Mira Jacob: I’m Not Going to Hold It for You
Mira Jacob’s Good Talk, a graphic “memoir in conversations,” explores the inextricable links between Jacob’s past experiences and the innocence of her six year old son’s budding curiosity about the world around him: What is race? What is racism? What is privilege? In her attempts to answer these and many other questions, Jacob carefully constructs her answers, knowing full well that they will need to be re-examined later. After all, a straightforward question isn’t necessarily simple, and in uncertain times no answer seems final. Consider, as Jacob does, the context: our fractured country, our divisive climate, how privilege and power tilt the scales against those of us for whom the “American Dream” is not simply a birthright, a tangible destination. Jacob grapples with this, and much more, as a mother, artist, and woman of color living in post 9/11 America.
As Jacob’s memoir progresses, it illustrates in full and profound color the issues that we as Americans may no longer mistake as black-and-white. It’s hard dialogue at the dinner table, and controversial heroes. It’s swallowing the pride of the past and owning up to one’s ignorance. It’s Jacob’s plight to remain honest and informative, but also generous and hopeful. It’s impossible to ignore. As a biracial, millennial woman growing up in America, I have a personal stake in Jacob and her work–what it might suggest for all those trying to navigate a divided nation, while still keeping what matters most closest: our identities, our families, our future. Her memoir was recently shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and has been longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award. It’s gotten acclaim from The New York Times, as well as from Time, Esquire, Library Journal, and Publisher’s Weekly. It is not just relevant and timely: it is also timeless, insightful, funny and heartrending. It’s complicated.
—Briana Gwin for Guernica
Guernica: What made you want to tell this story as a graphic memoir?
: So the book starts with my son asking all of these questions about Michael Jackson–which means a different thing, now–but at that point, because all of his questions were about race, and some of them were really pointed, and some of them were about Ferguson, I knew that if I wrote it as an essay…We were already sort of ramping up to the America that we’re in now, where nobody believes anybody’s pain, especially if it’s racial pain. People who have never experienced racial pain love to tell people who experienced it that it’s like an imaginary thing. So I knew that if I was going to write about this as an essay, that was going to happen, and also that people would doubt his questions because his questions are hilarious, but they’re also super That’s just how kids are. I knew if I was going to write an essay, no one was going to believe it. So then
