This question, scratched on a speech bubble and attached to the lips of Mira Jacob鈥檚 six-year-old son in the early pages of Good Talk, catches Jacob in a complex moment, as she speaks with her mixed-race child about his white father and his racial identity as half-Indian, half-Jewish. After publishing another race-related conversation between her and her son as a short essay in Buzzfeed, Jacob returned to this piece as more and more questions about race troubled her son in a post 9/11 New York City. Using scenes of America, family photos, and illustrations, Mira Jacob weaves together a memoir about belonging and identity as an Indian American mother of a mixed-race child. Exploring immigrant family dynamics, sexuality, interracial relationships, and intersectionality, Jacob confronts unresolvable questions about belonging, ultimately grappling with the most difficult question of all: how do you talk about this with someone you love? Mira Jacob writes with admirable sums of vulnerability and self-perceptiveness, as she constructs a story of uncertainty, heartbreak, and hope across generations and decades. With incredible artistry and humor on her side, Mira Jacob pulls the reader into an unflinching portrait of contemporary America, and what it means to love another person.
Mira Jacob is a novelist, memoirist, illustrator, and cultural critic. Good Talk is Jacob鈥檚 second book, with her first, The Sleepwalker鈥檚 Guide to Dancing, a story about an Indian American family grappling with their past, earning her immediate recognition in the literary world. Mira Jacob was born in New Mexico to Indian immigrant parents, and now continues to write, teach, and illustrate in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and son.
To grapple with the questions of race, relationships, and identity that are pervasive to our daily lives through multi-media storytelling. To indulge in Jacob鈥檚 powerful grasp of humor and vulnerability, and find ourselves within these pages.