“I understand now”: Aria Aber’s Good Girl and Maternal Recognition

A Review of Aria Aber’s Good Girl (Hogarth 2025)

“I wanted to take pictures, I thought, because exile made my parents’ lives a mystery to me. I wanted to archive my life, to have irrefutable testimony,” says Nila, the protagonist of Aria Aber’s debut novel, Good Girl.

Good Girl tracks the artistic coming-of-age of Nila, the daughter of Afghan refugees, as she comes into her own, both as an Afghan woman and as a photographer. Nineteen and just back from bilingual boarding school, which she attended on a scholarship, Nila, in the late 2000s in Berlin, spends her time leading a secret life unknown to her family in Berlin’s underground techno and clubbing scene, frequenting a nightclub she refers to as “the Bunker.” Between the social expectations of her Afghan family and community to be a “good daughter” and her own desires to move beyond the limiting boundaries drawn around her, Nila engages with a shifting cast of wealthier friends and acquaintances in the Bunker, including the charismatic but washed-up American writer Marlowe Woods. Through these acquaintances and spaces, Berlin unfolds to Nila in varied ways as she spends time with her wealthier friends from school, as well as with Marlowe and other friends from Berlin’s nightlife scene. The brutalist architecture of her home—shared with her widowed father and a space that constantly carries echoes of her mother—remains a looming, ever-haunting force as Nila tries to exit its orbit. A Künstlerroman in four parts, Good Girl examines what it means to make a life in the shadow of war and exile, what is at stake in the quest to know one’s origins, and how to escape the perpetually haunting history of a place.

Nila’s impulse to photograph—to capture what is present, to make it tangible instead of ephemeral—arises out of a desire to document what is most unknowable to her, her parent’s exile, and this becomes the driving force of the narrative. Early in the novel, after her mother is already dead, Nila returns home, walks into her parents’ room, and sleeps in their bed, her face covered with a cashmere dress that belonged to her mother. This object, which once clothed and dressed her mother, captures the suffocating quality of the grief that is central to the novel; it is the transitional object that allows Nila’s return to her home, both physically and mentally, as she moves through the world, untethered after her mother’s passing. The absent mother, thus, becomes the central presence in Nila’s life, even if the protagonist herself might insist otherwise.

Just as her mother’s passing suffocates, Berlin too suffocates, and Nila, though certainly an agent in her own life, is also subject to the larger histories of Berlin—the city as well as the histories of German envelop her. Early in the novel, Nila says of Berlin: “The ghosts of the East were still present between the buildings, shadows filtering through every snow-covered crack” (6). Past and present converge in Berlin, just as they do in her parents’ lives, always mediated for Nila by exile. Of Nila’s experience of Berlin, Aber writes, “But I could’ve said this: Berlin is onerous. The city is particular and historical and shattering. And I was born inside its ghetto-heart, as a small, wide-eyed rat, in the months after reunification.” Berlin is, for Nila, a place where she is always attuned to the historical currents that have brought her here—not just her and her immediate family, but also her larger community of Afghan refugees, displaced by the West’s imperial project.

Limited by geography and yet yearning to always leave (for New York, and for London as a stepping stone to the US), Nila escapes the ghosts of her past in Berlin’s clubbing scene, lying about her identity—claiming Greece or Colombia or Israel rather than her own ancestral land. Constantly distancing herself from Afghanistan, Nila lives on the precipice, her identity ready to unravel, afraid to reveal her history in spaces that harbor increasing anti-immigrant sentiment. One night, on a rooftop Nila looks outward over Berlin, a city she has never seen from this vantage point before, inaccessible in her everyday life. Of the sight, she says, “I had never seen Berlin like this. Melancholy overcame me; I was from here, and not once had I stood on a rooftop of this caliber. Neither had my aunts or uncles or parents. My dead mother.” Nila’s melancholy here is for the past—the foreclosure for her mother of such a commanding view—but also for the awareness of the future she has stepped into, a form of mobility accessible to her but not to her parents. In Aber’s sharp, vivid images of Berlin, multiple geographies and temporalities converge, becoming one in Nila’s experience of the city.

As Nila understands her, her mother is a woman who Kabul belongs to and who belongs to Kabul. For the daughter, a fundamental tension—wanting to not be Afghan and yet yearning for her mother—shapes her artistic journey, as Nila thinks through the work of photography and documents contemporary Berlin. Early on, she describes a club: “Photographs and mirrors were not permitted in these establishments, rendering my desire for representation obsolete. And yet, images reigned: The first time I came here, I saw a man in a safari hat with a toothbrush.” Berlin’s underground, where Nila claims geographies that are not hers, is a space where Nila can escape the sense of reflection and alienation that peeks at her elsewhere. As someone who often works in self-portraits, the absence of both mirrors and photography help Nila escape herself, her past, and her identity, while the vivid images in these spaces refine how she reads the world through images. Even as photography and mirrors are impossible in these spaces, Nila can see anew Berlin through image.

Nila’s first acquaintance with Marlowe comes through a photograph—she sees him, but it is a photograph in a magazine she has seen of him in the past that becomes the lens through which she sees him in real life. Of that image, Nila comments, “Though I couldn’t remember the details, I’d never forgotten his face in that glamorous photograph. Windswept and serious, a cigarette between his lips. The picture alone had exercised a strange pull on me, his blue eyes pierced the page with intelligence.” The photograph—in this moment, articulated as glamorous—becomes the mediating object between Marlowe and Nila; she is drawn to him not only by his charismatic nature in real life, but by the magnetism of the photograph, and by the vision and possibility of Marlowe it articulates. Later in the novel, Nila says of him, “I was always trying to imagine the young Marlowe, on his mythical California ranch.” Marlowe compels Nila not just as a person with whom, along with drugs and sex, she might escape the everyday of her life in Berlin, but also as a symbol of possibility through whom she might escape the histories Berlin carries—not just its own, but the transposed histories of her parents and family too, the global histories of war and migration that are part of the larger history of the city. California, represented by Marlowe, is also the landscape of Nila’s father’s desires, the United States’ farthest frontier. For Nila, thus, California represents a shift from the limits of Berlin to the possibility of the global, the possibility of reinvention, yet, ultimately, the impossibility of escaping history.  

Nila’s first meeting with Marlowe is driven by a moment of recognition: the man she sees is the one from a photo that has stayed with her ever since she first saw it. Recognition, in this sense, plays a vital role in how Good Girl captures the urgency and legacy of wars and history, even as its narrative time moves linearly, onward and propulsive. On the first night Nila spends with Marlowe, she notes his use of a Minolta—the same brand of camera her father uses; this moment of convergence, of Marlowe and Nila’s heritage, becomes the first of many moments through which Nila finally recognizes herself as she comes into her own as a photographer.

Central to Nila’s coming-of-age and work as a photographer is her slow recognition of her mother’s story, seeing her as not just her mother but as Anahita, a woman who was a doctor in Kabul, a political prisoner, who had lived a vivid, full life before she became Nila’s mother. Imagining her and her desires, Nila says of Anahita: “She wanted to love life, this ambitious woman, to be a doctor again, to have a house.” There is a desire for materiality that permeates Nila’s memories of her mother—her mother’s hopes are material, of course, but in addition to this,  the desire for something tangible, something that makes memory real, is something that passes from Anahita to Nila, that echoes across generations, that is, as Nila articulates, what shapes her desire towards photography as her medium of choice, the concreteness with which it takes on archival value. Kabul is no longer materially present, lost in time and history, and so Berlin at least must be made material.

Nila’s desire to escape takes as its form, not just her relationship with Marlowe, but also in her applications to universities in London—institutions imagined as safe spaces where Nila might become a photographer, away from Berlin and its echoes of Kabul. As part of her applications, Nila compiles self-portraits alongside photos of both her mother and Marlowe; photographs of Anahita and Marlowe become windows into the articulation of her own desires. Nila says of her vocational trajectory: “I had started shooting at fourteen, already obsessed with documenting my life. To take a picture was to control the narrative, to frame only what you wanted to see. I despised the austere flatness of early point-and-shoot digital photography, yearning for the texture and rigor of 35 mm film.” Here Nila articulates the twin impulses that photography contains for her—it is a tangible object writing against the intangibility of exile, but also an abstract means of narrativization: the photograph is the object through which she might recognize her own life, her own history. The photograph, for Nila, becomes the precipitating object of recognition, the catalyst through which she might read herself and others.

The pictures she has taken, Nila notes, are most often of her mother: “My other favorite picture is of my mother: She sits on a rounded chair, looking up at herself in the gold-rimmed mirror in my grandmother’s bedroom. The large eyes are full of shock, her hair, long and curled, lips a vermilion red.” Here, even in the lack of physical description of her mother, we see at work the kind of sharp insight that comes through in the moment—not of something that is present, but what it allows Nila to understand about her own mother. Later, Nila says of a photograph she took of herself with her mother, a few weeks before she passed: “What chills me now is not the aura of sickness, knowing that she would unexpectedly die a few weeks later, not the scalloped, outdated curtains in the background, but that neither of us looks at the other. The photograph is two self-portraits melded into one.” Nila and her mother here are at odds, and the photograph is the means through which Nila, for the first time perhaps, and in retrospect only, can recognize Anahita as a self, someone truly distinct from her.

This retrospective view is where Nila most explicitly articulates her grief at her mother’s passing: the narrativizing voice of Nila emerges from an ambiguous future, seeping through the cracks of language and time and place. As Nila herself puts it,

This moment imagines the most important recognition in Nila’s life, her recognition of Anahita, yet it is also an impossible moment. Nila constantly seeks this suspended and fictive moment, the possibility of Anahita herself seeing that Nila can recognize here. In some sense, its speculative possibility becomes the center of Nila’s life.

Of her work as a photographer, Nila comments, “Later, when I took pictures of her, or of other people, I believe I was trying to create a carbon copy of this scene: a woman with an unknowable loss marking her eyes.” This recognition, of Nila’s awareness of her own creation myth as a photographer, with the centrality of her mother to her own artistic project, marks the moment where Nila’s journey pivots into an awareness of selfhood. Nila is no longer only the actor of recognition—she becomes equally the subject who is recognized.

Aber shifts, in the last third of the novel, from Anahita to Nila herself. Nila and Marlowe take a cab one night; the driver turns out to Nila’s uncle, catalyzing a moment of recognition where Nila must be honest about her identity as an Afghan woman to Marlowe and to her friends. In this moment, Nila comes into her own, both as a photographer and as an Afghan woman. Nila, here, sees her friend Eli anew too—recognizing their shared histories of refuge, Eli’s family from Kosovo, Nila’s from Afghanistan. Whether it lasts or not, Nila’s history is seen by Eli and understood. She says of this recognition: “But maybe it was enough: I had been seen, once, in this life. Someone across the room had said my name and pronounced it the way my mother pronounced it”. This final moment of recognition in Berlin, by someone else who similarly belongs and does not belong to Berlin is what makes it possible for Nila to leave, to move westward to London. Her mother’s recognition, her recognition of her mother, is impossible, but Eli, with his own similar history becomes a stand-in for such recognition of Nila’s selfhood.

As the novel ends, Nila’s father tells her that her mother named her Nilab—the name she has so far always shortened into the more ambiguous Nila—after the river in Kabul. Her name, like Anahita herself, tethers Nila to Afghanistan; it becomes an everyday reminder of who she is and who she might become. Anahita is gone, though she exists still, suspended in time through photography. Through its focus on maternal recognition, Good Girl’s articulation of Nila’s coming-of-age as an artist becomes a documentation of the possibility inherent in art. Art makes concrete and coherent the inherent impossibilities and paradoxes of exile, the perpetual hauntings of war. In Aber’s lyrical prose, Good Girl captures that prolonged moment just before departure; its sharp, lyric prose articulates the impossibility of escaping history, and its precise, careful documentation of Nila’s new, burgeoning selfhood is a reminder of the echoes of the past as well as an indication of what it might mean to read oneself anew in the world.

VIKA MUJUMDAR was born in New Jersey and raised in Pune, India. She holds an MA in Comparative Literature from UMass Amherst, where she is currently an MFA student in Fiction. Her work has appeared in Public Books, the Cleveland Review of Books, Full Stop, and elsewhere. She edits Liminal Transit Review.