You might remember Aminah Mae Safi for her wonderful debut novel Not the Girls You Are Looking For or her 2019 stellar novel Tell Me How You Really Feel. On October 13th, Aminah Mae Safi is back with a beautifully refreshing novel, This is All Your Fault. Centred on the struggles of a small, independent bookstore, her new book is an ode to literature and the reading community.
In this Q&A, we get to chat with her about her novel, writing process, and the influence visual pieces have on her literary production. We also dive down a little deeper into the mind of her three new fantastic characters!
Congratulations on your new upcoming novel, This is All Your Fault! To begin with, could you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Thank you so much! I’m Aminah Mae Safi and I’m the author of the This Is All Your Fault, Tell Me How You Really Feel, Not the Girls You’re Looking For, and the short story, “Be Cool, For Once,” in the anthology Fresh Ink.
There’s a Fast and Furious reference in every one of my pieces of published fiction. They’re like Pokémon. Try and catch them all.
If you were to create a playlist that described This is All Your Fault, which three songs would you include?
Funny enough, I have a playlist, here. This Is All Your Fault is my summertime book so I wanted the playlist to feel very summer, very Classic Americana.
But if I had to pick three songs off of it:
“Gives You Hell” by the All American Rejects. I know so much of the music of my youth is deeply uncool now, but I think all three of my girls— Imogen, Daniella, and Rinn— find that core inside of themselves. The need to scream that they’re going to give someone else hell at the top of their lungs. And frankly, I’m proud of them for that.
“This is The Day” by The The. Because that’s the iconic background music to the scene at the end of Empire Records when they dance along the rooftop and I couldn’t not have that song on the playlist.
“Wuthering Heights” by Kate Bush, because even though she’s British and ethereal— the song was written by Bush when she was a nineteen and she caught a film version of Wuthering Heights playing on BBC. Teen girls taking inspiration from literature and making their own statement and art out of it is for sure the This Is All Your Fault
This is All Your Fault is centered around the Wild Nights Bookstore and Emporium closing, which is quite a sad premise. However, the novel and the development of Daniella, Rinn and Imogen has an immensely hopeful and celebrating tone. Why did you decide to create such a contrast? And why pair it with such an ominous time measuring device as a countdown?
The countdown was particularly fun, I’m sorry to say. I think in fiction when you have that ticking clock, there’s a sense of immediacy that is irresistible as a creator. Perhaps that’s my love of action movies permeating my world building. I love that about big action sequences. Why not pull that device into something that should be more classically contemporary and subdued? Our world feels that big, even if the timebomb that’s about to go off is metaphorical. It always feels that big to me, at least.
I wrote this book in the wake of the 2016 election. It feels so far away now but we’re still living through so many of its repercussions. And I was thinking about how sad I was— how despondent so many of us were— and what to do with that sadness and that anger and that rage.
I knew that things would not be okay. That people’s lives and livelihoods would be on the line as a result of that election.
I wanted to tell a story about what happens when there are sad and impossible things happening beyond our control. How do we decide to be okay? How do we get through, even when they are not?
Those were the questions I was asking myself. What does it mean to lose and to lose big— and then find the thing— call it strength, courage, optimism, hope, determination, whatever you need to— to keep going?
The future is built by people who believe they can change it. And I think on some level, I was trying to find that for myself. The knowledge that I don’t control outcomes, but I do control getting up every day and doing what I can with the task in front of me and the skills that I’ve got.
This is All Your Fault deals with almost every aspect on the reading community! Why did you decide to offer such a wide vision of the current situation of literature outside the written word itself?
I guess I couldn’t imagine the state of literature without all of the worlds outside of the written word itself.
The world of literature has existed I think for as long as there has been print culture. These used to belong to aristocratic salons and to members of the intelligentsia only. But now we have booklovers finding each other through so many forums. Booktube is one. Bookstagram another. GoodReads. Comments sections. Blogs, way back when. We have endless tools for discovery and discussion at our fingertips.
The paratext is just as alive as the text itself at this point.
But also indie bookstores themselves. They are the great hubs of books and the great champions of so many books that don’t ever make it on to any lists. And I love that they’re there, finding the right book for the right person.
Finding ways to celebrate those communities and the ways in which so many booklovers have been able to leverage what they do into opening the doors and making more room at the table for people is heartening.
Like many authors, I started out as a booklover and a reader myself. So all of those books and poems and authors that I’ve listed throughout were also ways of celebrating all of the different kinds of reading and readers. On my father’s side I’m Arab and I inherited a love of poets and his love of nonfiction. My mothers loves classic love stories. I think I wanted to be able to celebrate all of these kinds of readers, without talking down to one or the other. I cut my teeth on old mystery novels that I should not have been reading (Hello Rebecca and Death on the Nile when I was nine years old).
I wanted to also celebrate the fact that a love of reading is almost always passed down to us. Not just from parents and guardians but educators and librarians and the people in independent bookstores who see a strange little girl (ahem, me) and hand her The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler just knowing that she’ll love it (spoiler: I still do).
Both Tell Me How You Really Feel and This is All Your Fault are inspired by pieces of visual media—Gilmore Girls and Empire Records. How do you structure your writing process around these influences?
I’m not sure if I structure my process around them so much as I am a great watcher and re-watcher of movies and TV shows that I love. I learned so much about story in general from movies and re-watching them. Not just when they’re perfect, but also when they could have been great but fell short of the mark.
How would I have changed the story? What would I have done differently?
I think I’m always asking myself these questions. I think stories are rarely original, but the way we tell them and the way we see the world— that is a way that I can tell a story that no one else can. And also, the way you can tell a story that no one else can.
And as a great lover of Empire Records I realized that the thing I would change first would be to center the story on the three girls. I was re-watching the film and realized that the POV characters are actually the three boys and the manager Joe. I hadn’t noticed somehow. I’d always, in my mind, thought the story was about the girls.
And so I set out to do just that. To tell a stories with the girls at the center. The boys, pardon the film pun, on the side.
Curiously, “this is all your fault” is a sentence that appears in both of your latest novels. Was that intentional or just pure coincidence?
The first one— in Tell Me How You Really Feel— probably was a coincidence. But I’m sure that was unconsciously echoing in my mind as I was working through This Is All Your Fault.
But I put the line in TIAYF because it felt important. I think we want to blame people before we want to find a solution to the problem. Not that accountability and making sure those in charge are held accountable aren’t important. Because they are.
And throughout the novel, the question keeps being asked— whose fault is this?
Why is the bookstore closing down? Could anything have been done to stop it? Is it Eli’s fault for making the mistake in the first place? Daniella’s for not tattling? Rinn’s for not doing more promo? Jo for not telling them sooner? Imogen for acting like she doesn’t care when she does?
Does any of them blaming each other or blaming themselves solve the problem?
If you’re getting the sense that I just like to ask myself questions as I write, you’d be correct. But I like untidy problems. I don’t want easy answers. And that’s why the line and the title and all these characters running through this space was such a delight for me to write.
Relationships that begin from an enemy starting point and develop into a beautiful friendship and/or romance are usually present in your novels, but why do you think these types of dynamics are so satisfying to read?
Man, can I blame Shakespeare and Much Ado About Nothing?
I think enemies to friendship or romance is so satisfying because the opposite of love (platonic love or romantic love or familial love or any kind really) is not hate. It’s apathy. (and, as an aside, it’s apathy and self-absorption that allows for the worst of us as humans, à la Hanna Arendt and the Banality of Evil).
I think that there’s something satisfying in knowing that people are capable of change. That the things that irritate us about someone are also the things we could grow to admire in them. So I took three girls who, by all outward appearance, could not be more different and could not have more friction in their interactions.
And the fun part about telling stories is this— I got to take them and give them a common goal. And just in that one act, in putting them suddenly on the same side and the same team, they found their respect and their admiration and their love for one another.
Of the three main characters in This is All Your Fault, who was the easiest to write? And the hardest? Who do you identify the most with?
They were all hard, honestly, in their different ways. I gave Daniella my impulsivity and moments of my ADHD. Her rage is really my own. I gave Imogen that bone deep sadness I felt as I was depressed but kept trying to get on with it. The need to ask for help but not knowing how to even begin to ask for what I needed help with. And Rinn got my anxiety, that urge— to know, to list, to understand, and to help. She’s earnest and cares deeply and for so long that part of myself felt like a weakness rather than a strength.
So they were all difficult for me, because on some level, I felt exposed by each of them. I fought and wrestled to get the truth out of each of them, for it was really getting the truth out of myself.
The only thing I will say is that Daniella’s poetry I actually stole from an old file of my own high school poetry. Please be kind about that, for fifteen-year-old me really thought that sonnet was between myself and Mrs. George. She’d just about scream if she knew I would go on and put it in a published novel. Sorry, past self.
Imogen already recommends a couple of amazing books and authors throughout This is All Your Fault, but could you recommend a book according to each of the girls’ (and Eli’s and AJ’s) personalities, so that our readers can pick a book according to their favorite character?
Oh, wow! Let’s see. Daniella would tell you to read Mary Robinson, a thoroughly wild and bright Romantic, as the best of the Romantic poets often are. She thinks you should find more women poets, particularly in the classical and historical genres, in general— they’ve been there the whole time.
Rinn thinks that you should read a really great love story. She’s extremely partial to Their Eyes Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston because it’s a self-love story and those are the best kind of all.
Imogen thinks you should read The Odyssey as translated by Emily Wilson so that you can understand the difference a translator makes. She thinks you should read Impostures by al-Hariri once you’ve realized that. And then maybe you should read Eva Luna by Isabel Allende.
Eli thinks you should read Finnikin of the Rock by Melina Marchetta as long as you’ve already read The Lord of the Rings.
Obviously, AJ thinks you should read Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers.
To conclude, could you give us a little hint at your future plans? What are you working on at the moment?
I am working on a re-telling of Robin Hood for the Classics Remixed series from Feiwel and Friends! The first book will be a re-telling of Treasure Island, out in last 2021 and mine should be releasing in winter of 2022. I’m so excited to get my hands on all of the books this series and I’m so thrilled to get to write a historical novel. Stay tuned!
