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If you asked me to share my favorite kind of book, my brain might, if it could ever decide, circle and land on prose by poets. So, when news reached my starry eyes of a debut novel from Aria Aber, the author of Hard Damage, I pounced on the preorder button. In a party of boxes, it arrived. I read it every chance that arose, running out of sticky flags multiple times.
Good Girl by Aria Aber
Back in Berlin, after graduating from a prestigious boarding school in Rosenwald, Nilab Haddadi, Nila, turns 19. Born to Afghan refugees from Kabul, Nila shares a two-bedroom apartment with her father and leggy creatures, including beetles and silverfish. While clubbing at the “Bunker,” she meets Marlowe Woods, a writer twice her age who pulls Nila into his fold. Between nights steeped in techno, drugs, sex, and deep conversations, Nila attends sporadic university classes as an art history and philosophy student, serves beer and burgers at a jazz café, and takes pictures. As a violent string of murders tracing back years continues to erupt across Germany, she keeps her identity, home, family, and given name a secret from her friends, new and old.
Delving into longing, motherloss, shame, memory, and rebellion, this coming-of-age story charts the growth of a young artist. We learn about Nila’s origins as a photographer, “I had started shooting at fourteen, already obsessed with documenting my life. To take a picture was a way to control the narrative, to frame only what you wanted to see.” We witness the artists and works Nila adores: Nan Goldin, Roland Barthes, The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides, Virginia Woolf, Sally Mann. We’re privy to the Goethe quote in gold that adorns her bedroom in Gropiusstadt and her dorm room door, “I couldn’t paint now, not a single stroke, yet I’ve never been a bigger painter than in this moment.”
While listening and relistening to this gripping novel, I became fascinated with interiors and exteriors, armor and intimacy, how characters desire to be seen and them yearning to be seen as they are. The protagonist, a habitual liar, is taken with appearances, “When I slept, I dreamed of untreated wood and high ceilings, of style.” Nila observes the homes of others with hungry attentiveness: the white ladder leading to Marlowe’s bedroom and his apartment’s crown molding, her first love Setareh’s embroidered daisy sheets and blue bowl turned ashtray, her friend Doreen’s Kafka poster and book stacks and chair piled with clothes.
If you’ve ever felt lonely in a crowded room or lonely among beloveds, befriend this book. If you crave descriptive, lyrical language with palpable tension, reach for this work, which joins the amazing company of outstanding novels by poets: Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, Promise by Rachel Eliza Griffiths, and When We Were Sisters by Fatimah Asghar. Let me end with an irresistible sentence that I hope catapults you into the pages of this work: “I had been lifted out of the low-income district of hopelessness and sent to one of the best schools in the country, and yet here I was, my mother was dead, soon the city would be covered in snow again, and I was ravaged by the hunger to ruin my life.”
For more book recommendations, check out our Read This Book archives.