Sarvat Hasin: Passage Reading – Strange Girls

Novelist Sarvat Hasin reads from the second chapter of her novel Strange Girls — the beginning of Alia's story.

Sarvat and Freya talk about how the two narrators of Strange Girls arrived in different voices and tenses: Ava, bold and certain, who could only ever be written in first person, and Alia, quieter, rendered in a storybook third-person past. They discuss the novels woven through the book — Donna Tartt's The Secret History and Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence — and why an ambiguous relationship that's never named or declared can still change a person completely. Along the way, a conversation about what it means for writing to feel alive: raw, uncertain, and true to life, even when only a few stories have ever really been told.

This is a conversation about voice, ambiguity, and the books that live inside the books we write.

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