked Aria Aber up from her hotel in Nashville, Tennessee. She arrived to town as part of the Gertrude C. & Harold S. Vanderbilt Visiting Writer Series, the first of the season. I was in the throes of first trimester pregnancy nausea, but I was absolutely not willing to miss her craft talk and her reading. My body relaxed when Aria Aber sat down in the passenger seat and smiled. I smiled back and noticed her shoes—Prada kitten heels with gorgeously dainty bows.
This was back in September of 2022, when Good Girl was probably still a drafted manuscript on her computer. Aber’s poetry collection, Hard Damage, was published in 2019 to much acclaim. The poems navigate personal and historical implications of self-discovery and cultural identity and place and family of origin. These studies seem to be in conversation with Good Girl (Hogarth, 2025), Aria Aber’s debut novel that arrived on shelves in January of 2025. I was thrilled to read a coming-of-age story written in poetic prose, as the elemental foundation of girlhood is one that can’t be properly organized and perhaps does best when allowed to depart from typical form and structure.
Today, I hold the book in my hands, a book I read with ferocity. I devoured the story of Nila and her beautiful brokenness, the way a girl must reclaim her existence over and over again in the quick span of a life. I think back to Aria Aber’s time at Vandy that fall and remember her craft talk on elegies. I think about the pieces she shared with the MFA students, the concepts of beauty and terror and how they are tied together, the way loss and grief are voids we nestle into and dig, dig, bury ourselves deep. I remember the closing lines of a poem she read that night, the tenderness of their sentiment:
I do not want to open, neither for food
nor men. For loneliness, I keep a stone
to kiss. At night the entirety of me arches
not toward the black square
of absence, but toward you.
— “Reading Rilke at Lake Mendota, Wisconsin” by Aria Aber
Brittany Ackerman: Congrats on this stunning novel! I’m so thrilled to chat with you about this book, and I’d like to begin with talking about form and structure. As I mentioned in the intro, girlhood cannot be easily catalogued and classified, and I think you did a wonderful job of capturing the chaos of coming-of-age, especially in the female perspective.
How did elements of poetry and prose help guide you in writing Nila’s arc? How did these same elements hinder you? In other words, what joys and challenges occur when you depict something as poetic as girlhood in prose?
Aria Aber: Thank you for this wonderful question. I love to think of girlhood as something that’s poetic in nature, because it can be a very fractured, nonlinear and often fragmentary period in a woman’s coming-of-age. I had to utilize a different part of my brain to switch to prose, and I tried to immerse myself in my favorite novels in preparation for the narrative arc. Especially for the present-day narrative that takes place from 2010 to 2012, I tried to abstain from writing too poetically or associatively. But I did employ my more poetic sensibility when I wrote the childhood chapters, which disrupt the linear narrative, and provide some background information for Nila’s character by looking into her past and upbringing. There, the language is extremely musical, and in some ways, “choppier.” I wrote many of those chapters after I had the first draft ready to go, and they felt more playful in their composition. But I have to admit that it was also a joy to stick with a sustained story for a long period of time, as one can rarely do that in a lyric poem.
BA: One of the most compelling parts of the book for me was the mother-daughter relationship between Nila and her beloved, deceased mother. There is so much pain and longing in Nila’s memories, and the too-soon departure of her mother from her life has clearly left an impact on Nila’s worldview and perspective.
Nila’s photography is a gorgeous way to capture these memories on the page. The images serve as documentation and evidence of her mother’s life of sacrifice and struggle, of her beauty.
I wonder if you could talk about depicting mothers and daughters in fiction. Are there any books or stories you return to when writing? What care and consideration goes into painting this most delicate and fraught relationship? How did you find your way to the center of their love?
AA: I decided to include the mother’s early death as a way to honor the classic bildungsroman trope, which often begins with the death of a loved one for the protagonist. The story really fell into place when the grief of this monumental figure colored Nila’s consciousness. Part of it must have been subconscious, because I was grieving the death of a close friend while I began writing the novel, so I probably sublimated my own private longing into the character’s woes. For inspiration, I was reading Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Voyage in the Dark, and Good Morning, Midnight, all of which feature dead mothers as well—the spectral presence of a powerful but mysterious woman served as a great thematic anchor for Nila’s own confusion when it comes to womanhood, girlhood, and growing up. Because the mother is dead, Nila’s understanding of femininity and patriarchy is somewhat stunted, or delayed—she looks to the dead for answers to existential questions. It was important, however, to include at least one living maternal figure—in the form of Nila’s aunt Sabrina—to serve a surrogate figure who can guide her towards self-acceptance.
BA: Let’s talk about generational trauma. I want to look at these lines: “Something big happens. Something bigger than you. My mother marches at a student protest, wearing suede boots in 1984, the sun rising over the mountain.”
Nila envisions her mother’s past, and with it, the pasts of women in her family and the women who have come before her. Nila is conflicted by her family of origin (#relatable!), but she recognizes the unbreakable ties that tether her to her deepest, darkest secret—her true identity. I was moved by Nila’s desire to escape herself and her ultimate reticent acceptance of self. I think we all struggle with reckoning who we want to be with who we actually are, and this book came to me in the midst of such a reckoning, so thank you.
Did writing this book help heal any identity issues, or did it deepen any trauma? Is writing a road back to self, or a path further from it?
AA: The sentence you quoted above is from a chapter that occurs shortly before Nila experiences the beginning of a political awakening, when she finally acknowledges her role within this larger collective—the women and men who came before her, the community in West Asia and the Middle East, all these people she had refused to accept as her tribe beforehand. And writing that particular chapter did feel cathartic to some extent. I think that writing can be therapeutic, but I don’t turn to writing for that purpose; I think I turn to writing in order to explore larger questions about the world we live in, and the responsibilities we have to people around us, and the way a person’s consciousness develops over the course of a period of time (of growing up, political upheaval, etc.). Writing can be both mystifying and demystifying; I don’t think I have more answers but I understand a little more about the types of characters I chose to write about. Generally I would say that writing is a road to the self and to others, rather than away.
BA: I recently saw Nosferatu in theaters this past holiday season, and I couldn’t help but see so much of Nila in the character of Ellen Hunter, played by Lily-Rose Depp. I admired the movie for its pure, unadulterated embrace of Ellen’s madness and the explicit wrong that would ensue if she was suppressed or tied down in any way—both physically and metaphorically.
I felt the same for Nila, in that she is able to fulfill her destiny when she is allowed to embark on all her misadventures. She says, “Of course I had tried to be good. But the women in my family have always been misfits.” Nila embraces her pain and makes it a part of her.
Is this what makes her a genuine artist? Do we need to be in pain to create, or does all art come from a place of melancholy or unsettled psychology?
AA: I love the comparison to Nosferatu, even though I haven’t seen the film yet. But now I know I really have to go watch it! I’d be careful not to romanticize mental illness or certain pathological conditions as “artistic dispositions,” even though it’s true that many artists do suffer from mental health issues. Perhaps depressive people have a tendency to turn inwards, to be still, to ponder existential questions which other people might shy away from, and this might provide them with the foundation for artmaking. But I don’t know if art emerges out of pain, or rather out of a sense of curiosity—about the world, humanity, and the self. But I do think that making art, or writing literature for that matter, is an inherently lonely enterprise and often alienates you from the people around you. As an artist, you are always on the fringes, on the outside; you rarely participate in all that is considered a “full life.” Many of these concerns are topics for Nila’s conversations with Marlowe, and they’re questions I grapple with on a daily basis. But I also know that the best art comes out of experience—that you need to delve fully into life in order to render it into art.
BA: Nila recalls, “The spring after I turned twelve, I jumped out of my grandmother’s second-floor apartment and into a row of bushes because she reprimanded me about wearing a miniskirt that revealed my vanilla-colored underwear.”
All of Nila’s actions are big in dichotomy to her time spent ruminating in her room during periods of punishment. Reading Good Girl, I was reminded of those private moments of pain, the emotional growth that comes from spending time alone.
Do you think isolation is necessary for a writer? What is your writing life like, and do you mirror Nila at all with her periods of solitude and bouts of expression?
AA: This is related to your last question, and I think the answer is yes. Writing is a solitary act and for me it takes periods of intense solitude in order to compose something worthwhile. My own writing life has changed over the years. For many years, I used to be a very private person, who rarely went out, but I have developed a healthier approach to writing. I love going for dinner, going to parties, and hanging out with friends, with whom I can exchange ideas but also just talk shit. But when I do have a project that I’m working on, it’s the most exciting thing—I almost automatically prefer to be at home with my work, rather than out and about. I work best at night, when my husband has gone to bed, and I can focus on the document in front of me. But once I’m in the “flow state” I can write anywhere. I also take a lot of inspiration from being on the road, either on the train, on a plane, or on a long walk.
BA: “The world spins. We send rockets into space, robots that take pictures of planets we have never been to. We write down the law, we amend it, and we define who is good, who bad. Documents are classified, hidden for years. Exile. War. Terrorism…And then, as always, there is loneliness. A loneliness as old as your childhood.”
Good Girl’s dynamic construction allows for straightforward narrative blended with memory and image and poetics and a free-range notion of time. The book straddles Nila’s very present and poignant self-discovery with the broader issues of our world and current times.
What was your editing process like here in terms of how to balance the two: Nila’s singular experience as a fulcrum for the story and the whole world and its tumultuous existence?
AA: Good Girl is primarily a book about displacement. As a character who grew up in exile, Nila’s sense of linearity and time is forever upended. There are many lacunae that she doesn’t have access to in the lives of her parents and her larger extended family. The past always overshadows the present, and she feels tethered to an unknown history in the ruins. It’s almost impossible to see yourself as “apolitical” if your positionality within society is politicized or disenfranchised, and Nila’s refusal to accept this condition is what leads to the fracture of her subjecthood and her lies. So it was always important to me to situate the narrative within a larger context, because she can only gain a full sense of self when she sees herself as part of a group. I think the two are inextricably linked—her self-acceptance is bound to her political awakening, even if that process is not fully fleshed out in the novel. So that part of the narrative was always there. During the revision and editing process, the questions that presented themselves were about where and how to incorporate the chapters about her childhood and other family members such as her cousins and aunts. I wrote many of them after I had already drafted the main story, and it was both exciting and challenging to find a cohesive arc for those.
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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 serves as the poetry editor of Amulet, as a contributing editor at The Yale Review, and works as an assistant professor of Creative Writing at the University of Vermont. Aber divides her time between Vermont and Brooklyn. Her first novel is called GOOD GIRL (Hogarth/Bloomsbury) and is being translated into German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, and Japanese.
