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“By turns hilarious and heart-rending, it’s exactly the book America needs at this moment.”—Celeste Ng
“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, adapted for audio, is a love letter to the art of conversation—and to the hope that hovers in our most difficult questions.
Read by: Vikas Adam, Shiromi Arserio, McCartney Birdwell, Donte Bonner, Bill Cheng, Nicole Counts, Margaret Dunham, Chris Edmund, Alison Fraser, Cecila Flores, Kaitlyn Greenridge, Alison Hart, Chris Jackson, Soneela Nankani, Victory Matsui, Kivlighan de Montebello, Meera Nair, Lorna Raver, Rajiv Surendra, Oliver Wyman, and an ensemble cast
Advance praise for Good Talk
“[A] breezy but poignant graphic memoir that takes on racism, love, and the election of President Trump. . . . The collage effect creates an odd, immediate intimacy. [Mira Jacob] employs pages of narrative prose sparingly but hauntingly. . . . The ‘talks’ Jacob relates are painful, often hilarious, and sometimes absurd, but her memoir makes a fierce case for continuing to have them.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“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 hysterically funny, always honest, and ultimately healing.”—Jacqueline Woodson, National Book Award–winning author of Another Brooklyn
“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
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Creators
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Publisher
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Awards
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Release date
March 26, 2019 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780593105528
- File size: 79959 KB
- Duration: 02:46:34
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Mira Jacob's graphic memoir is thoughtfully adapted to audio with members of a full cast narrating each voice. They create a sense of intimacy as listeners eavesdrop on a lifetime of conversations about race, racism, and colorism. Mira Jacob's voice reflects exasperation as she faces impossible questions from her young son, who is portrayed with curiosity by Kivlighan de Montebello. She recounts unsuccessful conversations about race with her Indian parents, depicted by Vikas Adam and Soneela Nankani with a mix of compassion and a lack of concern. Contemporary conversations with her white Jewish husband, portrayed by Oliver Wyman, highlight challenges in their marriage and relationships with his parents. The shock of racism after 9/11 and the 2016 election, as well as Jacob's fear of raising her son in a dangerous world, is palpable in her very personal narration. E.E.C. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine -
Starred review from February 25, 2019
Snippets of dialogue between Jacob (The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing) and her family and friends form the basis of this breezy but poignant graphic memoir that takes on racism, love, and the election of President Trump. The bisexual daughter of Indian immigrants, Jacob effectively conveys how the 2016 election impacted LGBTQ folks and people of color in ways that were searing, personal, and often misunderstood (such as that awkward moment when the older gentlemen at her mother-in-law’s dog’s “bark mitzvah” think she’s the help). As her Trump-supporting Jewish in-laws insist they still love her, her six-year-old son wants to know not only if he can turn white like Michael Jackson (and “Did he lose his other glove?”), but how to tell which white people are afraid of brown people. Jacob pastes simple character drawings, cut like paper dolls staring directly at the reader, over grainy photos of New York City, her childhood home in New Mexico, and other locales, emphasizing the contingency of identity. The collage effect creates an odd, immediate intimacy. She employs pages of narrative prose sparingly but hauntingly, as when she learns that a haughty, wealthy woman once lost a child: “in that place where you thought you would find a certain kind of woman... is someone you cannot begin to imagine.” The “talks” Jacob relates are painful, often hilarious, and sometimes absurd, but her memoir makes a fierce case for continuing to have them.
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