Safi, Aminah Mae
WORK TITLE: Not the Girls You’re Looking For
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.aminahmae.com/
CITY: Los Angeles
STATE: CA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | no2018080873 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/no2018080873 |
| HEADING: | Safi, Aminah Mae |
| 000 | 00864nz a2200205n 450 |
| 001 | 10778510 |
| 005 | 20180616073115.0 |
| 008 | 180615n| azannaabn |n aaa c |
| 010 | __ |a no2018080873 |
| 035 | __ |a (OCoLC)oca11398184 |
| 040 | __ |a ICrlF |b eng |e rda |c ICrlF |
| 100 | 1_ |a Safi, Aminah Mae |
| 370 | __ |a Texas |e Los Angeles (Calif.) |2 naf |
| 372 | __ |a Young adult fiction |2 lcsh |
| 374 | __ |a Authors |2 lcsh |
| 375 | __ |a Females |2 lcdgt |
| 377 | __ |a eng |
| 670 | __ |a Safi, Aminah Mae. Not the girls you’re looking for, 2018: |b title page (Aminah Mae Safi) dust jacket (lives in Los Angeles ; this is her first novel ; her website: aminahmae.com) |
| 670 | __ |a Aminah Mae Safi’s website, June 13, 2018 |b (Originally raised in Texas, she now lives in Los Angeles) |
| 670 | __ |a Amazon website, June 13, 2018 |b (Aminah Mae Safi is a Muslim-American writer ; lives in Los Angeles) |
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:University of Southern California, B.A.; University of Chicago, M.A.
ADDRESS
- Home - Los Angeles, CA.
CAREER
Writer.
AWARDS:We Need Diverse Books Short Story Contest winner, 2016, for “Be Cool, For Once.”
WRITINGS
- (Contributor) Fresh Ink: An Anthology (short stories), Crown Books for Young Readers (New York, NY), 2018
- Not the Girls You're Looking For (novel), Feiwel and Friends (New York, NY), 2018
SIDELIGHTS
Aminah Mae Safi is a Muslim-American writer raised in Texas, who focuses on art, fiction, feminism, and film. Her debut novel for young adults, Not the Girls You’re Looking For deals with mean girls, complicated friendships, and bad decisions. Safi also had her award-winning story “Be Cool, For Once,” about nerdy girls with impossible crushes, published in the Fresh Ink: An Anthology in 2018. Aimed at a young adult audience, the thirteen stories present work from diverse authors in partnership with We Need Diverse Books that address identity, acceptance, gentrification, poverty, death, and homosexuality. Safi holds a master’s degree from the University of Chicago. She lives in Los Angeles, California, with her partner and cats.
Safi’s 2018 Not the Girls You’re Looking For presents Iraqi-American teenager Leila “Lulu” Saad, a high school junior at a swanky Houston private school. Her mother is a white Catholic from Louisiana and her father is a Muslim Iraqi immigrant. Lulu just wants to be a normal American teen from Texas, but she has to deal with prejudice, bigotry, and talking to boys. Headstrong and obstinate, Lulu fasts during Ramadan but also drinks, smokes, and goes to parties. Safi also follows the lives of Lulu with her three best girlfriends, race and religion struggles with her mother’s family, Islamophobia at school, and war that that touches her father’s family half a world away. Another issue is sexual awakening and consent when a boy Lulu likes, Dane, goes too far.
A Kirkus Reviews contributor commented that Safi gives Muslim American readers “a teenager they can relate to as they too learn to navigate racial and religious tensions in a predominantly white society,” and that the book is delightful and funny, but also covers series topics like sexual consent and xenophobia. With Lulu as a portrait of contradictions, “Safi offers a refreshing perspective on conformity and the path to self-actualization,” according to a writer in Publishers Weekly, who also liked Safi’s prose style with a lively staccato rhythm that reflects Lulu’s spirited nature. Safi writes teenage girls with authenticity in this coming-of-age novel, according to Library Journal reviewer Jenna Friebel, who added: “This rich story also explores biracial and mixed culture identity … in all its joys and struggles.”
Speaking to Rachel Brittain online at Book Riot, Safi explained her focus on female empowerment in the book: “I wanted to write a book about girls who push against the boundaries of girlhood. Girls who engaged in risky behavior. Girls who made the first move. Girls who steadfastly love one another in a way few elements of pop culture portray. This is, largely, because there’s usually only one girl on the team (if any) in most big pieces of pop culture. You literally cannot show female friendship when there’s only one woman in the story.” Commenting on the book, Brittain remarked: “It’s a story for every girl who’s ever felt in-between and every friend who’s ever messed up but been determined to set things right again. Most of all, it’s an ode to the intricacies of female friendship and teenage girldom.”
In an interview on the Hypable website, Safi explained that diverse characters should be proud of the culture and the heritage that they bring to American society. She said she wrote a story about the false choice that “children with mixed-race or mixed-heritage have to make. Pick one or the other, never both. Assimilate and erase or refuse to assimilate and pay the consequences. When you don’t fit neatly into pre-made identity boxes, the lived reality is much messier and much more nuanced. I wanted a story that showed a protagonist living in that mess and realizing that it was, ultimately, going to be okay.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 2018, review of Not the Girls You’re Looking For.
Library Journal, May 2018, Jenna Friebel, review of Not the Girls You’re Looking For.
Publishers Weekly, April 9, 2018, review of Not the Girls You’re Looking For, p. 78.
ONLINE
Book Riot, https://bookriot.com/ (June 15, 2018), Rachel Brittain, author interview.
Hypable, https://www.hypable.com/ (April 20, 2018), author interview.
- Fresh Ink: An Anthology - 2018 Crown Books for Young Readers, https://www.amazon.com/Fresh-Ink-Anthology-Lamar-Giles/dp/1524766283
- Aminah Mae - http://www.aminahmae.com/
Hello Darlings! I'm Aminah Mae Safi and I'm a writer who explores art, fiction, feminism, and film. I also love puns, oxford commas, and heists.
My short story, "Be Cool, For Once," will be featured in WNDB Young Adult Anthology, FRESH INK, after winning the 2016 We Need Diverse Books Short Story Contest. Check it out if you like nerdy girls with impossible crushes.
My debut novel, NOT THE GIRLS YOU'RE LOOKING FOR will be available from Feiwel & Friends in June 2018. It's my ode to mean girls, messy friendships, and bad decisions. Be the first to know about release dates and pre-orders by getting signed up here!
Once upon a time, I wanted to be a professor. I have a BA from the University of Southern California in Art History and an MA from the University of Chicago. Ask me about art, or, check out the art archive.
Interested in working with me? Contact my agent, Lauren MacLeod at The Strothman Agency at Lauren (at) strothmanagency.com.
Official headshot? Right here.
Official bio? Right here.
Short Bio:
Aminah Mae Safi is a Muslim-American writer who explores art, fiction, feminism, and film. She's the winner of the We Need Diverse Books short story contest. She lives in Los Angeles, California, with her partner and two cats. NOT THE GIRLS YOU'RE LOOKING FOR is her first novel.
click image to downloadclick image to download
Longer Bio:Aminah Mae Safi is a Muslim-American writer who explores art, fiction, feminism, and film. She loves Sofia Coppola movies, Bollywood endings, and the Fast and Furious franchise. She’s the winner of the We Need Diverse Books short story contest. Originally raised in Texas, she now lives in Los Angeles, California, with her partner, a cat bent on world domination, and another cat who’s just here for the snacks. NOT THE GIRLS YOU'RE LOOKING FOR is her first novel.
Not the Girls You're Looking For
Publishers Weekly.
265.15 (Apr. 9, 2018): p78. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Not the Girls You're Looking For
Aminah Mae Safi. Feiwel and Friends, $17.99 (336p) ISBN 978-1-250-15181-0
In this YA debut, Safi explores the internal struggle of having to "talk to more than one world, simultaneously." Lulu considers herself both American and Arab (her father is a Muslim immigrant, her mother from Louisiana), but to many of her classmates, she's only Arab (and therefore a terrorist). Meanwhile, she fails to meet her Muslim family's cultural standards. Lulu is a girl who defies stereotypes: a Muslim who celebrates Ramadan, drinks, smokes, and loves to hook up with boys. Safi's prose style has a lively staccato rhythm that captures Lulu's spirited nature, which can easily slip into impetuousness. In addition to Safi's focus on multicultural identity, her story provides a candid perspective on female friendships that are full of conflict, love, and angst. Through her character of contradictions, Safi offers a refreshing perspective on conformity and the path to self-actualization. Ages 13-18. Agent: Lauren MacLeod, Strothman Agency. June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
1 of 4 8/10/18, 11:05 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
"Not the Girls You're Looking For." Publishers Weekly, 9 Apr. 2018, p. 78. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A535100033/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=5d110790. Accessed 11 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A535100033
2 of 4 8/10/18, 11:05 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Safi, Aminah Mae: NOT THE GIRLS YOU'RE LOOKING FOR
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 1, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Safi, Aminah Mae NOT THE GIRLS YOU'RE LOOKING FOR Feiwel & Friends (Young Adult Fiction) $17.99 6, 19 ISBN: 978-1-250-15181-0
Leila "Lulu" Saad is about to graduate from high school with her three best friends by her side, but things get messy and senior year becomes a little more complicated than expected.
Lulu just wants to be an Iraqi-American living a normal teenage life in Houston, Texas. But that's not possible when your (presumably white) Catholic mom is from Louisiana and her family has been openly hostile since your maternal grandmother, the matriarch of the family, passed away. It's hard when your Muslim dad is from Iraq and you've grown up as an Arab-American Muslim who drinks and frequents all the latest parties but still fasts during Ramadan. Navigating high school is tough enough with graduation, boys, gossip, family, and friends, but Lulu also has to deal with Islamophobia at school, a war that threatens her family thousands of miles away, an incident in which sexual boundaries are overstepped, and the cross-cultural puzzle that every child of immigrants must learn to piece together in their own way. Lulu's stubbornness and desire to make both her worlds meld lands her in isolation from both family and friends. Safi's debut novel offers Arab and Muslim readers a teenager they can relate to as they too learn to navigate racial and religious tensions in a predominantly white society.
Delightful and funny but still giving voice to serious issues of sexual consent and xenophobia. (Fiction. 14-18)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Safi, Aminah Mae: NOT THE GIRLS YOU'RE LOOKING FOR." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May
2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536571131 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=1be0b2b5. Accessed 11 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536571131
3 of 4 8/10/18, 11:05 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
GILES, Lamar, ed.: Fresh Ink: An
Anthology
Kaetlyn Phillips
School Library Journal.
64.6 (June 2018): p88. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Phillips, Kaetlyn. "GILES, Lamar, ed.: Fresh Ink: An Anthology." School Library Journal, June
2018, p. 88. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540902951 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=632daff1. Accessed 11 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A540902951
4 of 4 8/10/18, 11:05 PM
Not the Girls You're Looking For. By: Friebel, Jenna, School Library Journal, 03628930, May2018, Vol. 64, Issue 5
Gr 9 Up—Lulu Saad is ready to tackle junior year with her three best friends by her side. They'll continue to attend house parties where she'll make out with cute guys. But after one hookup goes sour, her friendships start to tear apart. To make matters worse, she's on thin ice with her mom. Lulu struggles to put back the pieces of her life and find herself in the process. This character-driven, coming-of-age novel explores relationships and identity in many forms. A burgeoning romance facilitates an honest look at consent and being responsibly sexually active. However, the romance takes a backseat to the female friendships, which are the driving force of this story. These authentic teen girls are smart, complicated, sexual, and sensitive. Their friendships can be mean and messy, but they are also fiercely loyal. This rich story also explores biracial and mixed culture identity (Lulu has a white mom and an Arab dad) in all its joys and struggles. The plot sometimes suffers from uneven pacing, but the witty writing and strong voice more than make up for it. VERDICT This debut is a worthwhile purchase for all teen collections and will appeal to those who appreciate realistic slice-of-life novels.
- Christian Science Monitor
https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2018/0720/Not-the-Girls-You-re-Looking-For-follows-a-rudderless-Iraqi-American
Word count: 979Not the Girls You're Looking For' follows a rudderless Iraqi American
This dark but clever YA novel confronts topics that are not tidy – because, as Safi reminds us, these are not tidy times.
stack of books What are you reading?July 20, 2018
By Katie Ward Beim-Esche
In Aminah Mae Safi’s Not the Girls You’re Looking For, protagonist Lulu Saad makes a ferocious entrance, a calamitous mess, and a thought-provoking exit. She’s a handful, but that’s why we love her.
Lulu approaches life and relationships like a high-functioning weed whacker: It’s going to be loud and messy, but odds are good it’ll turn out fine in the end. Needless to say, “Not the Girls You’re Looking For” is quite a ride.
When we tune in, Lulu is galloping through junior year at a fancy Houston private school. She and her best friends, Audrey, Lo, and Emma, are competitive, defensive, independent, and brash. Lo and Lulu in particular feel no hesitation in calling people out or unleashing blistering feminist critiques in real time; there’s no esprit d’escalier here.
And yet, for all her bristles, Lulu’s public bluster belies a private struggle. As a child of an American mother and an Iraqi father, she feels like she’s a resident of both cultures, but not a full member (rather like Maya Aziz from Love, Hate, and Other Filters). She’s not Arab enough for her Arab side, but she is never considered fully American—she’s constantly code-switching.
When paramour James expresses surprise that she celebrates Christmas, Lulu responds with irritation, “Of course I celebrate Christmas; what kind of American kid doesn’t celebrate Christmas?”
Can you guess which literary work goes with each final line? Take our quiz!When her father reminds her that he deliberately chose to raise his family as Americans, she complains, “This world may never let me forget I am Arab, but it will also keep me from belonging as one of them.”
The frustration revolves around Lulu wishing she had some kind of language for how to be a hyphenate, an in-between. She’s tired of people constantly asking her what she is, “like a piece of flora or fauna ... missing her proper taxonomy.”
Lulu says she survives via a cultivated ability to blend in with any crowd – but this is a girl who makes out with any boy she feels like, who causes a minor scandal at Ramadan, who has a capital-R Reputation. Disappearing into the wallpaper does not come naturally to Lulu Saad. When she turns her full focus on people, they feel like rabbits before a coyote.
James has a knack for appearing just when Lulu’s at her lowest, angriest, or most vulnerable, and even in those moments, the thunderstruck boy calls her “terrifying.” This is not news to Lulu.
“She had command in her eyes,” Safi writes. “But she wasn’t idly grasping for power that wasn’t hers. She had simply been born in charge. She’d known it for ages. It was only when people wouldn’t stop describing their amazement at her potency that she realized there was anything strange about it. She’d simply always felt like herself, not like some rare exception. And that, she found, scared people most of all.”
Meanwhile, Lulu fights an attraction to Dane, a cocky good ol’ boy who says things like, “You know you want it.” Dane is also the jerk whose group targeted Lulu in a yearlong anti-Muslim harassment campaign after the Paris attacks. Their complicated, pseudo-Faustian chemistry takes a darker turn when Dane goes too far at a dance.
If this feels like a jumble of relationships with unlikeable characters but lots of potential, that’s because it is. The first half of “Not the Girls You’re Looking For” struck me as rudderless, and Safi’s staccato narrative and film noir asides clashed with the lighter subject matter (“Lo was drawn to the darkness like a bad after-school special”).
Mercifully, midway through the book, I felt Safi hit her second wind when a proper plot direction took shape. Everyone’s apparent angst sharpened so I could see the real darkness behind those spiky exteriors. Safi’s narrative stride lengthened, and her pace felt newly rhythmic and natural.
It takes the full 330+ pages to see the beauty in the mess. The issues in “Not the Girls You’re Looking For” are not tidy topics, and Safi reminds us that these are not tidy times. For all the pop culture references and snide commentary on wealthy neighborhoods, Safi’s mayhem has real roots.
“Not the Girls You’re Looking For” throws both arms open to embrace the chaos. There’s anger, shame, spite, guts, weakness, and redemption. Misunderstandings, social blow-ups, substance abuse, and guys who choose not to hear “no.”
As Lulu comes into focus for the reader, so does the character for herself. After a series of major conflicts are resolved, Lulu realizes that, as an in-betweener, her defining characteristic is fluency – “the gift and the curse to move between people, languages, and cultures. Not to blend so much as to be able to communicate clearly across invisible borders.”
Follow Stories Like ThisGet the Monitor stories you care about delivered to your inbox.
Have patience, both with Lulu Saad and her story as a whole. Whether or not these are the girls you’re looking for, this is a story you may come to appreciate.
Content warning: This story includes strong language, drug use, substance abuse, and sexual themes.
- Book Riot
https://bookriot.com/2018/06/15/interview-aminah-mae-safi/
Word count: 2783“You Are Not Your Worst Days”: An Interview With Aminah Mae Safi
Rachel Brittain
06-15-18I recently had the pleasure of chatting with author Aminah Mae Safi about the upcoming release of her debut YA novel, Not The Girls You’re Looking For. We talked feminism, wonderfully messy friendships, and her character-driven writing process (among many other things).
Not The Girls You're Looking For Cover Image from An Interview With Aminah Mae Safi | bookriot.comNot The Girls You’re Looking For is the messy, heartwarming, relatable story of Lulu Saad, whose life kind of falls apart thanks to a series of ever-worsening mishaps during Ramadan. But in spite of everything, she’s determined to put her life—and her friendships—back together again. It’s a story for every girl who’s ever felt in-between and every friend who’s ever messed up but been determined to set things right again. Most of all, it’s a ode to the intricacies of female friendship and teenage girldom.
One of my favorite aspects of this book is the friendships between Lulu and her three best friends. I love that friendship is at the center of the story, even more so than their various romantic entanglements. Their love and loyalty for each other runs so deep, but their friendship is still messy and imperfect—and I feel like we don’t get to see much of those kinds of nuanced and heartfelt female friendships in media. Can you talk a little about why showing that was so important to you?
Thank you! I think fundamentally, we don’t get enough women in media in general. So that’s probably part of the problem.
But I wanted to write a story about friendship from the beginning. It’s so central to young women’s lives—has been so central to my own life—that I wanted to write a story that honored friendships as I had known them and as I had seen them.
Part of the risk in there being so little representation of female friendships in any media is that the urge to overcorrect and show shining, perfect friendships is so strong. It’s almost like, if you’re going to get the space to write about a group of women being friends, you want to show the best kind of friendship possible.
But real friendships are messy. They are full of hurt. And the ones that survive are the ones that learn to move beyond the hurt, to find ways of seeking and giving forgiveness from one another. As soon as I started writing these girls, I knew I wanted to write about the moment where the reader looks at them and wonders why are these girls even friends? So that, throughout the course of the story—if this reader actually stuck around and trusted me—I could say here, this is why.
Lulu and her friends are imperfect, yes. They are flawed and their relationships with one another often brings those flaws into strong relief. They also get to see one another clearly and still love one another. That is, to me, the definition of true love.
How much did you draw on your own teenage experiences while writing about Lulu?
The best part about setting Not The Girls You’re Looking For in the place where I grew up was getting to use all of my favorite teenage haunts. The weird dive-y coffee bar, the music venue on the edge of downtown, the beignet shop nearby school. There were so many places that my friends and I ran around as teenagers—places that seemed almost acceptable to our parents on the outside, but belonged to us on the inside. They were the kind of places you could get into a little bit of trouble in.
These were fun spaces to revisit with Lulu and to hand over to her on her own terms. And let her get into more than a little bit of trouble in.
I hope I did the city of Houston justice, because, it will always be the place that shaped me and made me who I am. That beignet shop has, unfortunately, been closed now for over a decade. I still miss the granitas.
Lulu and the other characters in your book get the chance to screw up—to make really monumental mistakes—but then to learn, grow, and recover from them. I think that’s very representative of the teen experience (and human experience in general). Was it especially important to you to give your characters that chance?
Yes! It was so important to give all of these characters the chance to screw up, the chance to move beyond those screw ups. One of the worst parts of being a teenage girl in my opinion is that the world tells you there’s so little room for error. One mistake and that’s it; that’s who you are for life.
So I wanted to write a story not just about making monumental mistakes, but that there is life beyond a monumental mistake. That life is, essentially, figuring out how to live with yourself after you’ve hurt someone you care about and how to make amends with them. I wanted to write a story that showed that there is a world beyond any mistake you make, if you can find the courage to face it.
You’ve mentioned before that character is one of the most fundamental aspects of storytelling for you. Did you find that the characters changed or shaped your perception of what this story would be as you were writing it?
Always. I have to stay open to what my characters are trying to tell me, what they want to show me. I call my first draft “Draft Zero” because it is always a mess. It’s just me, hanging out with my characters, trying to listen as they try to communicate with me. Anytime I try to strong-arm them into a particular plot, the character ends up winning in the end.
So I just go with it. Lulu’s romantic interest screws up pretty spectacularly in his few opening scenes, and I kept worrying that he might not be able to come back from that. I had to just go with it and accept that if he couldn’t get there, they wouldn’t get there. You kind of have to take your characters as they are, and hope you can prod them into growth.
There are so many great fiction and pop culture references in this book. (And can I just say, as a geek myself, I really appreciated all of them—particularly the title reference to Star Wars. I loved getting to the quote referencing it in the book.) Are there any movies, books, art, etc. that have particularly influenced you as a writer? Or with Not The Girls You’re Looking For specifically?
In general? Jane Austen. I’m a Janeite to my core. I’ve also got a soft spot for The Fast and the Furious franchise.
With Not the Girls You’re Looking For? There were the Bennet sisters from Pride and Prejudice and the March sisters from Little Women. I love the way friends are like sisters and are constantly setting up their identities and senses of selves in opposition to each other.
There was Star Wars and playing with the idea of who a geek girl could be.
There was Melina Marchetta’s Saving Francesca, which is a phenomenal book about growing up and screwing up and friendship and love and family.
Mean Girls because I always wanted a story of those last ten minutes—the part where all of the hurt is being undone, rather than done.
And finally, Leslye Headland’s Bachelorette which is just this bananas dark comedy around an immensely screwed up set of four women who were high school friends, on the eve of one of them getting married. It’s like if the Mean Girls never learned to pull that poison out of their bodies. It is not a teenage film, but it was so raw and I wanted to capture the rawness Headland had in that film and put it onto the page.
You also have a short story coming out in We Need Diverse Book’s upcoming anthology, Fresh Ink. How different was the process of writing that story from writing a full-length novel like Not The Girls You’re Looking For?
On the good side, a short story is so much faster to draft and to edit. It’s so satisfying when you’re working on longer projects to get through a short story, simply because it’s shorter. You’re just on a much more condensed timeline, in the best way. Also, you can see the whole structure of a short story so much more easily. You don’t get lost in the middle of your story in the same way you do in a full-length novel.
On the more difficult end, you have no words to spare in a short story. No extraneous passages about the weather or the car wooshing down the road or the feeling of humidity in your hair. Every word counts. Every sentence has to be driving the story forward, in one way or another. I do like that full-length novels have those moments where a character can sit and process what’s happened to them. You just don’t get that in a short story, unless the entire short story is about introspection.
There are so many great lines in this book, but one quote that particularly stood out to me was:
“No. I was running by the boys to check them out. But Brian assumed the reverse. Boys are the subject; I’m the direct object…It might seem like a technicality to you, but I like being the subject of my own sentences.”
That’s such a powerful line and really representative of a lot of the feminist undertones of the book. Can you talk a little more about that?
Oh, man. I wanted to write a book about girls who push against the boundaries of girlhood. Girls who engaged in risky behavior. Girls who made the first move. Girls who steadfastly love one another in a way few elements of pop culture portray. This is, largely, because there’s usually only one girl on the team (if any) in most big pieces of pop culture. You literally cannot show female friendship when there’s only one woman in the story.
For so many women—in the past and still—we have been objects. Not just in the obvious ways, of women literally used to be property. But in the more subtle things—the way we’re supposed to look, the way we’re supposed to experience our bodies, our sense of self, sex, everything. We’re taught so often that how others perceive us is more important than how we live in our own bodies and in our own life.
The thing is—most girls know this.
Women often forget all of the programming that was done to them in their childhood, but girls are so close to it. They feel how unfair it is—to be told what a girl is and what she isn’t, what she can be and what she can’t.
So much of that line to me was Lulu’s frustration with being shoved into the framework of how to behave as a girl and her need to push against that. She knows the world isn’t fair to girls. She just doesn’t quite know how to make it more fair, either for herself or anyone she cares about.
I think ultimately it’s this—Lulu isn’t angry she’s a girl, she’s furious that a girl is perceived as less than. I think she and all her friends have to contend with this inequality one way or another in the story.
One of Lulu’s biggest struggles in the book is her feelings of in betweenness, being in between Arab and American culture, in between childhood and adulthood, in-between who she is and who she wants to be. Was that something you knew you wanted to be a major theme of the book from the get-go?
It was. The first thing I knew I wanted to do with Lulu’s story was write a book about not having to pick between one side of culture or the other. I wanted to write about a girl who was culturally bilingual—who was code switching so often and so effortlessly that she almost doesn’t notice she’s doing it.
I grew up with multiple cultures in my home—in fact, my own mother is Mexican and German, so I’m even more ethnically mixed than Lulu—and so often the message I was getting was that I was either one or the other. It was the Bush years and much of the messaging was—you’re either American or you’re Muslim. You’re either white and you assimilate or you’re Arab and you reject assimilation.
But my lived reality was so in between. I just never saw that—rarely in books, never in movies, never on TV. So I set out to tell a story that honored that so much of the American experience really is living in between. It’s not always easy, seeing the world from multiple points of view. But it is a gift that I’ve been given and I think it’s a gift many people have, that they’ve been taught not to appreciate.
Not the Girls You’re Looking For is, ultimately, my celebration of being in between.
What do you hope people will take away from Not The Girls You’re Looking For?
Forgive me if I’ve said this before, but—you are not your worst days. You are not your worst self. You can always dust yourself off and keep going. It does take courage, to look at the terrible things you’ve done and decide to do something about them, to decide to do better. But that’s the place in life where growth happens.
I also hope that I’ve helped provide windows and mirrors. I hope that people can come to the work and see versions of themselves in these girls, in all of these characters. I hope that readers can also gain insight into people whose experiences are nothing like their own. I don’t mind if you don’t like these girls at the end of the story, but I do hope that you understand them and what makes them tick.
What’s one piece of writing—or life—advice you’d give to your younger self?
Probably a combination of “Believe in yourself, kid” and “You don’t have to have it all figured out right away.”
Believing in yourself isn’t just the ego thing of believing you’re great no matter what. It’s about believing that if you’re not where you want to be, you can work to get there. Creative work is such a process and being patient with that process can be frustrating. Being patient with yourself as you build skills and talent sometimes feels like the worst. But if you believe you can, you usually can get there in the end.
And not having everything figured out is because learning about yourself and learning about life is a process. It’s meant to be a struggle, it’s meant to take time. You’re meant to screw up. I still need this reminder. I should probably put up a Post-it of this somewhere in my office, to be honest.
Aminah Mae Safi Headshot from An Interview With Aminah Mae Safi | bookriot.com
Follow Aminah over on Twitter and Instagram and be sure to read Not The Girls You’re Looking For, available June 19th.
- Hypable
https://www.hypable.com/aminah-mae-safi-not-the-girls-youre-looking-for/
Word count: 2032Aminah Mae Safi on mean girls, messy friendships, and bad decisions in ‘Not the Girls You’re Looking For’
Exclusive
Hypable
Next Article
How much money will 'Avengers: Infinity War' make?BooksFeatures
Aminah Mae Safi talks to us about Not the Girls You’re Looking For, a story that explores ideas of identity, girlhood, and the complicated and powerful nature of female friendships.
About Aminah Mae Safi’s ‘Not the Girls You’re Looking For’Lulu Saad doesn’t need your advice, thank you very much. She’s got her three best friends and nothing can stop her from conquering the known world. Sure, for half a minute she thought she’d nearly drowned a cute guy at a party, but he was totally faking it. And fine, yes, she caused a scene during Ramadan. It’s all under control. Ish.
Except maybe this time she’s done a little more damage than she realizes. And if Lulu can’t find her way out of this mess soon, she’ll have to do more than repair friendships, family alliances, and wet clothing. She’ll have to go looking for herself.
Our interview with Aminah Mae Safi, author of ‘Not the Girls You’re Looking For’
Give us a quick elevator pitch about what your new novel Not the Girls You’re Looking For is about.Not The Girls You’re Looking For is my ode to mean girls, messy friendships, and bad decisions. It follows Lulu Saad — a Muslim American girl — as she and her friends go through their junior year at a Texas prep school. Lulu is spectacularly good at screwing up and mouthing off, so the story also explores what it means to hurt those you love most in the world and how any of us can recover from that.
What inspired you to write this book?I wrote Lulu for my teenage self. I needed her. I waited for someone, anyone to write her.
Turns out, I had to do it myself.
So I wrote about a girl who lives in a rarefied world. A world most daughters of immigrants don’t get access to. She understands it’s a privilege, but also, she’s a bit resentful of it. I wanted to give her room to screw up, but also, room to hope for the future, room to be able to grow.
I also stand on the shoulders of giants. Authors who have done the work of making narratives that show that assimilation is not the only option for immigrants and children of immigrants. That those characters can be proud of the culture and the heritage that they bring to the United States.
Because those writers have done that work — I got to write a story that was about how that is, in my mind, a false choice that immigrants have to make. That children with mixed-race or mixed-heritage have to make. Pick one or the other, never both. Assimilate and erase or refuse to assimilate and pay the consequences.
When you don’t fit neatly into pre-made identity boxes, the lived reality is much messier and much more nuanced. I wanted a story that showed a protagonist living in that mess and realizing that it was, ultimately, going to be okay.
To be able to reach out and communicate across and between cultures is such a gift. It didn’t feel like it growing up. But I know it is now.
One of my absolute favorite things about this book is how realistic and raw and honest the female friendships are. Can you talk a little bit your experience writing them the way you did?Like Lulu, I didn’t have sisters growing up. I felt like I was on the outside, looking in — my face pressed against a bakery window, really, at my friends who had sisters.
But I think most of us make sisters out of the friends we have. There’s a tenacity to female friendships that we just don’t get all that often in any kind of media. I think this is largely a byproduct of the fact that we don’t get many stories centered on groups of women all that often (and why women and young women cling to those stories they do get, like Beaches or Mean Girls or Heathers or Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants).
There’s also the ways your friends— and only your friends— can hurt you. Particularly when you feel like they aren’t seeing you or aren’t listening to you that I think is so important at this age. You grow and change so fast as a teenager that there’s this sense of bewilderment with your own friends. They’re supposed to know you better than anyone, but sometimes, they don’t seem to understand you at all.
I didn’t want to write perfect friendships where nothing went wrong. I also didn’t want to write— at least in this book— about toxic friendships or friend breakups. Most of us live in between those two— the friends who we love, who we struggle to protect, who we know exactly what soft targets to hit when we’re upset.
But, honestly, I wrote female friendships as I know them. The women I have known in my life would do anything for their friends. My 2 A.M. emergency dial has never been a dude and I’m married (sorry, babe). I feel so lucky that I got to write about that and I feel even more honored that it’s resonated with readers.
The prose in this novel is just absolutely gorgeous – seriously, my entire copy is just full of highlights. What’s one passage or quote from the book that you consider to be your favorite and why?Thank you! That is so wonderful to hear!
I have several passages I love, mostly because I fell in love with these girls and their friendship as I wrote them. But one I’m particularly proud of is from this moment where Lulu’s talking about her nickname and a boy comes in and starts singing Eric Clapton’s Leila at her. And she, understandably, gets annoyed.
“I dunno. I don’t wanna be Leila, or Carmen, or Belle de Jour. I just want to be me. Without some dude strumming a guitar or writing an opera or filming a movie trying to tell me how to do that. The singing reminds me that no matter what I go by somebody is gonna step in and remind me what some obsessed asshole thinks of my name. Reminds me that Clapton’s Leila is cruel and bite’s Carmen dies. So Lulu. That’s me. It’s mine. And it’s just as real as any other fiction. No serenade required.”
I love that Lulu tells us that. I love that, right off the bat, I knew what she was struggling with and struggling against from that dialog. She was a bit of a tricky character to get to open up. But I could keep going back to this passage as I wrote. It’s such a touchstone moment for Lulu.
Apart from Lulu, who was your other favorite character (or characters) to write and why?I have to pick?!
Okay, Lo is so much fun to write because she is just so unapologetically herself. She’s also the best kind of Slytherin— ferocious, cunning, loyal. I love that about her. I wrote her knowing that she’d be pretty polarizing to people and that was much of my early feedback about her. But she didn’t change at all through re-writes. Because I loved writing a girl who is, in so many ways, that girl and then actually getting to write her as a full, human character. Girls like Lo don’t show their weaknesses often, and I loved finding her vulnerabilities and writing them in a way for the reader that I hope made you understand what life looks like from her perspective.
Lulu’s dad— Ahmed— was also fun to write. I gave him my love of history. Every time he’s giving someone a lecture about history that is fully me, pushing up my glasses and getting extremely excited about an event that happened three hundred years ago. It was great to be able to slip that piece of myself into the story.
Also, Matt. He’s so grumpy. Grumpy characters are the best because they don’t hold back and they tell everyone exactly what’s on their minds. I loved getting to put him to comedic good use.
What do you hope people learn from Lulu?Oh, man. So many things. That everyone is fighting their own battles in this world. That we all have the power to hurt or help those around us. It’s in third person but we’re solidly with Lulu’s perspective for the story and I wanted to use that to show all the ways people around her have hurt her— as they’ve affected her emotions and her way of walking through the world.
But then I wanted to use that limitation on the story so that when other characters reveal their own hurts and struggles, the reader can experience themselves how Lulu missed her own blind spots. Because we’ve all got those blind spots— or at least, our versions of them— we’ve all got stuff we can’t see.
I hope anyone out there who identifies with Lulu— as the child of an immigrant, a Muslim-American, a mixed-race kid, a girl, any combination or variation on the above— sees themselves. I hope they know their stories are valid, are real, are important. I hope they see that they don’t have to be perfect, model versions of whatever marginalized group that they belong to in order to believe they have a right to space in this world.
What do you hope people learn from the story?I’d also love for anyone— but young women especially— to know that they can screw up and that they can make amends and move on. You’re not your worst days. You’re not stuck being your worst self.
So often when we talk about women saving themselves, it’s from an attacker, a burning building, a physical situation. But you can psychologically and emotionally save yourself, too. We don’t tell that enough to young women. That you can dig deep inside yourself and find your own way through the world. It’s not easy and looking your own misdeeds in the eye is never pleasant, but that’s where growth happens.
I’d also love for people to take away that forgiveness is a gift we give ourselves. And that earning forgiveness, making restitution, is about our actions. An apology is one kind of action, but it’s not the only one.
But really— I’m not in charge of any of that. Readers are going to take away what they’re going to take away. I hope I did my job right and those themes come across. And if nothing else, I hope they enjoyed the time they spent reading my work.
Aminah Mae Safi’s Not the Girls You’re Looking For will be out June 19! Pre-order it now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or from your local indie bookstore. And don’t forget to add it to your Goodreads!
Fan of our book coverage? Why not join our Hypable Books Facebook group!
We want to hear your thoughts on this topic!
Why not submit an article to Hypable?
Best of Hypable