Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations

A "vibrant, inventive, and vulnerable" (Bustle) graphic memoir about American identity, interracial families, and our most difficult conversations, from the acclaimed author of The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing.

"How brown is too brown?"
"Can Indians be racist?"
"What does real love between really different people look like?"

Like many six-year-olds, Mira Jacob's half-Jewish, half-Indian son, Z, has questions about everything. At first they are innocuous enough, but as tensions from the 2016 election spread from the media into his own family, they become much, much more complicated. Trying to answer him honestly, Mira has to think back to where she's gotten her own answers: her most formative conversations about race, color, sexuality, and, of course, love.

Written with humor and vulnerability, this deeply relatable graphic memoir is a love letter to the art of conversation--and to the hope that hovers in our most difficult questions.

 

 

"Emphasizes the complexities of being part of an interracial family and the struggles of parenting in the present moment." Time

"Good Talk addresses head-on the complexities of being fully American while also being fully Jewish, fully Indian, fully mixed, fully whatever in the era of Trump. . . . Good Talk attempts to answer, with humor and heart, some of the most difficult questions of all." Bustle

"By turns hilarious and heart-rending, it's exactly the book America needs at this moment." Celeste Ng

Mira Jacob is the author of the critically acclaimed novel The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing, which was shortlisted for India’s Tata First Literature Award, honored by the Asian Pacific American Library Association, and named one of the best books of the year by The Boston Globe, Kirkus Reviews, Bustle, and The Millions. Her recent work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Vogue, Guernica, BuzzFeed, The Telegraph, Bookanista, and The Scofield. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and son.