Sarvat Hasin's new novel is about a magnetic friendship between 'Strange Girls'

Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day.

I'm Tinby D'Aremis, filling in for Andrew Limbong.

A good friendship can transform your life.

That's certainly been the case for me, and it was especially true when I was in college.

There's this intense intimacy that comes from living in close quarters with your favorite

people, you know, figuring out classes and parties and crossing that threshold into adulthood.

But what happens when you graduate?

Life takes over, and the nature of that life-altering friendship changes.

Strange girls by Sarvat has seen it takes on this topic.

She spoke about it with all things considered host Wana Summers.

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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 Haasin's new book Strange Girls, Protagonist Eva and Alia are those friends

to each other.

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.

Eva is American.

Alia is Pakistani.

They meet in college in London and quickly declare themselves Strange Girls.

When I talked with author Sarvat Haasin about the book, I started by asking her about that

phrase and what it means to them.

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 to 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.

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?

I'm probably not very strange anymore.

I think the Strangeness is almost sort of defined by both the defines, 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, the no space to be both

if not like you're to pick a side.

And hopefully I feel like it's not like that as much anymore.

Yeah.

Tell us about where the idea from the story came from.

When did you start to think about it?

So I started to play with these characters around the time that my last novel, The Joint

Dog, came out and I was starting 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 your 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 becomes something else.

It doesn't change shape, but also doesn't lessen its intensity.

What happens to that?

Can that intensity sort of like toxify?

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.

Alia seems to really worship Eva 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?

It's so interesting, isn't it, because I feel like one of the things that 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 there's sort of like material shape of your lives and

your days are so similar.

Like I think universities, they're sort of great flattening where everything to do with

class and cultural backgrounds and things like that sort of becomes smooth 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, Eva Strani 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 piece that you need to have that time is expensive.

We see them come together, but there's also the aftermath for 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.

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 evolve 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 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 stay single

and the other person gets married or one of you as 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 organise our lives where friendships aren't prioritised.

I think in any of an obvious 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, 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.

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 the ability to say it out loud.

Was that intentional?

Yes, definitely.

I think in a funny way, the book's also a period of peace, right, because the university

is a set in the early 2010s and that was a slightly different time for young women and

their sexuality 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.

We've been speaking with author Sarvat and I'll see you in her new book is Strange Girls.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

This message comes from Bayer.

Science is a rigorous process that requires questions, testing, transparency, and results

that can be proven.

This approach is integral to every breakthrough they are brings forward, innovations that

save lives and feed the world, sciencedelivers.com.

This message comes from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, recognizing extraordinarily

creative individuals whose ideas, solutions, and discoveries expand people's expectations

of what's possible, macfound.org.

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