Morgan Jerkins is the author of the New York Times bestselling essay collection, This Will Be My Undoing. She graduated from Princeton University with an AB in Comparative Literature, specializing in nineteenth-century Russian literature and postwar modern Japanese literature, and she has an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, ELLE, Lenny Letter, Rolling Stone, The New Republic, and BuzzFeed, among many others. Her next two projects, Why We Get Out and Caul Baby are forthcoming from Harper Books. Jerkins is based in New York City.

EB: How did you begin writing in general and nonfiction specifically?

MJ: I started nonfiction writing when I was in college my senior year. When I started writing in general, I was writing fiction because I needed a place to hide. I was being bullied and harassed in high school, especially my freshman year, and I needed a way to be less lonely. I needed a therapeutic vent, so I started to write fictional stories. It wasn’t until my senior year of high school that I became more fixated on how I navigate the world as a black woman, understanding feminism and intersectionality—that’s when I began to write nonfiction.

EB: Has the essay always been your go-to form for nonfiction?

MJ: It has. Though my next book is going to be nonfiction—but narrative nonfiction. I am still going to be writing about myself and my experiences, but predominantly telling other people’s stories. The way that I write is that I write to make sense of things. And so when I think of writing nonfiction, mainly I am thinking how do I write this down and how do I sort through my feelings.

EB: Can you tell me more about your next book? Or is it still too early?

MJ: It’s still in the early stages, but I can talk about it. I was inspired to write this next book by the movie Get Out. It’s about the paranoia that black people face and how pervasive white supremacy is and how easy it is for white people to be in possession of black people. So what I decided to do was amplify that idea, and write to show what white supremacy does and how black people have always been under the threat of possession and dispossession—of their bodies through the legacy of slavery, their land, their identities, and even their citizenship. So what I am doing is traveling to different parts of the country and talking to black people of particular ethnic groups—for example the Gullah/Geechee community of Georgia, the Creoles of Louisiana, the black and native people of Oklahoma—in order to show a lot of the ways that we protect ourselves from white homogeneity, which can be often seen as paranoia, but if you listen to our stories the truth is stranger than fiction.

EB: I am really excited to read that! Do you have a publication date set?

MJ: Fall of 2019.

EB: Oh, wow, that’s pretty soon.

MJ: Yeah, my deadline is this October, which is why I am getting a move on.

EB: Good luck with that! So, sort of related to traveling, I know that you speak six languages, which is so badass, and this is when I have to tell you that I also studied Russian in college.

MJ: Oh, wow!

EB: Ha, thanks! But I was wondering, have you found that studying different languages (and the literature of those languages) has influenced you at all as a writer?

MJ: I know it influences me as a person. Being an African-American in this country, we do something called code-switching—the way I speak to someone who is black is not the same way that I would speak to someone who is not-black. It’s similar with language. I remember I read somewhere that when you speak another language, you have a different personality.

EB: Oh, whoa.

MJ: Yeah, or you show a different variation of your personality, which I totally believe. When I speak in Japanese versus the way I speak in English, I am completely different. I am more overt in English. It’s hard to say it influences me as a writer, though, because I write in English.

EB: Right.

MJ: But I will say that in terms of how I navigate the world, it does take on a different bent depending on where I am, who is around, and what language I am speaking.

EB: That’s awesome that you speak Japanese. Japanese seems so hard to me.

MJ: It is hard, but I’m going to be honest with you, I think Russian is harder.

EB: Really?

MJ: With Russian, the conjugations are difficult. With Japanese, there are no oopsies. It’s not like you’re using one conjugation and suddenly it should be different. In Russian there are also so many different nuances. If I tell you in Japanese I am going to the store, that’s it. In Russian, there are so many variations: Am I going to the store one time? Am I going there and back? Am I using a car or am I going by foot? Am I going multiple times or once? Am I talking about the result or am I focusing on the process of getting there? Japanese does not have that. Don’t get me wrong, Japanese has kanji, and kanji is difficult, but in terms of conjugating verbs, Japanese is nowhere near as difficult as Russian.

EB: Verbs of motion! Ugh! And they’re so not intuitive if you’re not a native speaker.

MJ: Right! The other day I was looking up the different forms of the Russian word why—trying to understand when do you use zachem and when do you use pochemu. And it’s a difference! When you use pochemu you are asking why something happened, like why did you come to the store? Answer: Because all the other stores are closed. If you use zachem it is about your reason for coming to the store. Why did you come to the store? Answer: To buy this thing. So zachem is focused on the future, and pochemu is asking what has brought you too this point. In Russian, you have to think much more temporally. I have to be the most conscious of time and space when speaking Russian than in any other language.

EB: That is so true. Actually, I think for me as a writer, studying Russian has made me think a lot more about verbs of motion in English. Like in English we just say go for everything, but having studied Russian, now I am always wondering, is that the most specific or best word I could use?

MJ: Right! And that’s the thing—languages are so different. Like everyone always wants me to teach them curse words in Japanese, and, yeah, there are curse words in Japanese, but it’s not the same as English, you know? In college when I was studying Japanese, we spent a whole week-and-a-half studying how to make requests, because, in Japanese, it’s this whole other type of speaking. For example, if I have a roommate who is playing music too loud, in English, I just say, “Hey, your music is loud, can you turn it down?” But in Japanese, it’s this whole thing. You have to say, “Hey, your music sounds really good and I know you are working very hard, but can you please turn your music down?”

EB: So true. My Russian host mom would tell me that she could always tell Americans because they were constantly trying to put together the Russian words for no (nyet) and thank you (spasibo) to say no thank you like we say all the time in English, but no one who speaks Russian says nyet spasibo.

MJ: Right. In Russian, you just say no.

EB: And it’s so hard!

MJ: Also, in Japanese and Russian, you address people who are on a higher level than you differently than you address someone on the same or lower level. That’s something I have actually adopted for my own in English, and so now it’s very hard for me when I am talking to someone with a PhD and they say hey call me Cathy and you want to tell them no! I am trying to honor you by addressing you this way! Same with my mom’s friends. I came home from college and all of a sudden they were telling me, don’t call me Miss Margo, call me Margo, and I thought no! You’re my mom’s friend, not my friend! And you’re trying to do it in a way that doesn’t feel flippant. Besides time and space, I think the other thing I am more aware of from speaking Russian is divisions. In America, it is very easy to get close to someone very quickly, in terms of casual language and touch.

EB: Yeah, definitely. Thank you for talking to me about Russian.

MJ: Of course. I could go on and on about Russian forever and definitely need to be stopped.

EB: Me too! And I have this sick satisfaction with everything going on now because in college everyone was always asking me why I was majoring in Russian, and now I can say, look! It’s so relevant!

MJ: I dealt with the same thing. I went to Princeton and everyone at Princeton wants to be the best at everything. And everybody wanted to study Chinese—you know, those all-American guys who want to go into international relations or finance—and everyone was asking me why I wanted to study Russian. But I got the last laugh! Though Russia is never not going to be relevant.

EB: So true. Okay, well, back to nonfiction, I know you talked about this a bit in your interview on the podcast Call Your Girlfriend, but a lot of your essays in This Will Be My Undoing address some really personal topics. How do you approach writing about personal material, and what it is it like for you to have that information out there?

MJ: It was hard. It is kind of ironic, I think, the stuff that was hardest for me to write didn’t take the longest for me to write, because the memories were embedded in me. I am not trained as a psychologist or therapist, but I think that the memories that stick to us the most, they have an immense influence on our psyche and how we navigate the world, and as soon as I endeavored to write about black girlhood and womanhood, the memories came to the forefront like I summoned them. Every time I went to the computer, I would pray—I have a ritual of praying before I start—and then I would write, and I was lucky to have editors who could sense when I was psychologically cutting corners and had more to say. For me, it was cathartic. I had been hiding these memories for so long. None of my closest friends knew about them, and like I said earlier, writing is the space where I am able to express myself best. It is my form of therapy. If I am trying to make sense of the world, I need a blank page to process.

EB: And how does it feel to have that out in the world?

MJ: It is way easier to tell my stuff to strangers than to family members. I am not ashamed by anything I wrote in there. One day I may look back and think man, I went there, but it’s my truth. It’s not anything that I am ashamed of. When other people ask me this question, sort of implying I went too far, it feels like a projection. I liked it. My parents liked it. I don’t feel like I did anything wrong. I don’t regret anything. So you almost need to ask the question back to them: Why would you think I might feel like that? But without sounding defensive. Becoming a public figure has been an adjustment. When you put yourself out there, people can say anything in response to you that they want. And when we read true stories, it’s hard not to see what we want to see. Something resonates with us because we’ve been there.

EB: Do people feel like they know you? Other writers I have interviewed have said that is a challenge—that because someone has read your memoir they think the know everything about you. Have you had that problem?

MJ: I have been fortunate. I have not gotten the impression from anyone that they feel like they know all of me. Because I am still alive, I am still living. There are essays in the book now that are still conversations I am having, thoughts that are still evolving. Because I am still alive, still developing ideas, still having conversations with other people. To think that you know them, you are inadvertently placing them at this terminal stage and then they become a static figure, not a living, breathing person who is moving and trying to understand the world. If you are not careful and think that you know everything about everyone, you kind of dehumanize them in a way. You definitely downsize what they can and can’t do, how they can grow.

EB: It kind of belittles their complexity as a human.

MJ: Yeah! That’s definitely what it does.

EB: So you’ve touched on this already, but what do you find the most challenging about writing nonfiction?

MJ: Putting yourself out there. You never know what someone is going to think of you. You never know if someone is going to read things out of context and then think they know who you are. You don’t know whether or not someone is going to make an argument you were making but in a different way. And once you put yourself out there, you can’t go back.

EB: And what do you find the most rewarding about writing nonfiction?

MJ: Owning my truth. Writing is a very therapeutic thing for me, and I like writing nonfiction because it helps me make sense of myself. Writing nonfiction feels like a form of immortality. It makes me feel like, hey, I was here. I lived. And I am thankful for that. I know that sounds really woo-woo—

EB: [laughter]

MJ: But it’s true.

EB: In addition to writing, you were a former editor at Catapult. When you’re looking at nonfiction, as an editor, what do you think makes for really good nonfiction?

MJ: I think that the biggest mistake that writers make is that they have all these big, grandiose ideas, but they don’t give me scenes. When you watch movies and TV, and you see that first scene, you know it is going to be important. It lays the foundation. So I always try to remind writers that readers are going into your piece blind, you need scenes to ground them. If you just have all these ideas, you lose them. The best writers I know have this balance of scene and narration or meditation. I love nonfiction writers who can pull in different threads, threads that you wouldn’t even think are similar, but show how the reader’s mind works. That’s what I love.

EB: I love that too. Finally, speaking of nonfiction writers you love, what is your favorite passage of nonfiction written by a woman?

MJ: From Joan Didion:

To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weak- nesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us.

E.B. Bartels is from Massachusetts and writes nonfiction. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, The Toast, The Butter, xoJane, Ploughshares online, and the anthology The Places We’ve Been: Field Reports from Travelers Under 35, among others. E.B. has an MFA from Columbia University, and she runs an interview series on Fiction Advocate called “Non-Fiction by Non-Men.” You can visit her website at www.ebbartels.com, see her tweets at @eb_bartels, and read her haikus about strangers’ dogs at ebbartels.wordpress.com