Sarvat Hasin on Strange Girls, Female Friendship and Creative Rivalry
How You Find Your Voice: Episode 6
In this episode of the How You Find Your Voice podcast, I speak with novelist Sarvat Hasin about her novel Strange Girls, a powerful story about intense female friendship, creative ambition and the complicated emotions that can exist between admiration and rivalry.
Episode artwork for episode 6 of the HYFYV podcast.
The book centres on two young women, Ava and Alia, who meet at university and quickly become deeply entwined in one another’s lives. Their meeting is described as being like two magnets colliding, and before long their friendship becomes all encompassing.
What begins as a conversation about friendship opens into something larger. We talk about the strange emotional territory that can exist between admiration and competition, about the friendships that shape who we become, and about the grief that can accompany their rupture.
Sarvat also speaks about creative ambition and the realities of becoming a writer. One of the ideas that stayed with me from our conversation was her observation that the distance between talent, ambition and the work itself is often shaped by something much more practical: time. Who has it, who can claim it, and who gets the opportunity to pursue a creative life.
We also talk about the ethics of storytelling and the difficult question at the centre of the novel. What happens when two people share a life and one of them turns that experience into fiction. Who owns a story when more than one person has lived it.
This episode explores creativity, longing, rivalry and the ambiguous spaces between friendship, love and art.
Topics Covered
• Intense female friendships and formative relationships
• The emotional complexity of friendships formed at university
• Creative admiration and rivalry between friends
• The strange grief of friendship breakups
• Creative ambition and the realities of becoming a writer
• The role of time and circumstance in creative life
• The ethics of fictionalising shared experiences
• Who owns a story when two people have lived it together
• Writing towards questions you do not yet know the answer to
• Sarvat’s approach to writing by “chasing the feeling” of a moment
About Sarvat Hasin
Sarvat Hasin is a British novelist and short story writer whose work explores relationships, identity and the emotional terrain of modern life.
Her novel Strange Girls examines the powerful nature of intense female friendships and the creative ambitions and entanglements that can grow out of them.
Her writing is known for its psychological insight and its sharp observations about the lives we imagine for ourselves when we are young and the realities that unfold afterwards.
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For more on Sarvat Hasin and her novel Strange Girls see here.
Follow Sarvat on Instagram here