Review of 'Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
Loved this book. Should be required reading for our whole country.
349 pages
English language
Published July 23, 2019
Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations
by Mira Jacob
5 stars
(6 reviews)
A bold, wry, and intimate graphic memoir about American identity, interracial families, and the realities that divide us, from the acclaimed author of The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing.
“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 …
A bold, wry, and intimate graphic memoir about American identity, interracial families, and the realities that divide us, from the acclaimed author of The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing.
“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.
Review of 'Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
What is it like to have children? What, in particular, is it like to have an intelligent thoughtful eight-year-old child who asks insightful difficult questions about the hate-filled world he sees every day? What is it like too be an intelligent decent parent having to explain to this child why monsters sometime win? I am infinitely thankful to not know, that I’ll never know; but Mira Jacob made me feel just the smallest bit of what it must be like, and I cried much of the way through.
This is a beautiful work. Tender, considerate, vulnerable; painful but also warm and funny and moving. Even, dare I say, hopeful. (But shhh. Not out loud.)
