Best Friends Forever?: Sarvat Hasin on new novel Strange Girls

On the front cover of Sarvat Hasin’s Strange Girls, two women cram into a photobooth: their legs are suggestively in view, but they are cut off at the waist. Are they kissing, or pulling silly faces? Are they lovers or friends? An image that seductively brims with tension, it sets the tone for Hasin’s latest novel, a work that revels in the ambiguity of intense female friendships.

“People refer to it in different ways… a friendship breakup novel [or a] queer yearning novel. I quite like that it sits between those two things,” says Hasin. Strange Girls is the fourth book by the British-Pakistani author, and the liminality of female intimacy is writ large across it, desires largely going unspoken and instead teased throughout, depending on how you interpret the enigmatic relationship of our two protagonists, Ava and Aliya.

The novel opens in the present day with Ava’s voice, as she confronts an awkward reunion with the now-married Aliya in her London home. As the chapters alternate between Ava’s first-person and third-person as told through Aliya’s perspective, we learn that the pair met on a feverish corner of the internet a decade earlier: the online forum of their university’s creative writing group. The feedback Aliya receives on her excerpts is uninspiring, with one student recommending she focus on fictionalising her Pakistani heritage. But she feels seen in an email from Ava, setting in motion a connection that sprawls life stages and literary influences. We hungrily read on to find out if there is romance in their past and the cause of the frostiness. 

“I was interested in writing about a breakup that you don’t have a script for,” Hasin explains. In experiencing a romantic breakup, “you know what to do, and everyone around you knows what to do. There’s a determined path for that to take,” she says, listing crutches that offer immediate relief: “a bad haircut, ice cream and tequila, or whatever.” By contrast, we don’t announce friendship breakups; we don’t reach for the apps to let the world know that we’re recently out of a long-term friendship and looking to befriend a replacement. Hasin observes that platonic severances are predominantly experienced in solitude. 

There is no script for how to heal from a friendship breakup; similarly, there is no script for working out what kind of woman to be. On the wall of Ava’s university dorm, there is a poster emblazened with the script ‘STRANGE GIRLS. Can They Marry Like Other Girls? Have Children? Be Happy As They Are? Why Were They Born?’ Ava and Aliya self-identify as strange, and amidst the sea of influences, from family norms to characters on TV, rely on each other to shape their femininity. “That sort of power dynamic of wanting to be someone, but also wanting to be their friend,” was what motivated Hasin’s characterisation of her entangled protagonists, she explains.

We talk about betrayal. I go in hard on my issues with Ava, but Hasin is gentler when she talks about her character – Ava’s voice came to the author first, after all. She was keen, she explains, to toy with readers’ loyalties through the alternating perspectives: Ava and Aliya “each have their moments where they feel like they’ve been betrayed by the other, and what you call the central betrayal of their relationship would be different if you asked Ava and if you asked Aliya.”

While I describe Ava’s cultural slip-ups – particularly in relation to Aliya’s Muslim background and her difficulty understanding the nuances of her relationship with her family in Karachi – as microaggressions, Hasin sees it differently. She wrote these moments as “two people who are from culturally different backgrounds trying to understand each other and failing”. The thrust of Ava and Aliya’s friendship unfolds in the 2010s, and although they share cultural touchpoints such as Bill Nighy, Usher and Britney, they are both living in the UK for the first time. The setting smooths out their differences. “University is a great leveller,” Hasin says. “You spend your days in the exact same way, you’re living in very similar places, you’re eating very similar things.” It’s only until graduation, and navigating the gruelling world of adulthood, that their cultural backgrounds are inflamed by difference. 

Strange Girls presents a book within a book, but the script for messy, indomitable friendship is co-authored by our two protagonists. I ask Hasin what pile of books sat on her desk while writing Strange Girls. In a meta turn, she speaks of a book that the protagonists repeatedly return to: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. “Aliya relates to Newland Archer’s inability to reconcile his desires with real life. And Ava relates to Countess Ellen Olenska’s braveness in living a singular life outside of the margins of what society expects of her.” For Hasin, The Age of Innocence captures the power of an intense relationship that is unacknowledged in the world. Strange Girls does something similar.