Mira Jacob

Harvard Book Store welcomes MIRA JACOB—acclaimed author of The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing—for a discussion of her new graphic memoir, Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations.

About Good Talk

“Who taught Michael Jackson to dance?” 
“Is that how people really walk on the moon?”
“Is it bad to be brown?” 
“Are white people afraid of brown people?”
 
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. 
 
“How brown is too brown?”
“Can Indians be racist?”
“What does real love between really different people look like?”
 
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.

Praise

“Mira Jacob just made me toss everything I thought was possible in a book-as-art-object into the garbage. Her new book changes everything.” —Kiese Laymon, New York Times bestselling author of Heavy

"Good Talk illuminates the increasingly fractured world we live in. By turns hilarious and heart-rending, it plunges fearlessly into the murky gray areas of race and family, of struggling to find common ground, of trying to talk to our children and help them make sense of it all. It’s exactly the book America needs at this moment.” —Celeste Ng, New York Times bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere

“A beautiful and eye-opening account of what it means to mother a brown boy and what it means to live in this country post–9/11, as a person of color, as a woman, as an artist . . . In Jacob’s brilliant hands, we are gifted with a narrative that is sometimes hysterical, always honest, and ultimately healing.” —Jacqueline Woodson, National Book Award–winning author of Another Brooklyn