Aridjis studied comparative literature at Harvard University and wrote a thesis on "Night and the Poetic Self" in Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal at the University of Oxford, under the supervision of Malcolm Bowie before completing a doctorate on "the interface between high and popular art in nineteenth-century France with a special focus on the relationship between poetry, magic shows and literature of the fantastic".

[4][5] As a teenager she had a bilingual exposure to pop in Mexico City, listening to British bands while discovering their Mexican equivalents at a gay goth club.

[6] She met great poets such as Jorge Luis Borges and Ted Hughes at international poetry festivals her parents organised in the early 1980s.

[4] She publishes in journals and newspapers in England, Mexico, among them essays for Granta on insomnia and the psychological fallout of space travel on Soviet cosmonauts.

[4] Her debut novel Book of Clouds was published in the US by Grove Press in winter 2009, and by Chatto and Windus in the UK in July 2009, in the Netherlands, and by Mercure de France in September 2009.

[11] Regina Marler in the Los Angeles Times drew attention to Aridjis's "magic and poetry", and described "an unsettling atmosphere unlike anything in recent fiction.

[6] The novel concerns two museum guards, one at the National Gallery in London, for whom life and art begin to overtake each other in surreal and unsettling ways.

[21] She was co-curator of the Leonora Carrington exhibition at Tate Liverpool that opened in March 2015[22] and she occasionally writes for frieze[23] and other art journals.