Are You A Good Girl?

Aria Aber taps into Berlin’s party scene in her coming-of-age novel Good Girl.

While writing Good Girl, Aria Aber started smoking cigarettes again.

For the last decade, Aber, who was raised in Germany, has wanted to write a novel about a Berlin party girl who descends into darkness. And after the release of her debut poetry book Hard Damage, the writer found herself, for the first time, with nothing to do and some financial security. So she moved back to Berlin and rented an apartment in a neighborhood she used to know and would take long walks every day, ripping cigs and listening to old techno sets and putting herself back in the mindset of a 19-year-old club kid.

“[Berlin] was just so deserted and it felt almost apocalyptic, but I also felt as though I was walking on a blank page and I could fill it in with all of my thoughts and memories,” Aber tells Language Arts. “I felt inundated with memories of what my life was like a decade prior when I was very young.”

She worked on the book for two years, which would eventually become Good Girl, a coming-of-age novel set in 2010 following 19-year-old Nila, a Berlin club kid born to Afghan refugee parents, whose life is upended when she meets Marlowe, an older American writer whose dominance morphs from pleasure to pain. Nila, a Cindy Sherman-obsessed aspiring photographer who lives in a public housing complex with her father is indulgent, self-sabotaging, and starving for experience — whether it’s drugs or the addictive pull of a sometimes-violent lover. She is young, in the best and worst ways, but her longing is a life force. Nila’s life shares the same undercurrent of the club’s self-destructive underbelly, in which state-sanctioned, familial, and romantic violence keep her contained in a claustrophobic prism of pain. It’s a stunning and nuanced story about violence, self-embodiment, and freedom.

Below, Language Arts spoke with Aber about the urgency of writing a young character, what makes a truly good nightlife scene, and readers’ fascination with novels by poets.

What was it like to be in Berlin and revisit this Rolodex of memories you had as a young person? How did you go about embodying that voice? I would imagine that there's a bit of defamiliarizing that you had to do because it’s a place that you know well.

100%. On the one hand, I was rushing to finish the novel because I knew that I was growing older and more estranged from the consciousness of a young person. I hope that as a writer I will never not be able to inhabit someone else's consciousness, especially if it is a character who's similar to my own demographics, even though they vary in age. That is the capacity of an imagination. But at the same time, everything felt very urgent and fleeting, probably because I knew that I wouldn't stay in Berlin for very long. I had to move back to California at the end of the year to start a fellowship.

I think even though I had dreamt of writing this book for so long, that was the right time. My poetry book had just been published; I had nothing to do. I had a little bit of financial security for the first time in my life so I could focus just on writing for a couple of months. Oddly enough, the political upheaval that was happening that summer with the summer of [George] Floyd and right wing terrorism in Germany earlier that year, all bled into the book. It materialized as the [narrator] having somewhat of a political awakening very late in the novel. Even though I was writing about a different time in 2010, the contemporary world still made its way into the book. It's not really a pandemic book, but it is a book about something grander than yourself changing and understanding yourself as part of a collective.

There is this undercurrent of violence in the book. Nila is witnessing Turkish shop owners being bombed and making sure they’re not forgotten.

In some ways, neo-Nazi violence frames the entire narrative. It's almost trapping Nila’s coming of age in a snow globe where she can't escape the politics around her and the society around her, even though she wants to. I try to keep it a little bit in the background because even though she's constantly aware of it and and understands that most others are being dismissive about that type of violence, she still pushes it far away from her because she's lying about where she's from. She also has this illusion that she might make a life as a different kind of person who's not affected by these things. I think it would break a part of her to accept the fact that she's vulnerable to the same type of violence and also accept the compassion that those are her people.

She thinks that if she goes to London and becomes a photographer the violence her family has experienced and she's seeing around her isn’t going to affect her, even though it is affecting her constantly.

I was really interested in thinking about violence and how it manifests in a macroscopic way through nation states that create war or organized crime, like the neo-Nazis, and then also on a more microscopic level.

“I'm not really answering any questions in the novel, but rather asking, where does violence come from?”

On the one hand, in this domestic setting of familial violence where it's a language of discipline and something that's inherited from tradition, like from generation to generation, and then, romantic violence, which can be erotic and voluntary in nature, which happens between Marlowe and Nila in the beginning, but then also morphs into this other kind of domestic violence that she’s used to at home. I'm not really answering any questions in the novel, but rather asking, where does violence come from? Why do certain communities who are really disenfranchised and have experienced state-sanctioned violence or abject poverty use violence to express themselves in other ways? All the small acts have an origin — where is it coming from?

I want to switch gears and talk about how you write about the club. Nightlife scenes can be very self-serving, like, you're trying to convince the reader that you’re cool. You write about Nila at the Bunker in a really straightforward and unsentimental way that really accurately depicts nightlife. How did you approach writing those scenes?

I think it's incredibly hard to do and it took me a while, and that was actually part of the lifestyle that I was the furthest removed from. I hadn’t set foot in a club like that, or Berghain, which is the inspiration for the Bunker, since 2015. I have a lot of very fond memories of that place. I don't really want to re-inhabit that place physically.

I was trying to find examples in literature because I really didn't know how to write a club scene. I couldn't find examples that felt authentic to the kind of experience that I wanted to bring across on the page, which was one of absolute hedonism that is not beautiful or subtle. They might not be junkies yet, but they very well could become junkies. I remember when I was at that age and partying, it took me a long time to realize that the majority of the people that I was surrounding myself with had an actual substance abuse problem and that we weren't just having fun. I wanted to bring that darkness into it without making it an addiction narrative, because that's a different kind of book. I needed to find a middle space.

“They might not be junkies yet, but they very well could become junkies.”

I ended up getting more inspiration and visual texture from films, helped with thinking about light and darkness. I would listen to the techno sets that I remembered from that time for hours and try to re-inhabit the world. I tried to jog my memory in this really visceral way, and I started smoking cigarettes again, which I was doing at the time, which is not good because now I'm addicted to cigarettes again.

Aria’s Nightlife Film List

• Party Monster (also the book on which it is based: Disco Bloodbath), which I was obsessed with as a teen)

• Magnolia

• Goodfellas

• Party Girl

• Almost Famous

• Enter the Void

• The Great Beauty

Readers are really fascinated with novels by poets. What do you think it is about a poet's approach to a novel that is so captivating?

I think it's interesting that more poets are writing novels than novelists are writing poems. I also think that the categorization of writers into one fixed genre is something that is fairly new. If you look at the last 500 or whatever years of publishing across the globe, most writers wrote in more than one genre, and a lot of great novelists started as poets. I don't know why not everyone chooses to go down that route, but it's probably easier to write a novel as a poet than the other way around because poets study the sentence and the granularity of language. Poetry might be a little harder to understand when you come from linearity. But everything else in our lives when we encounter texts, except for music lyrics, is in prose. We live in a world of prose. Poetry is harder to master, maybe. For me personally, I think I was always drawn to narrative. I would say I have actually a more novelistic disposition than a poetic one.

This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.