Love in Black and Brown
A conversation with author Nina Sharma about writing her new memoir “The Way You Make Me Feel.”
Issue #69
Hi all —
Below is a condensed version of one of my favorite conversations of the last few months — the kind of interview that was supposed to be half an hour and went long for an hour.
Nina Sharma is a writer who teaches at Barnard College and Columbia University. She was formerly the programs director at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and also co-founded New York City’s first South Asian women’s improv team.
In May, Sharma published her memoir, “The Way You Make Me Feel,” which is a collection of essays reflecting on her life through the lenses of identity, her interracial relationship and her mental health.
I continue to be thrilled to see such candid books from fellow second-generation South Asian Americans, because these are the works that are sparking new conversations about our experiences.
Thanks for reading,
Vignesh Ramachandran (on Signal at 773-599-3717)
Co-founder of Red, White and Brown Media
Q&A with author Nina Sharma about memoir “The Way You Make Me Feel”
Nina Sharma spoke with Red, White and Brown about her new memoir, “The Way You Make Me Feel,” which was released this spring.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
RWB: In your new book, you write about a point when you questioned what it would be like to share the pleasure of writing with the world — something you’ve now done professionally for many years. Tell us about your journey starting writing.
Sharma: I was always writing — with some interruptions — because life happens. I always want people to know that having interruptions to writing life doesn’t mean you’re not a writer.
As a kid, my sister would tape me reciting poems on cassette tapes. What is striking to me about those tapes is how seriously I took it, and I’m really grateful for the nurturing, especially by my sister. I’m grateful for a lot of my teachers that noticed it before I noticed it and mentored it, even when I did not realize they were doing that. This was all parallel with having this urge to write.
I really just thought that the thing to do would be to fall into the footsteps of my parents, who are doctors. But even from an early age, I could see myself rebelling against that. Small decisions to not take AP Biology felt enormous to me. Even in my teen years, I knew by not making that decision, I was making a choice that felt foreign to me. It almost feels a little bit like I had to make a certain amount of choices to get to the point where I was ready to admit that I wanted to do this. I started to just feel more like myself.
RWB: You write about what it means to talk about race and identity after a lifetime of rarely talking about it. What fueled the drive to start writing about race and identity?
Sharma: Realizing that I wanted to be a writer was this moment where I just wanted to do something that really felt like I could just take a sigh and just be myself in life. It made life a lot easier. I found that same sort of feeling when I found ethnic studies programs and classes in both college and grad school. It all of a sudden felt like I was within this language that really felt to me like the language of self-care.
I really always wanted to take to self-help books, especially in times of struggle, but I never could. Finding the language of ethnic studies, programs and classes — the language of critical race theory — with which I could identify these things that almost felt like hunches in me felt so good.
I knew when it came time to writing this book, it would forever be part of the way I write, because it’s just more and more the way that I consciously thought. I feel like I found language that really could help me think about what I went through and what my family and I went through together collectively. And to start to have a conversation with myself before I even had it with them, and then finding ways of connecting with them with this kind of newfound awareness and empathy that comes from thinking about this stuff — the history of South Asian immigration, how it intersects with the 1965 Immigration Act born out of the civil rights movement, and the way that the model and problem minority myths play off of each other.
RWB: There are reflections of South Asian American race and identity in your book, but also the community’s relationship with Blackness and white supremacy. By addressing those things, what do you hope our communities reflect on?
Sharma: The experience of assimilation. I think anti-Blackness is baked into that. In the most simplest way, thinking about how the model and the problem minority myths are kind of opposing stereotypes that uphold the ultimate myth of white supremacy. By playing into the model minority stereotype, we suffer both by closeting who we really are in this mode to survive. There’s something really primal to assimilation, making all these decisions because we think that this is the way that we can achieve.
What I hope is clear in the book is that it’s an imperfect and ongoing act. It’s a lot like doing improv comedy: You are just putting one foot ahead of you, every time. You have to let go of ideas, of right or wrong, and give things an honest try. If you can be generous with yourself with … what’s in your blind spots about race and ethnicity and what you know, I think we all can grow a lot quicker to where we want to go.
I hope that this book can be a space for people to feel OK with being vulnerable — and maybe have more vulnerable conversations with each other. I think that’s no small feat to be able to do, especially when it comes to thinking about love. I hope that this book can be a space that might offer a way into conversations that are more tender than maybe we often have.
RWB: You write about your own experiences facing mental health challenges and frame it so aptly: The monster is not mental health, but the stigma. I really appreciated your candor in sharing everything from suicide attempts to seeing psychiatrists to medications. What do you hope that conveys?
Sharma: I just hope it makes people feel like they’re not alone. It’s more common than one thinks. We’re walking down the street. We’re in Duane Reade right next to you. This book was the journey of me getting OK with talking about my own mental health.
I went to graduate school for nonfiction and memoir writing, and I just never touched talking about my mental health ever. I did write about my life, but it would never touch this thing that felt so fundamental to my story. Finally, the very last class of graduate school, I went to my thesis teacher and I remember sitting there and telling her that I had always wanted to write about having bipolar disorder. Whenever I had tried to write about it, it was with so much shame that it stopped me. The writing felt almost punitive.
She asked me about my mental health experiences: Nina, when you were going through all of that, did you ever experience any pleasure? Nobody had asked me that question. No one had ever framed thinking about mental health in that way. I always thought of it as some kind of struggle story. But immediately when she said pleasure, I pictured it — myself in a bright, fuchsia dress that I put on during a manic episode. All of a sudden the story started to come to me in technicolor in a way that it hadn’t before. I felt like I was able to finally tell the story free of stigma and judgment and really just get into the senses of it.
RWB: Your husband Quincy Scott Jones is a big part of your story in your memoir. Did he follow your writing process along the way?
Sharma: Quincy reads drafts at every stage. He’s a writer, too, so we’re always sharing work together. It’s the language of our household — sharing these ideas and kind of creating things together. So he is definitely part of the process of this book being made and us thinking through our journey together.
RWB: I think there are so many people out there who have amazing stories locked up inside themselves. Can you talk about how Asian American writing workshops and communities have been important spaces in your own writing career?
Sharma: I owe a great debt to the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, where I worked before I fully came out as a writer. It really was a place where I just constantly had conversations where art and politics came together every minute of the day. It was part of what you talked about at the watercooler, it was part of what you plan, it was part of the joy of being together. Kundiman is another Asian American arts organization, and another one of those places where I feel like I grew up as a writer.
These are places that I went to at the start of my writing career when I was still sort of like: Am I going to fill out medical school applications? Because I felt like I should be doing that. I would go to all these spaces and hear all these writers and really felt like: Oh, they’re talking about something that happened to me.
That, really — incrementally — is how I felt the permission to write my own story. I had never before just seen so many people at spaces that center Asian American stories. We need to talk more about what it means to pass through these spaces and how they impact us.
Your thoughts
Please email us to share your feedback, story ideas or anything else you’re thinking about these days:
Red, White and Brown Media facilitates substantive conversations through the lens of South Asian American race and identity — via journalism, social media and events. Please tell your friends and family to subscribe to this newsletter.
Follow Vignesh on Threads, Twitter/X and Instagram via @VigneshR.