In The Singular Life of Aria Patel (Little, Brown, out now), Ahmed’s sixth YA novel, the titular science-minded protagonist falls through the multiverse on one fateful day and gets a second chance at love and to see her late father. The author describes it as The Midnight Library meets Everything Everywhere All at Once. PW spoke with Ahmed about her inspiration, romance tropes, and the stories of revolutionary girls.
What was the inspiration for this novel?
I love what-if questions and alternative histories. I wrote a multiverse scenario into my Ms. Marvel comics-writing run for Marvel a few years ago. When I was in college, I took a class called Physics for Poets. My professor was Leon Lederman, a Nobel Prize winner, who taught me that physics is part of our everyday life. It was through him that I got interested in particles that we can’t see and dark matter and cold spots in the universe.
I read an article by Matthew Salesses about grief. He said that to grieve is to really live in another time. When we grieve for a person who no longer exists in our world, we are grieving in another time and another place than the one that we exist in. The inspiration for Aria was a combination of all these things.
What tropes does Aria employ?
I’m going to blame Jane Austen. I’m a Persuasion fan before I’m a Pride and Prejudice fan. Second-chance romances allow us to see how characters grow—they see each other in ways that are different from the ways they saw each other when they were younger. Because I’m writing YA, my characters aren’t looking at their past from the passage of time; in the multiverse, the different universes serve as a way to look back. I’m also a huge X-Files fan. The Mulder and Scully relationship is not grumpy-sunshine. It’s more like science-faith—not faith as in religion, but faith as in believing in the unknowable or the stuff that we can’t provide evidence for. Aria is science minded and rational. These characters—one who’s very data driven and one who’s more romantic—push each other, ask each other questions, and help one another be open to new ideas.
How do you write about grief?
Grief is one of the most difficult-to-explain human emotions because everyone experiences it differently. It can be completely absent for long time and then come on you like a monster, lurking in the dark. Young people have lived through Covid; it reshaped our world in ways that we aren’t aware of, and we don’t do a good job of talking about it. Grief is one of the feelings that can make us feel the most lonely. Books are spaces where we can navigate the swells of our feelings, but in a safe place—where we can see other characters and what they’re going through. Maybe it touches on something that helps us see what we’re feeling is just normal.
Is Aria a political book?
The throughline of all my books is “stories of the revolutionary girl.” Revolutions can sometimes be loud, and sometimes they can be quieter and be about self-discovery. Aria gets stuck in a world that is both similar and different from her anchor universe, which allows her to examine the choices that societies make. In both Internment and Hollow Fires, two of my previous novels, we see ways that social media can be used for good. But, it can also be extremely detrimental. Social media and cell phones allow us to escape into another universe and allow us to avoid confrontation with things that are necessary. It can dull us.
I hope that readers will take away that we should question the technology we have and how we choose to use it. It makes our lives easier, yes, but are we damaging our environment? Are we damaging our relationships? What is the cost of those technologies?
Samira Ahmed will give the breakfast keynote in the Oregon Ballroom, 203–204, Floor 2, on Saturday, June 14, 8–9 a.m.
