Sarvat Hasin: When Friendship Becomes a Story
On speaking to Sarvat Hasin about Strange Girls
When I spoke to Sarvat Hasin for the How You Find Your Voice podcast, we began with the friendship at the centre of her novel Strange Girls.
Strange Girls by Sarvat Hasin
The book follows two young women, Ava and Alia, who meet at university and quickly become deeply involved in one another’s lives. Their meeting is described as being like two magnets colliding. It is a good image for the intensity of certain friendships when we are young. They can feel all-consuming, as though this person will be part of your life forever.
What interested Sarvat was the emotional complexity inside that kind of bond. Ava and Alia admire one another, compete with one another and shape one another’s ambitions. The friendship becomes a creative relationship as much as a personal one.
One of the most interesting parts of our conversation was the question that sits quietly at the centre of the novel. What happens when two people share an experience and one of them turns it into art?
Writers often draw on the material of their own lives, but that raises an awkward question. Who owns a story when more than one person has lived it?
Sarvat spoke about writing as a way of exploring questions she does not yet know the answer to. She does not begin with a clear argument or message. Instead she writes towards a feeling and lets the novel grow from there.
She described her process as “chasing the feeling” of a moment. Rather than planning every detail in advance, she tries to capture the emotional atmosphere of a scene and build the story from there.
We also talked about the realities of becoming a writer. At one point Sarvat made an observation that stayed with me. She talked about the distance between talent, ambition and the work itself is often determined by something much simpler than we like to admit: time.
Let’s face it, not everyone has the freedom or resources to spend years writing a novel.
It was a reminder that creative lives are rarely shaped by inspiration alone, but are shaped by life circumstances as well.
You can listen to the full conversation with Sarvat Hasin about Strange Girls on the How You Find Your Voice podcast.
Sarvat Hasin