It Has to Be Imperfect  

An interview with Nina Sharma, author of The Way You Make Me Feel: Love in Black and Brown

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Nina Sharma is a writer, performer, and adjunct professor of English at Barnard College. Her writing has been featured in The New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar, Electric Literature, Women’s Studies Quarterly, The Margins, and Longreads. Last fall Nina published her debut collection of personal essays, The Way You Make Me Feel: Love in Black and Brown (Penguin Press, 2024). Nina is also a proud co-founder of Not Your Biwi Improv and co-creator of Blackshop, a column on Anomaly that thinks about allyship among BIPOC people. In a conversation that happened mere hours after the 2024 US presidential election, BCRW research assistant Sydney Johnson (BC ‘25) sat down with Sharma to talk about the themes in her newest book. Influenced by the turbulent American political climate, the two discussed what it means to write about love and solidarity during hard times. 

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Sydney Johnson: Why did you decide to write your first book about your relationship with your husband, Quincy? 

Nina Sharma: This is the origin story: in 2012 we were in the middle of planning the wedding and I was so stressed out. I never really saw myself as a bridezilla girl, but I was kind of becoming a bridezilla girl. Unhinged, I Googled, “Afro-Indian wedding stress,” but nothing came up. I was going on all these wedding forums and nothing. So I thought, I should write about this. Write about the wedding, write about this experience, and write about what it means to represent this Afro-Indian union. 

Later, once I started writing, I found this Instagram account called the Blindian Project. It has a lot of activist content but also shows a lot of pictures of Afro-Indian couples. I just thought, wow, I did not have that. How powerful. Of course, there was also Mississippi Masala, an amazing 1991 film that depicts an Afro-Indian couple, which I talk about in the book. So I hoped my book could contribute to this cultural archive and support efforts to build Afro-Indian solidarity. 

SJ: Can you share a little bit about your writing process? 

NS: Maybe by way of telling a story about one of the first essays I wrote about me and Q, which is now in the book. I wrote it twelve years ago and it’s about Quincy cutting his dreadlocks for the wedding. My mom kept on him about it, wanting them gone for the wedding. His family was encouraging it too, yes, but while his family’s bugging felt like kidding around, my mom’s bugging landed differently. And then it became a dynamic between me and him. I wanted to explore all of that. 

I wrote this essay in almost one go. A few days before I wrote it, I was in a writing class. I was handing in all this flash fiction and the teacher who mostly loved my work said some of it was starting to read unclear. She asked me to clarify what I wanted to say. The critique catalyzed me. I realized I was hiding in the guise of experimentation—no shade at all on experimentation, I just wasn’t actually expressing myself through it—and that if I was going to say what I really wanted to say I needed to try my hand at this story burning inside me, the dreadlocks story. It shot out of me. I felt like I had never written anything as good or true as that. That’s when I realized there was more to say, a whole story about Afro-Asian relations in America, anti-Blackness in South Asian America, that I wanted to write about in that honest way. And in writing this particular story, I realized that a story of painful choices and sacrifice, which is what the dreadlock essay is now called, twelve years later, “Sacrifice,” that can be a love story too.  That was my first longform essay and once I popped, I never wanted to stop.

SJ: What made you choose the essay form for this book? What made you fall in love with the essay?

NS: It started when I was working at a bookstore in Philadelphia called Big Blue Marble in 2012. If you’re a writer you know bookstores are amazing, indie bookstores especially. Support your local bookstore! If you don’t have a bookstore, the Big Blue Marble is really great! So I was around what was going on, you know, what was current in literature which was really cool. And I was taking a writing workshop at the bookstore called Life Writing. It was taught by Minter Krotzer who became like a mentor to me. She did such a wonderful job championing and curating a creative nonfiction section at the bookstore. Her husband, the legendary poet Hal Sirowitz, is worth mentioning too. They really took Q and me under their wings. That was the first time I saw two working writers as a couple, knitting together a community based on love and allyship.

During that time Minter pointed me to Phillip Lopate’s The Art of the Personal Essay anthology, James Baldwin’s Notes of A Native Son, and Eula Biss’ Notes from No Man’s Land. Reading those essays made me think about the hard stories about life and how the essay can be this powerful and playful form to release them. 

SJ: A lot of your stories are about love. Why do you find it important to write about love today? 

NS: I’m thinking of the Toni Morrison quote from Beloved that I use at the start of one of my essays: “Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.” It is often said the opposite of love is not hate but indifference. I think that’s what she gets at here. Today, in this country and globally, we reckon not just with hate but a frightening indifference, a thin love: for Black and brown Americans, for marginalized folks, for Palestinians killed and suffering in Israel’s ongoing genocide against them. Love is a matter of life and death.           

I’m also thinking of Q’s line in another one of my essays that originally comes from a moment when he was watching the George Floyd murder coverage. He said, “America likes to kill us. Americans like to watch.” Today we were talking about what he wanted to say to his students about Donald Trump’s reelection and what we came to is: survival. What it means to survive, time and again, that which tries to come for us. 

I often discuss how my love for rom coms is stitched into the book. But to go deeper, this book is born of knowing that any story about Black and brown love is necessarily a story about survival, much like my beloved Mississippi Masala. 

SJ: What are the virtues or merits of writing about broader themes like race, immigration, class, and mental illness through the lens of love and partnership? 

NS: Love and partnership work together. It’s essential to any partnership to talk about these things simply because they affect your life. Talking about mental illness, race, class—we couldn’t help it. We were living it. That’s why it’s critical for me, absolutely critical, to write about these things when I’m writing about love. I don’t even think there’s a way they could not be part of the story. 

White America bills race as a story about pain, but Black and brown people are more than just our pain. A love story, an American love story, is by default white. If there’s a love story about a non-white couple, that’s all they are: non-white. If the love story is interracial, one person is white and one person is non-white. In rom-coms, non-white people are the white lead’s helpful best friend, the underwritten neighbor, the colleague in the background. Their love lives are never given a second thought. Quincy and I are none of those things. So I wanted to write a love story that shows us in our fullness, in the humanity we aren’t always granted.

I’ll also add that Q and I both come from organizing backgrounds and I think our love was born from an understanding of the value and practice of coalition building. You need to be in constant conversation about what solidarity is, what histories of struggle are informing us, where they meet, where they don’t. We have those conversations around a table in a serious way, but also when we do the dishes or we’re kissing. They’re just there. They’re a part of our life. This has become a way we move through the world and consequently a way we move with others too. Love can be a way to build an enduring and healing coalition. I hope our book offers one way in.

SJ: I think it does. It is also wonderfully humorous. Why is comedy important to you? How has humor specifically played a role in your relationship with Quincy and your relationship with other people, like your family? 

NS: Comedy is a way of talking that feels most natural to me. Maybe this is because I grew up with a jokester dad and I was often his sidekick. My dad recently told me a story that I didn’t remember about when I was a kid and we were watching a Spanish TV show. As he tells it, I asked him what they were saying and he said, “They are making fun of white people,” and we both laughed. When he shared it, I laughed with him but I also felt a little sad. What brought about this type of joke? What had my dad gone through as an immigrant assimilating into white America? It reminded me that comedy often comes from pain. Now I’m thinking of one of my OG favorite movies, which my dad hipped me to, It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963). This caper-comedy stars the late, great Jonathan Winters. Winters, like me, had bipolar disorder, and he was one of the first celebrities whose diagnosis was known to the public. When given the option of getting ECT [electroconvulsive therapy], which the doctors said would erase some of the pain he was feeling, he declined. He said, “I need that pain—whatever it is—to call upon it from time to time, no matter how bad it was.” 

SJ: Although many of your essays focus on your relationship with Quincy, I noticed another thread throughout the book: how you grew into yourself. Can you talk about how your relationships have led to personal growth? 

NS: Well, it goes back to comedy. A lowkey storyline in the book is my journey into comedy on my own terms, no more translating to a white audience, which culminated in my co-founding the all-South Asian women improv group Not Your Biwi Improv. I think part of falling for Quincy, part of the love and solidarity we were building, happened by making each other laugh and resisting softening our edges for a perceived white audience. I talk about this in “Animal Strip Club” when I chronicle our early dating days, flirting stitched with jokes traded in barrooms with our Black and brown chosen fam. I had never experienced this type of joking in a large friend group: humor for us, by us. There was a lot of laughter, but when the conversation pivoted to discussing race and racism, I receded. I grew quiet. I didn’t like that. I knew I wanted to get to know Quincy. I didn’t want to stop talking to him. So why was I holding back? “Animal Strip Club” is an exploration of that. Speech is not like an allocation, like money hoarded by the few. We can all speak up. I thought I needed to speak to keep the flow of conversation going with Quincy, but in reality the more I was willing to speak on my relationship to race, the more I found a closeness with myself. 

SJ: How does it feel to write yourself into broader narratives about immigration, race, politics, and culture in America? 

NS: How can you not? As writers we think a lot about the idea of giving yourself a voice and representing yourself authentically. That’s really what I want to do, to create a character that is real who people can relate to. 

SJ: How did you navigate writing the intersections of anti-Black and anti-Asian racism? 

NS: I kept a set of questions at the top of my mind as I wrote: At what point is allyship a political statement? At what point is it just people living their lives? In love and marriage, is allyship a given? Or does it require an effort as big as the history of racism in this country?

Afro-Asian allyship wasn’t and isn’t a given in America. Like many other Asian immigrants, my parents came over here via the 1965 Immigration Act when the US, with the desire to beat the Russians in the space race, opened its doors wider than it ever had to Asian immigrants.  

But what truly gave that wave of Asian American immigrants a shot at a more equitable life in America were the gains of the Black American Civil Rights Movement. That movement was the origin of efforts toward diversity in the workplace, the struggle and formation of ethnic studies programs, and even the development of the term “Asian American.” That’s enough for Afro-Asian allyship, right? Enough for us all to band together against the perennial threat of white supremacy? 

That’s not what happened. 

The birth and perpetuation of the model minority myth is what happened. The shooting of Latasha Harlins by Soon Ja Du, a Korean American convenience store owner, and the subsequent LA riots is what happened. Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard where Asian Americans were used as a wedge to undo Affirmative Action is what happened. Officer Tou Thao with his hands in his pocket while Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd is what happened. 

This book, our love affair, is haunted by this reality. I wrote propelled by this haunting.   

SJ: Has publishing essays that delve deeply into your relationships with Quincy, your family, and your friends published had an impact on those relationships? What was it like for you to publish something so personal? 

NS: As I was dating Quincy and writing this book I knew: I have to talk to my parents about race. I was worried about writing about them. I often tell my students there’s the “23 and Me” version of a family story, the version those DNA test commercials sell that tells a warm and fuzzy genealogy tale—the end. But that’s not a full story. And I am in it to tell our stories in their fullness. I hoped that by rendering people in their fullness, forgoing neat binaries of heroes and villains, and creating deeply human portraits, readers including my family would see themselves and their loved ones, warts and all, and feel seen and loved. I hoped, and worried, my family would feel that way. 

In my essay “Sacrifice” I wanted to show that talking about race means talking about a lot of things at once. It can start with that infographic from Instagram or that fight you had with your father, but it must come to an understanding that racism impacts so many parts of our lives and our loved ones’ lives. For people of color in America, talking about racism is also about talking through trauma in our families. I hope I showed both in this book: people having those direct talks about racism but having normal conversations and confronting traumas together. 

My first public foray into writing about family was in my essay “Shithole Country Clubs,” which was about my father. I was very nervous. I initially published it in 2019 in The Margins, a publication of Asian American Writers’ Workshop, long before I knew I was up to a book. This past October, at my hometown local library, New Jersey’s Woodbridge Library, I read part of that essay out loud to a packed house. My dad was in the front row.

SJ: Wow. That is powerful. Did he know you were going to read it? 

NS: No, nor did I know until the essay came up in the Q&A. So I read it in the midst of the Q&A actually. And once I did I felt something in me shift. Like, there, that wasn’t so bad. There was laughter, there was my mom interjecting when I got to her dialogue about missing wedding turbans—“I still don’t know where those turbans are!”—and then there was the essay’s controlling question: why did my father falsely insist that I got married at Trump’s country club? The whole time I was reading, I was thinking am I going to stop before I get there? But I didn’t. I said it and the world kept spinning and my dad looked like he took it well or well enough. People say debuting is the journey from writer to author. That was a moment when I felt like it happened. 

I want to shout out my co-readers and fellow Jersey people, Tara Sarath and Faria Ali. Community is everything and I don’t know if I would have had this incredible moment without them, the way they were so bold with their words that evening. 

SJ: What are some key themes that you want people to take away from this book?  

NS: A few months ago at the Blasian March Book Festival one of my fellow panelists Lafi Melo said, “Solidarity is realizing the connections that are between us that are already there.” I love that way of putting it. What has stood in the way of our awareness—white supremacy, is that you again?—and what can we do about it? That was a big part of the book, how falling in love and growing our relationship was an ongoing awakening for me and Q. As a rom-com lover frequently disappointed by cringe-worthy Black and brown representation, I wanted to create more real, complicated and human portraits of Black and brown people loving and living.

Another thing is an important lesson I’ve learned from improv comedy. Improv that works has to be imperfect. There’s no plan, so there’s no way to perfect the act, and in that way it mimics life. I think that’s how love and solidarity work at their best. That’s what I’d say this book is about. It’s not a how-to-guide, but a flawed and messy record of what happens when we try. When we aim for perfection, we fall dead in the water. So be imperfect, try, keep going. 

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Bibliography 

Baldwin, James. Notes of A Native Son. Beacon Press, 1955.
Biss, Eula. Notes from No Man’s Land. Graywolf, 2009.
Kramer, Stanley, director. It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World. United Artists, 1963.
Lopate, Phillip. The Art of the Personal Essay. Vintage, 1995.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Vintage International, 2004 [1987].
Nair, Mira, director. Mississippi Masala. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer & Cinecom, 1991.