Good Talk

A Memoir in Conversations

By: Mira Jacob

Narrated by: Mira Jacob, Kivlighan de Montebello, full cast

Length: 2 hrs and 46 mins

Publisher's Summary

A bold, wry, and intimate memoir about American identity, interracial families, and the realities that divide us, from the acclaimed author of The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing.

“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 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 

Praise for Good Talk

“[A] breezy but poignant...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)

“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 best-selling author of Heavy)

©2019 Mira Jacob (P)2019 Random House Audio

Critic Reviews

“Good Talk begins with a child’s innocent questions about race and evolves into an honest, direct, and heartbreakingly funny journey. As a brown-skinned woman married to a Jewish man and the mother of a biracial child, I experienced this book on multiple levels: It broke my heart and made me laugh a helluva lot, but, in the end, it also forced me to ponder whether I have successfully provided the answers necessary to arm my own children against racism in America.” (Lynn Nottage, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Sweat)

“Among its many virtues, Mira Jacob’s graphic memoir, Good Talk, helps us think through this term [‘person of color’] with grace and disarming wit. The book lives up to its title, and reading these searching, often hilarious tête-à-têtes is as effortless as eavesdropping on a crosstown bus... The medium is part of the magic.... The old comic-book alchemy of words and pictures opens up new possibilities of feeling.... The people are Black and white - except, of course, they’re not.” (Ed Park, The New York Times Book Review)

“[A] showstopping memoir about race in America...by turns funny, philosophical, cautious, and heartbreaking.... Particularly moving are the chapters in which Jacob explores how even those close to her retain closed-minded and culturally defined prejudices.... The memoir works well visually, with striking pen-and-ink drawings...collaged onto vibrant found photographs and illustrated backgrounds.... Told with immense bravery and candor, this book will make readers hunger for more of Jacob’s wisdom and light.” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review)

Inspiring, funny, very good yet quick read

Loved every chapter and the timeline hopping. I laughed and started tearing up. Highly recommend. Perfect for the summer!

Wonderful, wonderful

This is excellent—smart, funny, touching, full of life. It’s so well done as an audiobook, too. It’s an intense pleasure to get to listen in on all these conversations. I love every character’s voice, both in what each person says and how each narrator brings the talk to life. It’s deliciously wonderful, and I’m so glad I listened.

Eye Opener

It was an eye opener to new feelings but yet old feelings as well! It is awful that people can’t accept people for who we actually are instead of racial stigmas based on ignorance! I pray for change no matter how small! Congratulations on giving a voice to today’s prejudices that are endured!

Powerful Story

Beautiful work, made even more powerful as an audio performance. This was intensely personal, reflecting the larger context as it impacts the author - making it very accessible and heartbreaking. As I watch the world around us with absolute horror, I am grateful to the author for the gift of this book and audio performance.

Performance is Amazing

I cannot imagine being the mother of a bi-racial child. I am the sibling of a mixed race brother and this book gave me an idea of what it must have been like for my mother to field some of the questions he asked growing up. I think this book should be standard reading for any household that has mixed race individuals. Even if you are not a parent of a young child, experiencing the prospective in an approachable way of a POC is something everyone needs to experience. Simple things I never thought of were brought to a new light when viewing through someone elses eyes, and this book does a good job of doing that.

Seeing and hearing, it’s beautiful

Serious, funny and reality of today’s world. Racism is real and too many people are sleep walking in society.
A must read!

Beautiful, Heartbreaking, Real

Mira Jacob keeps lighthearted humor, or comic relief, trickling through her amazingly portrayed account of sharing the heartbreaking truth of racism with her young son as she recounts so many ways she's desensitized by years of life as a dark skinned minority woman in the racist United States.

Laugh out loud funny in that painful way

I loved the cast of this book and think listening is the way to go. The racism and xenophobia is tangible and painful and yet she tells it in a way that is funny and poignant. Loved.

Loved it

Such a poignant and moving memoir. I’m at a loss for words, but grateful the author was not.

excellence@

this is such a good listen! wouldn't it be great if those "sleep walker" could and read/listen? i can hope.