Welcome to the Book Marks Questionnaire, where we ask authors questions about the books that have shaped them.
This week, we spoke to Brown White Black author Nishta J. Mehra.
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Book Marks: First book you remember loving?
Nishta J. Mehra: Probably Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls. That was the start of falling in love with books that broke me open. I still crave that feeling.
BM: Favorite re-read?
NM: Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese because it is my favorite kind of novel: historical fiction in the backdrop, set in a country other than the one in which I live, characters you grow to know intimately, plus plenty of intergenerational love & tragedy.
BM: A book that blew your mind?
NM: The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells. A must-read not simply for the facts it contains, but for the brilliant framing of those facts. Essentially, it is a book about the stories we humans tell ourselves and the power inside of those stories.
BM: Last book you read?
NM: Just finished listening to The Night Watchman on audio; I love it when authors read their own books (as I was lucky enough to be able to do!) and Louise Erdrich has a wonderfully soothing yet animated reading voice.
BM: A book that made you cry?
NM: When I finished Fatima Mirza’s A Place for Us, I ugly cried. Very rare in my experience that contemporary fiction grows stronger in the last quarter of the book, but this one—my goodness, what an ending.
BM: What book from the past year would you like to give a shout-out to?
NM: Sarah Vap’s poetry collection Winter: Effulgences and Devotions. Poetry is one of the few things keeping me going during quarantine, and this collection is stunning.
BM: A book that actually made you laugh out loud?
NM: The Sellout by Paul Beatty—it’s a brilliant piece of satire so astonishing I regularly paused to say to my wife “You gotta hear this!” and then read passages of it aloud.
BM: Classic book you hate?
NM: From first grade through graduate school, there has only been one time that I did not finish an assigned book, and that was with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I just could not get through it.
BM: Favorite book you were assigned in high school?
NM: Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.
BM: Book(s) you’re reading right now?
NM: Gish Jen’s The Resisters and Sarah Kendzior’s Hiding in Plain Sight.
BM: Favorite children’s book?
NM: Okay, this may sound odd but a few years ago, I bought my daughter a copy of Sex is a Funny Word: A Book about Bodies, Feelings, and YOU, just so we would have it when the time came. Well, she’s 8 now, and the time came a few months ago—we read through the whole thing together, and let me tell you, I think a lot of people would be a lot less screwed up if they’d had access to this book when they were younger.
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Nishta J. Mehra was raised among a tight-knit network of Indian immigrants in Memphis, Tennessee. She is the proud graduate of St. Mary’s Episcopal School and holds a B.A. in Religious Studies from Rice University and an M.F.A in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona. An English teacher with over a decade of experience in middle and high school classrooms, she lives with her wife, Jill, and their child, Shiv, in Phoenix. In addition to Brown White Black: An American Family at the Intersection of Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Religion, she is the author of The Pomegranate King, a collection of essays.
Nishta J. Mehra’s Brown White Black: An American Family at the Intersection of Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Religion is out now in paperback from Picador
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