In March 2020, G’Ra Asim and three of his four siblings returned to their parents’ home in Massachusetts to ride out the uncertain early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As they sat around the family dinner table one evening, Asim posed a question for the group to consider: How many happily married couples could they name?  Together, the four siblings came up with only seven couples, including their parents and grandparents.

The conversation convinced Asim that he had hit upon a topic worth exploring. 

“My siblings are pretty spread out in age and inhabit different walks of life, but their observations seemed closely related,” said Asim, now an assistant professor of English at WashU. “It made me think that this was a problem I could explore both in terms of how it shows up in my individual life and how it seems to be reflected in the culture at large.”

Six years later, Asim is preparing to release the resulting book, “99 Problems Finding the 1: A Love Story (Sort Of),” publishing August 4 by Beacon Press. Drawing partly on his own dating misadventures and laced with humor, the book explores the search for genuine human connection in a post-COVID world dominated by screens and social media.

The Ampersand spoke with Asim about writing the book and developing it through the Center for the Literary Arts’ Creative Practice Workshop. 

Reflecting on that conversation with your siblings, did you identify any possible reasons for the lack of happily married couples in your orbit?

The first thing that came to mind was, of course, atomization. It feels a little bit ironic to have been thinking about that in March 2020, because I see that as a problem that has compounded dramatically in six years.

At the time I was working at a social justice organization, and it seemed that a lot of those social justice concepts had migrated from academia into popular parlance, where they were vulnerable to a kind of distortion where they became high-minded justifications for ruthless individualism. 

I wasn’t sure if that was a big problem or just reflected where I was coming from, working at a nonprofit and living in Harlem. But talking to my siblings made me think that, yes, maybe it’s over-represented in my particular walk of life, but this is a broader cultural problem.

When you’re writing about your own romantic experiences, how do you drive toward an honest depiction of yourself, especially when there are two parties involved? When you’re navigating layers of self-defense or wanting to come across in the best light, how do you untangle that knot?

I can’t say for certain that I did untangle the knot. One thing I wanted to demonstrate to readers was this idea that your shortcomings are probably not surmountable — and that maybe owning and facing that is what's most important in terms of limiting how much those shortcomings influence your access to love. 

We do live in a culture that really overemphasizes self-improvement and optimization, lifting oneself by one's bootstraps. One of the messages in the book is that there are limits to how much a person can do that. 

The weaknesses and foibles of my own character that show up in the book are things that I strive to develop self-awareness about. I try to consider how they impact others. But I also need to come to grips with the fact that, to some degree, those things are baked in. It’s really about accepting and not shying away from that, rather than imagining that there's some plateau I might one day reach where I'm so enlightened that none of this affects anyone.

You spent a semester as a member of the Center for the Literary Arts’ Creative Practice Workshop, where you developed this book alongside three of your WashU faculty colleagues. How did that experience help shape the final draft?

I am a musician as well as a writer, so a lot of my creative process involves oscillating between songwriting and prose writing. In the songwriting world, you are making records based on how those records will feel when performed live, and I think I'm very attuned to that musically. But for whatever reason, I've never been that attuned to it as a prose writer. 

During my time in the Creative Practice Workshop, we had conversations about writers who always tailor an existing piece for public readings. They will edit, add, or cut as they see fit to optimize the piece's appropriateness for the situation in which they've been invited to read it.

We had a public reading at the end of the semester following the workshop, and I decided to attempt that, just as an experiment. I wanted to be at the microphone in the front of the room with a piece of writing that I felt genuinely excited to share, and that wouldn't need a whole lot of additional context to appreciate. 

That reading unlocked something for me. It helped me discover the rhythm and the tone that ended up animating the whole book. I don't know if that rhythm and that tone would be in my mind's foreground if not for the conversations we had in the workshop.