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 a person, someone who cannot be defined by a career. This weekend, Perkins will discuss her multifaceted writing and life as a panelist in the Southern Festival of Books, which is being presented virtually this year, giving Memphians an easy option for viewing the usually Nashville-based literature festival.
Virtual events have become a regular aspect of Perkins’ life this year, as she has worked to promote her recently released memoir, Sometimes I Trip on How Happy We Could Be (Grand Central Publishing).
“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 Sometimes I Trip, 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.
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 soap her great-grandmother used to have. She would smell the soap to help encourage the memories to come. “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. It’s a story, told in essays and with references to Prince songs, 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.
“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. The book is an excellent work of memoir, and it should not be missed.
Nichole Perkins is a panelist for the Southern Festival of Books’ “In Conversation: Brian Broome, Anjali Enjeti, and Nichole Perkins” event on October 9th, 4:15 p.m. To find out more or attend the festival’s virtual events, go to sofestofbooks.org.