This month, English professor and M.F.A. Director Gary Dop recommend's Mira Jacob's graphic memoir Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations (2019). Check it out:
For the past 9 months, I have been building a wall of bookshelves in a small room in our home. I am convinced that the shelves will mean that I call the room a library or an office or a study—does study sound pretentious? We bought this 1920’s fixer-upper when we first moved to town. The home had fallen into enough disrepair that nobody had bid on it for the 8 months it lingered on the market. We bid low and here we are, seven years later, building bookshelves.
A month ago, when I had shot the last nail into a piece of trim on the front of the shelves, I turned around and grabbed a book off the 4 foot-high wall of books that lined one wall of the study room. The book I picked up was Mira Jacob’s Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations. I placed it on the shelf and stood back and smiled at my wooden work finally put to use.
A moment later, I took the book back, sat down, and started reading. It wasn’t the first time I had read it, but each time I read it, it opens something new for me—and it makes me laugh and cry and wince—the wincing usually centers on my own complicity in the mess of race in America. It’s a good book.
Full confession: Mira Jacob teaches in our MFA program and was one of the founding faculty members when we launched the program two years ago, so this book holds a special place for me: our MFA community and the local literary community had the privilege of seeing Mira present several chapters while she was still developing the book. Good Talk is a graphic memoir, so her presentations of the book were of her drawn images and vocal performance of the conversations.
The book begins with her conversations with her son trying to make sense of whiteness and race in America—the chapters leap forward and back in time to her own childhood and the advice and perspective of her family and friends. Its authenticity is most often established by Mira’s willingness to reveal her own stumbling journey to make sense of parenting, friendship, race, sexuality, love, and loss.
The publisher says, “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.” For me, the power of the book is the way casual conversations about race reveal the complexities our hope, pain, fear and assumptions. These discussions between couples, friends, parents, children, teachers, and more keep Mira’s readers from aligning ourselves with one way of thinking or from assuming we have it all figured out. I need books like this. We all do.
When I finished the book again, I closed it and looked up at the unfinished shelves in my old house full of unfinished rooms. Good Talk is the kind of book that makes “old house full of unfinished rooms” a clear metaphor for way more than I have time to write here.
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