The Way You Make Me Feel: Love In Black and Brown

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. (May)