Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, TIME, BUZZFEED, ESQUIRE, LIBRARY JOURNAL AND KIRKUS REVIEWSLONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/OPEN BOOK AWARD‘Hilarious and heart-rending’ Celeste Ng‘Heartbreaking, but also infused with levity and humour. What stands out most is the fierce compassion with which she parses the complexities of family and love’ TimeHow 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 – and 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.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.‘Helps us think with grace and disarming wit … Reading these searching, often hilarious tête-à-têtes is as effortless as eavesdropping on a crosstown bus … Magic’ New York Times Book Review‘Vibrant, inventive and vulnerable … Good Talk attempts to answer, with humour and heart, some of the most difficult questions of all’ Bustle‘Moving and very funny’ Esquire

'By turns hilarious and heart-rending. Plunges fearlessly into the murky grey areas of race and family, of struggling to find common ground, of trying to talk to our children and help them make sense of it all' Celeste Ng 'Does Donald Trump hate Muslims?' 'Is that how people really walk on the moon?' 'Is it bad to be brown?' 'Are white people afraid of brown people?' Inspired by her viral BuzzFeed piece '37 Difficult Questions from My Mixed-Raced Son', Mira Jacob responds to: her six-year-old, Zakir, who asks if the new president hates brown boys like him; uncomfortable relationship advice from her parents, who came to the United States from India one month into their arranged marriage; and increasingly fraught exchanges with her Trump-supporting in-laws. Jacob also investigates her own past, including how it felt to be a brown-skinned New Yorker on 9/11. As earnest and moving as they are laugh-out-loud funny, these are the stories that have shaped one life, but will resonate with many others.