Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations

"The NBCC has a history of embracing the graphic memoir; Fun Home by Alison Bechdel was also a finalist in 2006. Good Talk is less of a straight narrative of experience and more a collage of experiences, dealing with Mira Jacob’s efforts to help her biracial son navigate the world that he’s been born into, filtered through her experiences as a writer growing up in an Indian family. After 9/11, she sees a lot of the world as frazzled, confused and uncertain about what to do with a woman like her—a woman who has married a white Jewish man and had a biracial son. What’s interesting about it is that she captures a whole range of emotional registers. She can be deeply angry; she can be sad; she could be frustrated. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . But it took me a little time to notice this in the book, and I don’t think it leaps out right away: the images of Mira Jacob as she tells the stories are all cut-outs, and they’re often the same cut-out. So the expressions, the faces of these cut-outs remain the same regardless of what emotions the characters are going through. So it’s inviting the reader to apply and understand those feelings without being manipulated directly on behalf of the artist: here’s a face, here’s an experience, what do you make of it? It uses the graphic form to talk about difficult subjects in a way that is non-didactic, and really inviting. It’s just a pleasure to look at as well because she is a wonderful artist on top of everything else. I’d like to think that we are smart enough now to understand that a graphic memoir does have different elements to it. I mean, how many years has it been since Maus now? I think 30, 35 years. So I think we understand some of the rhetoric of the graphic novel, how it blends imagery with text, that sort of thing. That said, it being a graphic novel doesn’t necessarily mean it’s an easier way of telling a story. In fact, one thing that’s interesting about Good Talk is that it really does reveal some of the artistic challenges that Mira Jacob was facing in terms such as: what is the clearest way to talk about the particular experiences that she had with her family, or growing up as a child? Sometimes she uses photographs, sometimes she uses symbols—American flags. Sometimes she is emphasizing the people that she’s talking to. Sometimes she’s doing straight, essayistic writing. I think that the artistic choices that she makes throughout Good Talk all seem reasonable and inviting and engaging."