JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Many of us have had that one friendship - you know, the one where you get really close really fast and then the real world gets in the way. The friendship falters, and suddenly, it has been a decade since you've even talked. In author Sarvat Hasin's new book "Strange Girls," protagonists Ava and Aliya are those friends to each other.
SARVAT HASIN: Both of them are just sort of defined almost by their similarities as much of their differences. So they're both bookworms and they're both obsessed with novels and writing and storytelling and are very creatively ambitious and want to be part of that world.
SUMMERS: Ava is American. Aliya is Pakistani. They meet in college in London and quickly declare themselves strange girls. When I talked with author Sarvat Hasin about the book, I started by asking her about that phrase and what it means to them.
HASIN: They're 18 when they sort of define themselves as strange girls, and I think they feel like they can't see the models for womanhood. They've been fed an idea of femininity and what their life should be like when they grow up, and it doesn't really resonate, so they feel sort of strange and disconnected from it. I think they're also just very - you know, as any two young, aspiring writers - quite pretentious and determined to set themselves apart from the rest of the world. I don't think what they want necessarily is that strange, but because they don't have examples of people who've lived those lives in front of them, it feels very alienating.
SUMMERS: And in fact, they come to classify all girls - all women, really - as either strange or not strange. I do have to ask - where would you classify yourself?
HASIN: I'm probably not very strange anymore. I think that strangeness is almost sort of defined by both a defiance but also by a desire to be strange. And I think it's sort of difficult as you get older to keep, you know, choosing to make your life in those unconventional decisions. I think also, for me, their sort of strange and not strange came from feeling very much like I was growing up in a popular culture landscape that pitted women against each other, and you were either the sort of, like, cool, alternative person or you were the more traditional feminine person. And there was no space to have aspects of both or no space to be both. It felt like you had to pick a side. And hopefully, I feel like it's not like that as much anymore.
SUMMERS: Yeah. Tell us about where the idea from this story came from. When did you start to think about it?
HASIN: So I started to play with these characters around the time that my last novel, "The Giant Dark," came out, and I was searching for a new idea and these two characters sort of came to me. And actually, the story itself has had many different forms. It was a role-playing game at one point. It was a period piece at another point. The vessel kept changing, but these characters stayed the same. And I think I was really interested in their particular relationship, which is something that is in between a friendship and a romance and incredibly intense and difficult to name and difficult to define.
And I was really interested in what happens to a relationship like that. If you are very close and sort of completely entwined in each other's lives, and the relationship doesn't progress and become something else - if it doesn't change shape but also doesn't lessen in its intensity - what happens to that? Can that intensity sort of, like, toxify?
SUMMERS: It's so interesting because there's this magnetism between these two characters, but there's also this through line of insecurity and envy of the other person. Aliya seems to really worship Ava in school, and she wants her confidence and her talent and her social skills. And then, as they get older, the tables really seem to turn. How do you think that happens?
HASIN: It's so interesting, isn't it? Because I feel like one of the things that's at the core of the book for me is how you can have such similar ambitions and such similar sort of life goals when you're at university because the sort of, like, material shape of your lives and your days are so similar. Like, I think university is this sort of great flattening where everything to do with class and cultural backgrounds and things like that sort of becomes smoothed out a little bit. And it's only when you leave university that all of these other forces start to take control.
And I think that, for me, Ava's journey is very much about, you know, one of care. She is - in the intervening years that we don't see them, she has been looking after her mother, and sometimes she's not been directly her carer, but she's been the person who's responsible for her. And that's really defined her time. And creativity and talent and drive are not the only things that make authors. Writing is something that requires quite a lot of time, and time is very expensive, and the peace that you need to have that time is expensive.
SUMMERS: We see them come together, but there's also the aftermath of a relationship when you have this intimate connection that you've treasured, where it breaks apart or fades, and we experience that in this book too. Talk about what you were hoping to show or illustrate with the distance that grows between them.
HASIN: Yeah. I think that female friendships - and all friendships, actually - when you leave university become very tenuous because when you're young, you have a lot of time to devote to those friendships, and it's very easy for your life to revolve around them. And then it feels like in the intervening years, every decision you make can either bring you closer to or further from your friends. So if you're both single at the same time, there's a sort of bonding in that, and you can continue to keep that intimacy due to that. If you both end up in relationships around the same time and your partners like each other, there's a bonding to have in that. If you have children around the same time, if you choose similar careers, those are ways that you can maintain that intimacy.
But if the opposite happens and you go in different directions, and one of you stays single and the other person gets married, or one of you has children and the other doesn't, or one of you becomes very career-focused and the other person is more focused on travel or something else, those things can really bring you apart. And there's a sense almost in the way we organize our lives where friendships aren't prioritized.
I think in Aliya and Ava's case, because it's so intense and so intimate, there is also this sense of the unspoken between them and this ambiguity that I was really interested in that gives them so much space for misunderstanding because they haven't agreed who they are to each other and they haven't made the rules or the map for what they owe each other. So there's so much space for them to get it wrong and for those expectations to be mismatched. Therefore, there's no sort of script when they're falling apart.
SUMMERS: Yeah.
HASIN: There's no sense of, oh, we were in a relationship. Now we've broken up, and now we're not going to speak for this amount of time. But maybe we're consciously uncoupling and we'll go no contact, and then we'll resume a polite friendship in so many years. There's no space for that because there's no script for the kind of breakup they're having.
SUMMERS: Yeah. It felt like these were two women that simply didn't have the vocabulary for what they were to each other, or if they did, they didn't feel ability to say it out loud. Was that intentional?
HASIN: Yes, definitely. And I think in a funny way, the book's also a period piece, right? Because the university years are set in the early 2010s, and that was a slightly different time for young women and their sexuality...
SUMMERS: Yeah.
HASIN: ...And how comfortable they were expressing certain things and how comfortable they were with those different expressions, I guess. And that was definitely something that I was considering.
SUMMERS: We've been speaking with author Sarvat Hasin. Her new book is "Strange Girls." Thank you so much.
HASIN: Thank you.
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