Good Talk

By Mira Jacob

It feels cliché to associate wisdom with children asking questions we’ve long since settled for assumptions to. Unfortunately, you can’t just write your own kid off as cliché and move on, you actually have to answer their questions. Mira Jacob answered her child with thoughtful hope, that maybe she could protect him from the real world in some way that she was not. Maybe he would have the opportunity of a kinder America not given to her. From a question about the racial identity of Michael Jackson spills her memoir Good Talk that spans childhood as an East Indian child growing up in New Mexico to a mother raising a Brown child in the age of Trump. Everything comes easy to the page, but leaves tricky questions in your brain, many without answers both for her life and your own.

A story can come together in images. Looking at paper dolls set on pictures taken of hometowns and apartments can bring to reality words framing collage on page. Mira Jacobs is a strong enough writer that this memoir could have been its own book of words alone. However, her approach of imagery to focus and center the story did what a musical score would to a movie or play, by introducing music you bypass the brain, piercing the heart directly. Jacob’s black and white character cut-outs on colored, real life backdrops gave a window into her world the reader otherwise is on their own to imagine. While not vital for communication, the story is clearer, and I would assume her memoir reached a wider audience for it.

Good Talk spans a lifetime, but feels set in a period of years I associate with coming into the consciousness of adulthood. I was six years old in 2001. My memory of a pre-9/11 world is scattered and more connected to the memory itself than the setting it inhabits. Good Talk is not a 9/11 memoir, but it is impossible to address living in America and experiencing the fallout that spilt forward into this new century without framing that experience in some way. In chapters leading up to that moment, you can see the World Trade Center standing tall in the New York City skyline, you feel the momentum of it crashing down and what would come for everyone who didn’t look like the sitting president. As the memoir swings between Jacob attempting to answer her son’s questions in the year leading up to the 2016 election and reflecting on her life leading up to that year, her story is laid bare for the reader in total understanding. Not of her experience, but how she tells it to the reader.

Throughout Good Talk Mira Jacob tells stories of race, love, and the experience of an aspiring writer in a field dominated by white men. She shares insight about the tone of her skin that not even her own family can understand. You see her understanding of self progress and mature as she does, never revealing too much too soon and always building the tension that has existed in America since its foundation. Good Talk is an easy read due to its accessibility and pace as a graphic novel/collaged story, but it leaves you with challenges you may be chewing on for days, weeks, and years to come. A life doesn’t fit in a book, but this story of hers is a snapshot for those struggling to see the forest for the trees within the overlap of their community and the driving forces that shape this country.