photograph by Sylvie Rosokoff
“I wanted kisses that were secrets I controlled.” — Nichole Perkins, “Fast”
Nashville-born, Brooklyn-based author Nichole Perkins contains multitudes. She is also a poet, an essayist, and a podcast host. And, of course, she’s also a person, someone who cannot be defined by a career. This month, Perkins’ memoir will be a selection for writer Roxane Gay’s book club.
Virtual events have become a regular aspect of Perkins’ life recently, as she has worked to promote her recently released memoir, Sometimes I Trip on How Happy We Could Be (Grand Central Publishing).
Every Chapter a Memory
I wrote the bulk of it during the pandemic last year,” Perkins says, explaining that it was a strange experience to delve deep into her memory while feeling so disconnected from anything resembling a normal routine. She did experience a “weird sense of timelessness” as many people did during the pandemic, adding a wrinkle to the already difficult task of writing a memoir.
“That’s one of the reasons I wanted to anchor the book in pop culture,” Perkins says of her memoir, which uses seemingly disparate pop culture icons as touchstones. “I’m not super great at dates,” she admits, “but I can remember what I was listening to, what I was watching, what were the TV shows we were talking about in class.” So by using Kermit the Frog, Prince, or Frasier’s Niles Crane (played by David Hyde Pierce), Perkins is able to anchor her memories. But her detective work doesn’t end with the pop culture references elegantly infused in her essays. “I had to do a lot of googling,” Perkins says with a laugh. “I’m sure the FBI agent in my computer was like, ‘What is she looking up?’”
She wrote a chapter called “The Women” about her great-grandmother, her aunt, and her sister. To help inspire herself, Perkins went to dollar stores and bought soap like the kind her great-grandmother used to have. She would smell the soap to help encourage the memory. “I was living in New York while I wrote the book, so a lot of the Southern smells from my childhood are not here,” Perkins says.
Sometimes I Trip on How Happy We Could Be is at times heartwarming and heartbreaking, honest and humane, humorous and haunting. It’s the chronicle of Perkins’ growth into herself as a person, as a Black Southern woman, as someone who fully inhabits her body, and as someone who has had to learn by trial and error what all of that means.
She also wants to write screenplays and audio dramas, but, for all Perkins’ interests, she says her home base is behind the keyboard. Whether they’re fans of music and TV trivia, or spirituality, or body positivity and self-love, or if they just enjoy a funny story about a bad date, readers can count themselves lucky as long as Perkins keeps following her passion.
“You can be in kindergarten sitting next to a boy and you’re just having a really good time being silly 5-year-olds, and someone will pull you away,” Perkins says, explaining that there are different standards of propriety for girls and boys, and later, for women and men. She also understands that the harsher expectations for young girls are a “fear response” borne out of a desire to protect the girls. It’s a complex social structure, a balancing act between what is acceptable and freedom, between self-discovery and safety.
Sometimes I Trip on How Happy We Could Be is a story, told in essays and with references to Prince songs (the collection’s title comes from Prince’s “If I Was Your Girlfriend”), of someone coming into her own “like a storm gaining strength just off the coast,” as Memphis-born writer Saeed Jones says on the back of the book.
I Contain Multitudes
Serena is so many things,” Perkins writes in “Softness,” noting the acclaimed athlete Serena Williams also owns a clothing line, makes jewelry, and went to school to learn how to do nails, “but her focused athleticism intimidates many, so they resort to the laziest insult. Her treatment reminds me that for people who believe gender exists as a binary, there are only absolutes. You are either masculine or you’re feminine, and there’s no room for nuance.”
In Sometimes I Trip on How Happy We Could Be, Perkins has made room for nuance, for her own multitudes. She is the author of the poetry collection Lilith, but Dark, and she says poetry was her “first real writing love.” She is the host of This Is Good for You, and she was the co-host of Thirst Aid Kit and The Wave, though she says she thinks of herself as a writer first. “I kind of fell into podcasting,” She moved to New York for a culture writing fellowship in 2017, and she began podcasting. “I love podcasting,” she says, “but I don’t want to take up space from people who have gone to school for it, or it’s their true calling.”
Her answer is kind and graceful; not every creative person considers the space they take up, or makes sure to leave room for others. That kindness is evidenced throughout her book, even when Perkins is leaning into humor or criticism. And those considerations are necessary now, when wide availability of hand-held supercomputers (we usually just call them smartphones) has made many artists the de facto hubs for an entire creative enterprise. It’s not unheard of for people to shoot and edit films on their phones, to record and edit a promotional podcast, and to run their own PR campaign.
“I’m Generation X, and I was told for a long time that you have to have one area of expertise, that if you were too many things, people would think that you lack focus,” Perkins says. The media environment has changed, though. “People want you to be able to do as much as possible. They want you to be that one-stop shop. I do have a lot of interests. I want to write everything. I want to write fiction.” She also wants to write screenplays and audio dramas, but, for all Perkins’ interests, she says her home base is behind the keyboard. Whether they’re fans of music and TV trivia, or spirituality, or body positivity and self-love, or if they just enjoy a funny story about a bad date, readers can count themselves lucky as long as Perkins keeps following her passion.
“I feel very anchored in writing,” she says. “That’s what I want to do until I’m ashes in the wind.”
