December 1, 2023
Sharma debuts with a memoir in essays as she talks about her love story with a Black man and the racism they encounter due to their interracial marriage. Interweaving history, pop culture, and politics, she also tackles issues of caste, colorism, and mental health. Prepub Alert.
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Starred review from January 15, 2024
Musings on the South Asian author's marriage to a Black writer, popular culture, and more. About two-thirds of the way into this meandering collection, Sharma writes about attending a writing workshop at a bookstore. "I don't have anything to write about. All I have been doing is wedding things," she worries. "How about writing about those wedding things?" suggests her fiance, Quincy. Unfortunately, the author's storytelling urge never gets much more urgent than that. It's not that she has nothing to say about their interracial relationship, which Sharma frames in the context of allyship, but there's not much forward momentum in its unfolding. They watched Mississippi Masala, about a similar love; later, they became fans of The Walking Dead. Sharma braids her discussion of the death of a popular Asian character on the latter with a review of the facts in the 1982 hate-motivated murder of Vincent Chin. This examination connects to discussion of more recent hate crimes, including the shootings of Asians in Atlanta and George Floyd's murder in Minneapolis. We take a slight detour into the author's history with improv comedy and emerge to discuss the Lovings and their "almost decade-long fight for their interracial marriage." Then, back to the 2011 wedding, then back to Floyd, and then a chapter titled "We Can Neither Confirm Nor Deny That Kamala Harris Is Our Time Traveling Daughter." This chapter is largely about the freezing and maintenance of Sharma's eggs, leaping back and forth through a timeline stretching from 1958 to 2022. The author also includes her sharply funny 2019 essay, "Shithole Country Clubs," which was inspired by her father's membership at Donald Trump's New Jersey golf club, and she salts the text liberally with jokes and wisecracks. (Nina: "Is there anyone like a 'rich activist'?" Quincy: "Batman.") The path of allyship unfolds, with some gems along the way.
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March 11, 2024
This sinuous debut memoir-in-essays from Sharma, who is of Indian descent, utilizes her romance with Quincy Scott Jones, a Black poet, as a jumping-off point for wide-ranging meditations on American and Indian culture, racism in the U.S., and Afro-Asian solidarity. Her essays circle around dueling personal and historical plotlines; for example, she unpacks the racial politics of hair in the U.S. (surfacing rarely discussed facts, such as that the import of Asian hair for wig-making was banned in the U.S. until 1966) in an entry grappling with her parents’ complaints about Jones’s dreadlocks during their 2011 wedding preparations. In another piece, Sharma’s father’s tone-deaf insistence that the couple hold a wedding-related event at Donald Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., is foregrounded against Barack Obama’s release that same year of his birth certificate in response to Trump’s racist conspiracy theories. (Sharma is unsparing of her family in these sections—some of their remarks are cringingly racist.) As Sharma’s narrative roves, she forms unexpected pop cultural associations, sometimes wringing humor from heavy subjects. (Reflecting on the possessed house in the movie Evil Dead, she writes: “Living as a minority in America is living in a house laughing at you and living as a model minority is joining in that laughter.”) The result is a powerfully forthright portrait of an interracial relationship that doubles as an insightful investigation into the history of racism in America.
April 15, 2024
Sensual, sharp, and raw, Sharma's memoir digs deep into the roots intertwining anti-Black racism and America's South Asian diaspora, unearthing what often remains unsaid when establishing true allyship. Embedding lustful descriptions of romance in an immigrant story complicated by colonialism, Sharma's 16 narrative essays contemplate the racial truths and uncertainties brought forth through her budding relationship with Quincy, a Black man who eventually becomes her husband, and how their relationship is perceived by their families, the broader society, and themselves. Through the lens of being in an interracial relationship, Sharma cleverly draws on pop culture, political discourse, and academic writing to deliver social criticism that persistently highlights the racial discrimination running beneath the surface of American policies and social conventions. Just as impressive as Sharma's composed, polished, and wholly sincere writing is her range of topics, including mental health, the model minority, police brutality, familial trauma, and COVID-19's anti-East Asian racism--the breadth of which illustrates the complex racial fabric of America today.
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