Aria Aber Was Born to a Refugee Family and (Partially) Raised in the Club. Both Shaped Her Debut Novel.
An interview with the German-born Afghan writer, who reflects on her new book, her relationship with dance music and life as an outsider among outsiders.
Dance music is drowning in books right now. For all the (frankly justified) worries about the collapse of music journalism and the effect that’s having on the genre’s attendant culture, those who do wish to really dig in and read something substantial have never before had so many options at their disposal. Artist biographies, scene histories, essay collections, genre-focused deep dives … it seems like a significant new title about dance music or club culture hits the shelves every few months.
Most of those titles, however, center their stories in the words, deeds and memories of club culture’s most active and influential participants: artists, label heads, club owners, promoters and other industry types. That’s fine of course, and makes sense within the context of constructing a historical narrative. But the story of dance music is so much more than who’s in the DJ booth and throwing the parties, and the one thing that many of these books leave out is something that’s absolutely foundational to the culture: the lived experience of the people on the dancefloor.
Good Girl, the debut novel from writer and poet Aria Aber, bucks that trend, and her willingness to devote much of the narrative to what it’s actually like to be at the club is just one of the reasons the book is such a compelling read. Set in Berlin during the early 2010s—and yes, a club that’s very similar to Berghain is involved—Good Girl features many, many long nights (and days) filled with partying, drugs and sketchy encounters, yet there’s much more than mindless hedonism on offer. Aber, the child of Afghan refugees and someone who was born and raised in Germany, draws on her own experiences, not just as a former club kid, but as someone who constantly felt like an outsider, both in the music scene and within her own immigrant community.
Although Good Girl is not a memoir or a cleverly disguised autobiography, the world occupied by its main character, a young Afghan woman named Nila, feels profoundly real, particularly for anyone who experienced Berlin during the early-to-mid 2010s. A time when rents were cheap, gentrification hadn’t yet gone into overdrive and getting a job still required actually speaking German, it was arguably the last gasp of the city as a scruffy, underpopulated artist mecca.
Aber—who grew up in Münster, but later spent a gap year heavily ensconced in the Berlin club circuit—clearly feels a certain fondness for that time, but as Good Girl progresses, the book pokes numerous holes in the utopian myths that have long defined dance music. For all of the genre’s talk of diversity and acceptance, its participants are often astonishingly naive and oblivious, both to their own privilege and the realities of the world around them. In the face of that blindness, Nila spends much of Good Girl not only hiding her Afghan heritage from her friends in the club scene, but also hiding the grim realities of her home life. Living in Gropiusstadt, a neighborhood filled with concrete tower blocks and populated with marginalized people from around the globe, she contends with not just the expectations and traditions of her family and community, but also the challenges of poverty, racism and a society in which neo-Nazi violence is becoming increasingly common.
Released in January, Good Girl has been greeted with rave reviews in The New York Times, The Guardian and a number of other prominent outlets, and the book was recently shortlisted for the upcoming 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction. As such, Aber—who currently lives in the US, splitting time between Brooklyn and Vermont, where she works as an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Vermont—has already given a number of interviews in recent months. Yet given the literary bent of the people she was talking to, few of those conversations focused on dance music and club culture, despite their prominent role in the novel.
Perhaps that’s why Aber eagerly agreed to talk to First Floor, and over the course of a long call last weekend, we spoke about her relationship with the club, from her initial party experiences in Münster to her countless nights out in Berlin and her current status as a mostly retired raver. Along the way, she shared how those experiences—and the experience of growing up in Germany as the child of Afghan refugees—shaped the character of Nila and the narrative arc of Good Girl, a book which at its core is the tale of an outsider among outsiders.