Mira Jacob: Good Talk
Mira Jacob is a novelist, memoirist, illustrator, and cultural critic. Her graphic memoir Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award, named a New York Times Notable Book, as well as a best book of the year by Time, Esquire, Publisher’s Weekly, and Library Journal. A bold, wry, and intimate graphic memoir about American identity, interracial families, and the realities that divide us, Good Talk is currently in development as a television series with Film 44.
The event started as they always does with an introduction by Rebecca Hoogs and a poem by the youth poet of the evening. Avni Rao read her poem Warzone about the women displaced and abused for the sometimes meaningless gains of men and their wars. The power of her words reflect the actions of the women in her poem, she is yet another young writer to watch in the coming future. The first thing Mira Jacob said as she came out to read from Good Talk, “While you were reading I was having a moment of it being International Women’s Day and watching the future happen. Thank you for that future, it gave me a lot of hope.” While I love getting to see authors of books I have read talking about their writing, the youth poet will always be my favorite part of SAL events.
The first half of the night acted as a behind-the-scenes of Mira Jacob’s memoir Good Talk, Jacob read from it and provided context for the pages projected onto the screen. On the night of I was downstairs serving drinks at the cafe. I recognized some of what she was reading from the beginning I had just started days prior. A lot of it was interesting in ways that I think anyone would enjoy, even those like me who hadn’t finished the book. I would always recommend reading the book beforehand so that things like the teasing of her brother who was sitting in the audience, lands more solidly when you’ve met him growing up through the pages. Regardless of your reading status, this was a reading well worth your time.
Jacob, as in the memoir, mentioned how all these stories were born from questions her son was having about Michael Jackson’s racial identity. What isn’t in the book was her immediate reaction and how she tried to cope with not knowing how to process information from him. Behind her bathroom door, taking a rare moment of privacy in her New York apartment, she drew little pictures of him and of herself. She took these and cut-outs of their conversation, set them against Michael Jackson vinyls they had in their living room and from there a humorous memoir of conversations she didn’t know how to have came to form. She said the humor bled from the narrative as Trump’s campaign and eventual election came to the front of all our lives. As the book got more serious her hesitation to write it grew. She was scared of backlash, not for herself, but for her son.
At this point I had to get to work and my notes disappear as I watched the rest of the event on my phone. I suppose the answer to how her hesitation resolved itself, as it always is, would be attending the SAL event yourself. There was also a Q&A with Sonora Jha, author of How To Raise a Feminist Son that I remember being insightful and entertaining, but unfortunately that part of the evening was during my bus ride viewing.
While Mira Jacob is one of many narrators on the audiobook, I would have enjoyed listening to her read all the parts based of her performance at this evening’s event. She began with a disclaimer about reading the parts of her family with accents,”I feel like I’m trying to whitewash them when I do it and I don’t know who that’s for. So, it’s with great love:” The characters come to life on the page as paper doll cut-outs, but live more so through her voice on the stage. I was laughing at her jokes as I broke down the bar and later watched it on my laptop. If you missed this event, don’t sleep on the memoir any longer than you have already. If you still haven’t attended a Seattle Arts & Lectures event, listen to me now and every time that the next one is still on sale and will be available for up to a week afterwards virtually. If it’s at Town Hall, you may even see me there, slinging drinks or running around with a walkie up to my ear.
I review events for #SAL as part of the #SALSuperFanClub; in exchange for a free ticket, I offer my unbiased review.