Behind the Essay: Aria Aber
On negative capability, the distance between fiction and fact, and joy in the midst of grief
In our Spring 2026 Issue, which is available online and in print now, Aria Aber writes about the Berlin club scene of her twenties and asks what remains when the party ends. Aber, whose debut novel, Good Girl, immerses readers in a fictionalized version of those nocturnal worlds, here turns to nonfiction to trace how clubbing and political awakening once felt inseparable—and to reckon with what that knowledge looks like when the underground gives way to an “experience economy.” We spoke with her about the challenges of writing about drugs, the distance between fiction and fact, and what a real party might still look like.
—The Editors
The Yale Review: The club, as you describe it, is a place where sense is overpowered by sensation. “I could feel my notions coming undone in agitation,” you write. “I can’t remember what those notions were, or what replaced them. That isn’t the point.” What were the challenges of writing about experiences that, in a fundamental way, seem to defy language and narrative?
Aria Aber: Drugs, like dreams, are notoriously difficult to write about because they resist linearity and often lack appropriate physical references, both of which we expect from clear and “good” prose. Just last week a student of mine said that they usually hate “writing about drugs.” I think this is a common reaction. When I had started writing the first few sentences of my novel Good Girl, which is full of club scenes and descriptions of altered states of consciousness, a colleague of mine said, “No one wants to read about being high, Aria.” We were sitting on a picnic blanket near a lake and nibbling on cheese. I remember this because I made a pact with myself at that moment. How much would it take, I wondered, to prove her wrong? Apart from the fact that I don’t enjoy prescriptive advice, I didn’t agree at all, and I took it as a creative challenge.
Needless to say, I love writing about dreams and drugs. I love Denis Johnson, for example, whose prose is lyrical and gritty at the same time. I will never forget reading him for the first time and being flabbergasted that he had portrayed an acid trip so well. I will never forget these sentences: “I knew every raindrop by its name. I sensed everything before it happened.” I love Ottessa Moshfegh, Michael Clune, and Hunter S. Thompson. And I love the mystics, who put into language transcendental experiences that might also defy clear narrative. I guess you have to trust yourself and your own weirdness in order to pull it off. To inhabit an altered, fractured, and mystical space on a sentence level requires a kind of playfulness, and a willingness to acknowledge the unsayable. To admit and embrace uncertainty, to resist and destabilize epiphany, all of which is probably related to Keats’s idea of negative capability.
Your debut novel, Good Girl, takes place in part at the club. What are the particular pleasures—or pitfalls—of fictionalizing a party? In turning to nonfiction, was there anything that surprised you about writing similar scenes in a different genre?
Fictionalizing the party scene was actually quite fun. There’s a ritualistic or almost preparatory nature to the way my protagonist, Nila, and her friends approach clubbing. There’s a set of unspoken customs to which they adhere during their pregaming and inside the club and at their after-parties, even though they purport to live in a lawless world of pure hedonism and libidinal impulses. It was a challenge to place scenes of conflict and action into these settings, but that was also a natural outcome of the narrative. After all, I didn’t want to write about just one particular, transformative club experience; I wanted to illuminate the world of a group of characters who live a big chunk of their lives at the party. They eat, drink, play, get high, dance, make love, break up, get together, fight, bond—and even brush their teeth—there.
It was much harder to embody these spaces in nonfiction, mainly because I don’t trust my own memory—it was so long ago, after all—and because I didn’t want to expose the lives of friends and acquaintances. But I also had trouble identifying what exactly my argument was: What was I trying to say about clubbing? How did the crowds at the rave resemble the crowds at a protest? How did the worlds of activism and clubbing compare, contrast, and diverge? Things that you can outline subtly in a novel you have to engineer into an argument in nonfiction. I’m much better suited for the fictional mode, I think!
You write that you haven’t been to a real party in over a decade—and the essay suggests that’s at least partly by choice. But with our “experience economy,” is a genuinely good party even possible to find these days? What would it need to look like?
I’m not sure, to be honest; I don’t think I’m in the mood for “a real clubbing experience” while the world is burning. It would just be escapism at this point, which isn’t necessarily bad. It’s important to have fun, to gain perspective, to have energy to do the real work, and so on. The DJ Sama’ Abdulhadi said that the dance floor is the only place where she doesn’t feel Palestinian. I think it’s important to acknowledge it for what it is. But it took me a long time to let go of my ideological conception of the party as this place where political awakening could be achieved and activism could be born, or at least enhanced, in a meaningful way. I guess the party, to me, was an extension of art making—and art is always so closely connected to politics in my mind. The question of how art and politics relate is something I will be thinking about for the rest of my life. But I am less rigid in my demands from a party these days, which naturally stems from the fact that I’ve distanced myself from that world to some extent.
However, I remember being in Palestine for a bit last November with a couple of friends and on my last night they took me to a bar in Ramallah. We were seated in the back of a private room for the goodbye party of an acquaintance. It was a group of many women and a few men. People were drinking and singing; one person played the tabla, another one the oud. I learned that the group of friends were activists, that they had been in prison together. The whole scene was very charged and moving to me. It wasn’t a rave, of course, but a much more intimate gathering. I felt oddly at home there, in a room with mostly strangers. Something about their connection, their liveliness, their insistence on joy in the midst of grief made me understand my own humanity. There it was, the essence of the real party: a reminder that you are alive, that you are in community with others, and that you are all going to die.
What’s a popular piece of writing advice you don’t agree with? What’s a piece of advice that you stand by?
I guess I don’t agree with the advice I outlined earlier—that no one wants to read about being high. But I also generally don’t react positively to prescriptions about art making. When I was younger, I would get enraged when writers I admired came up with strange writing rules I didn’t agree with. At a master class many years ago, a famous poet said that “the first line of the poem is the most important part.” I took it way too seriously and thought about how wrong this was for weeks on end. After a while, I understood that these types of rules are not to be regarded as commandments carved into stone but as fluid suggestions, little helpers that you can dance with or riot against. It’s up to you what you make of the rules. Reading widely is the key, a writer’s education. Restraint is important, I think. Form is important and should be, in some way, reflective of the content. I believe that verbs are kinetic, that syntax is the way the mind thinks, and that concrete and sensory details are what makes writing extraordinary. The most difficult and important aspect of writing is that you have to trust your intuition and sound like yourself. I read so much derivative work, so many people who try to sound like Louise Glück or Rachel Cusk or Garth Greenwell, and while all these masters have much to teach us, I want to read what you sound like.
“Night Knowledge” appears in our Spring 2026 Issue, which is available online and in print now.
