Call Your Girlfriend · Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow

I'm the Bad Guy Sometimes

December 17, 2021·57 min·5 clips

The memoir's title comes from a Prince song about changing relationship dynamics to stay close to someone.

Anne and Amina refuse a neat goodbye. The opening has that familiar best-friend crackle, with the hosts laughing about people who may have processed the big announcement a little too fast. They are not done yet. Anne turns the room toward Nicole Perkins, calling her a favorite writer, podcaster, poet, and author with real affection. Amina is already thrilled. Nicole's book, Sometimes I Trip on How Happy We Could Be, opens the door to pop culture, feminism, fan fiction, relationships, and Black womanhood. The conversation has some bite under the warmth. Nicole talks about reaching adulthood with enough distance to say some things were bad without deciding they ruined her. Agency matters here. For Black women especially, she treats imperfect decisions as something a person still gets to own, even when outsiders are ready to judge. Self-awareness works like armor. She remembers being teased as a child, but knowing who she was kept those moments from turning into helplessness. That same clarity shaped friendship. Nicole says she has avoided parasitic relationships because she cannot fake warmth while quietly resenting someone. She names her flaws, her ability to be a difficult friend, and the boundaries that decide who gets her time. Some people called that wishy-washy. Others mistook her introversion for superiority, when she simply did not want their company or their energy. The episode ends in mutual admiration, with Anne and Amina wanting to read Nicole forever and folding the interview back into the show's internet-goodbye intimacy.

As heard by us

A warm, funny conversation about agency, boundaries, and the cultural lenses Nicole Perkins brings to relationships.

Amina settles into a familiar Call Your Girlfriend groove here: a warm, funny conversation with Nicole Perkins about her book Sometimes I Trip on How Happy We Could Be.

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Why you'd press play

Press play for a long-distance besties conversation that uses pop-culture obsession to think through relationships and agency.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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