Getting Personal

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I first met Nina Sharma ’05 in a Barnard Fiction Writing class in the spring of 2005. We became fast friends, maintaining an email correspondence that lasted about a decade until we both found ourselves back at Barnard, this time as faculty — Nina is an adjunct associate professor in English; I’m a lecturer in French. 

We sat down recently to reminisce and talk about her memoir, The Way You Make Me Feel: Love in Black and Brown (Penguin). The book is centered around a fated Fourth of July, the day she met her now-husband, the poet Quincy Scott Jones, who is also a term associate in English at Barnard. Their courtship, marriage, and creative partnership are the backdrop against which Sharma navigates Afro-Asian solidarity (Sharma is South Asian; Jones is Black), breaking down its complexity by weaving in discussions of pop culture, politics, and police brutality in the United States.

Hadley Suter: Looking back on that fiction class, you and I were probably the least likely to end up anywhere near a college campus as adults. But the difficulty of your college years is a subject you treat closely in your memoir.

Nina Sharma: Well, that’s been really important for me, not just as a writer but as a professor, to share stories of feeling totally messed up throughout the whole college experience. Especially at a place like Barnard, where everyone has this veneer of being so on track and so on top of everything. But that fiction class was one of the first places at Barnard where — with a lot of trial and error — I started to find my own way. It was the first writing class I took, and so it was the first time a lot of the stuff I dealt with in the book started coming out, garbled at first. But there were a few moments — someone saying, “Wow, I really love that sentence” — that would just keep me going all week. These burgeoning creative identities are so delicate. They need so much coddling at first, to build the habit, for the habit to become a calling. And it’s great to get that from a teacher, but often you get it from a peer, and that can be just as valuable.

HS: I had a guest speaker in my Surrealism class last fall [Met curator Stephanie D’Alessandro], and she really emphasized that to the students, too — that your friends now will be your colleagues later. You’ve spent a lot of time in writing and improv groups. It seems like you’ve always seen writing as being part of a community, rather than a solitary ambition.

NS: Definitely. I think that’s the basis of the writing workshop system. I would even say that I came to writing looking first for the community. I didn’t have the aspiration to be like Joan Didion, or to be like Toni Morrison, or whatever. Which is not to say that’s a bad aspiration. But for me it was more, “Can I do this?” It was dealing with that urge to write, which was in constant battle with this other feeling of hesitation, more than any sort of clear-cut ambition. And I couldn’t figure it out alone; I had to find people to figure that out with. And the more people I found who were also asking those questions, the more I felt like myself. I tell my students, join a literary magazine. If you get rejected, start your own with your friends. You all submit, you put it together, you throw a launch party, celebrate it! You make your own first bylines. Become a submission reader for journals you admire. That’s how I ended up finding places like the Asian American Writers Workshop, which profoundly changed my life. 

HS: Has improv informed your approach to humor in your writing?

NS: Improv and performance always remind me that we write with our whole bodies. Improv and comedy to me are more about rhythm and timing than forcing a joke. I think that’s the main lesson I brought back to the page.

HS: I remember you wrote your thesis on Willa Cather and that you really loved her. Do you still love her? How has your literary taste changed?

NS: Funny you should mention. Two summers ago, I picked up My Ántonia. Midway, I hit this part where she describes a Black man. And it was a racist description. And I felt … pushed out of the book. Shortly after, I read Margo Jefferson’s Constructing a Nervous System, which I loved, and in the book she talks about teaching Willa Cather. Jefferson writes about this conundrum in a beautiful way — how to wrestle with a text that means something to you, or used to, but that couldn’t or wouldn’t imagine you.

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HS: The essays in your book play a lot with this idea of the self’s inner monologue being manipulated not only by pop music but commercial culture more generally. For example, in a few essays, you insert snippets of imagined screenplays for advertisements. 

NS: I wanted to show the ways our minds are warped through these different cultural filters so that to write a book today and not have the text acknowledge these manipulations — in content and in form — would be dishonest. I also think being a political writer means thinking through what it means to be human in both ordinary and extraordinary ways. The inner monologue of our identity plays out as much when we’re watching trash TV as it does when we’re reading theory.

HS: How did you arrive at the essay structure?

NS: Shoutout to Barnard’s Fiction and Personal Narrative class! I took that course with Timea Szell my senior year, and it was one of the spaces where I began to fall in love with the essay. In fact, I wrote an early version of “Shithole Country Clubs,” which appears in the book, in that class. It was called “Country Club Dinners.” “Essay” comes from the French essai — attempt. And that class, thanks to Timea, was an incredibly safe space to attempt, to get personal, to name things you haven’t otherwise named before.