A WRITER'S LIFE: The Legacy of Jade Sharma

A scene & dialogue from the novelist's first and only book parallel a pivotal Euphoria scene & dialogue

Purchase PROBLEMS here

I had never heard of Jade Sharma’s work before spying a Tweet about her this month. As soon as I Googled her, I was all in: I wanted to know everything I could about this whip-smart, highly regarded, American Indian writer with one blazing book left behind when she died at age 39 in 2019. The first pages I read online were memoriams and obituaries for Sharma from her friends and writing colleagues. Soon, I had read a handful of interviews and reviews of her work, and then with the delivery of a package at my doorstep, her entire (and only) novel, PROBLEMS.

Sharma wrote and talked openly about her struggles with drug addiction and mental health, so it is impossible not to speculate on how she died so young, however briefly. In the weeks before her death, she Tweeted this harrowing text:

u try; running, take meds but it's there "something is wrong with u. fuck up. can't get a job. useless. u take, love is wasted on u. the world runs fine w/o u. why live? my book. maybe people feel this too.. every three hours i cry and then go back to writing.this is bipolar.

Whether she was self-diagnosing or had been officially diagnosed with bipolar, I don’t know. I do know the hell that bipolar can bring to a person; some of the people I’ve loved most in the world have suffered with a seemingly untreatable form of this mental illness. Her friends and fellow writers painted a vivid, troubled picture of a turbulent and often audacious life thrumming with intense intellectual energy and desperate pain. According to her Twitter feed, she was working on a novel about suicide at time of her death.

I loved these words from Sharma’s fellow writer and friend, Melissa Mesku, in Literary Hub: “Catapult held a small gathering in remembrance of Jade recently, and at times it felt like a group therapy session. People who had known her told stories about the times she flaked, the chaos and aftermath they’d had to sort out because of her. But mostly they talked about her brilliance, and how they were willing to put up with her bullshit and her bullshit alone, because she deserved it. Because her work deserved it.”

This is the kind of framing that white and male writers have been given for centuries- the acceptance of great fault in trade for great work- and Jade Sharma’s talent and ferocity of spirit in life was so great that her contemporaries bestowed it on her. (Interesting note: I wrote this paragraph a few days ago, before I had looked up Sharma’s Twitter feed. As I scrolled her feed, I saw a review of her work that mentioned that The New York Times had reviewed PROBLEMS and said that the book’s protagonist, Maya, is allowed to be “as horrible, and as fully human, as men in literature have always been allowed to be,” directly echoing what I had written about not Maya, the character, but Jade, the creator— which directly echoes me pointing out similarities between PROBLEMS and Euphoria. META)

Sharma spoke in interviews with the same blunt frankness as her protagonist, Maya, did in PROBLEMS. Here Sharma is, speaking to Michele Filgate (a compelling writer herself, check Michele out) for The Los Angeles Times:

You write “It is an art to make yourself so unlovable.” Are you drawn to characters who aren’t traditionally considered likable?

My ex, he did a lot of the editing in my book when it was a baby. I used to secretly tape our fights and then transcribe them and then make him edit them and he obviously got really mad. He said, “Why would you even write that? It’s embarrassing and humiliating.” Like for both of us. I said, “Because that’s what’s interesting.” You don’t want to read about a couple who is happy and communicates well and their stocks are doing good. You know what I mean?

Like Emma Cline, I wish more people read and discussed PROBLEMS. Our unreliable narrator begins her story by telling us that she ensures avoidance of heroin addiction by never using more than three days in a row. As the days pass and she is high for each one of them, we realize she was simply writing: crafting a narrative she wanted to be real. Maya is a writer who needs to finish her dissertation and can’t, a married woman who needs to accept love and intimacy and can’t or a married woman who needs to leave her husband and can’t, a mistress who needs to accept the attached limitations and can’t, a drug addict who needs to get help, and… can’t? Won’t? The genius of this book is that although every second of Maya’s consciousness is unhappy (I don’t think that’s an exaggeration), Sharma’s writing is so striking-incisive, insightful, tightly crafted- that even though it was a slight relief to close the book on Maya’s suffering, I was already thinking about flipping the pages to seek out and reread certain exchanges or observations that wouldn’t leave me.

Like this:

Behind every crazy woman is a man sitting very quietly, saying “What? I’m not doing anything.”

As I read PROBLEMS I came across a scene that gave me a strong de ja vu but I didn’t know where from. After finishing the book in one night, I lay in the dark thinking about this singular book, and it hit me- the scene that I’d read had reminded me of my favorite scene from Season 2 Euphoria. Take a look at the parallel I found between a few paragraphs in Sharma’s novel, and the script for Euphoria. It’s fascinating to me to think that the creator and writer of Euphoria, Sam Levinson, might have read PROBLEMS and had this concept and scene implanted in his subconscious until it came to the surface as he was writing exchange between Rue, the lead character in Euphoria, and Lexi, a new playwright.

Jade Sharma was an Indian American woman who lived and wrote and died in New York City, the locale of her novel, PROBLEMS. She said in interviews that while PROBLEMS had begun with situations taken directly from her life, it soon took on a life of its own.

From the (edited for clarity) script for the Euphoria last season scene between Rue and Lexi:

Setup: Rue and Lexi are good friends; they are sitting next to each other on the floor in a bedroom. Rue is speaking about her drug addiction to Lexi, and about the play that Lexi wrote on the mostly troubled experiences of their friend group.

“RUE: I think I've been through a lot. And I don't know what to do with it. But you've been through a lot and you know what to do with it. Lex, look what you made. I don't know how to do that. I don't know how to get to where you are. You gotta give all this shit a reason. Because I don't wanna hold on to this forever.”

From Jade Sharma’s novel PROBLEMS

Setup: Maya and Elizabeth are good friends; they are sitting together on the floor talking. Maya is talking about her drug addiction, and Elizabeth talks about Maya being a writer.