Sarvit Hasin’s debut novel Strange Girls wades into the murky waters of a long time friendship gone sour. The novel is narrated by Ava, a young writer who’s traveled to London to reunite with her long estranged university friend Aliya for a friend’s bachelorette party. Ava and Aliya met as bookish and offbeat girls at university—they initially bond over their shared literary ambitions, sharing stories breathlessly online before beginning an intense and consuming friendship. The novel switches back and forth between their younger days, and the current moment as Ava stays with Aliya and her husband for a weekend in London.
The reason for the distance between the two women is not immediately explained: but it’s clear that Ava feels dismayed by Aliya’s more traditional marriage and lifestyle as it seems like a rejection of their shared commitment to being artistic outsiders. But she’s even more disturbed that Aliya has achieved a feat that has escaped her: getting her debut novel published. But not only is her novel being published, as Ava understands it’s an honest exploration of their friendship, which feels like a real betrayal of her privacy. Ava is consumed by jealousy and anger at the changes she witnesses in her friend—and its clear that she sees their split as a result of Aliya’s lifestyle changes. While she’s spent the intervening years caring for her ailing mother, Aliya has spent that time achieving more mainstream milestones like a career and a marriage.
But the novel really comes to life as it reaches back into the past to trace the early and intense days of Ava and Aliya’s friendship. While the two girls share a love of literature, they come from very different circumstances. Ava is American, but her mother has relocated her to the UK, and her home is a deeply unhappy place where her and her sibling are subject to the whims of an imperious mother. Aliya comes from a Pakistani family, traveling from her home in Karachi to stay with an aunt in London while she attends school, torn between her family/culture and her friendship with Ava, which requires more and more of her energy and attention. The girls’ closeness is initially intellectual, but quickly verges on the romantic and intimate, becoming a threat to their other friendships and romantic pursuits. In these University chapters narrated by Aliya, the reader becomes familiar with this young insecure woman who’s trying to grow up but is almost entirely consumed by her friendship.
The novel offers a fascinating commentary on what happens when an all-consuming relationship fractures, sending the two participants on separate but connected paths. Hasin explains in an interview with NPR: “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.”
Overall the novel offers a fascinating and complex portrait of two women coming of age amidst the pressures of academia and self-exploration, and tells the familiar tale of a friendship that goes beyond the traditional bounds of the platonic. Hasin’s novel is written with a wit and depth that honors the emotional currents of friendship and the intricacies of coming-of-age as a young girl.