Good Girl

Aria Aber was born and raised in Germany and currently lives in Los Angeles. Her debut poetry collection, Hard Damage, won the Prairie Schooner Prize. She is a former Stegner Fellow and Whiting Award recipient, and her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, New Republic, The Yale Review, Narrative, and POETRY. She will join the faculty of the University of Vermont in September, 2024.

Good Girl dives heart-first into one of the art s great crises: that the great searing ecstasies of youth should form us before we have the psychospiritual maturity to articulate them. Usually writing this good is realized through a gauzy patina of recollection, but in Good Girl the bass beat is still full in your chest, the coke drip s still a numbing bitter in your throat. Aber s ear is so remarkably good you hardly even notice she s building this great symphony of textures, mosaics within mosaics. Kaveh Akbar, New York Times bestselling author of Martyr!

In Good Girl, pleasure is textured, surprising, and treated with utter seriousness. Raven Leilani, New York Times bestselling author of Luster

A novel of longing and tenderness, a piercing Künstlerroman that understands home as a heartbeat and a heartache, writing into the ache and daily metronome of exile. It s a love song and a torch song for Berlin like an ode to a body full of chronic pain, this is me and it also hurts me. I disappeared into the many overlapping and colliding worlds of this book and emerged with a glistening, vibrating, beautifully exhausted heart newly alive to the complexities of love and family and becoming ourselves. I loved this book. Leslie Jamison, New York Times bestselling author of Splinters

Aria Aber s Good Girl is a novel of overwhelming and conflicted love for persons, for histories, for artistic creation, for Berlin. Rarely has the wildness and bewilderment of youth been conveyed with such richly textured heat. Garth Greenwell, award-winning author of Cleanness

Good Girl charts with more precision and poetry than any novel I know the heavy inheritance that children of immigrants carry. Stunning, suspenseful, boldly defiant, and masterfully crafted, I only put this novel down to marvel at its prose. Aria Aber s debut novel achieves the impossible task of making whole a life split between expectation and self-fulfillment,