The Good Fight

As she navigates questions on race and belonging from her Jewish-Indian son, Mira Jacob talks to Anjali Kumar about her graphic memoir Good Talk, a piercing observation into what it means to be brown in a polarised America.

Over the last few years, I’ve been thinking a lot about unanswerable questions. What happens when we die? How do we find happiness? (You know, the small stuff). So much so that I even wrote a book about my search for answers, called Stalking God: My Unorthodox Search For Something To Believe In (Seal Press), and did a TED talk about it. And I talk to pretty much everyone about these kinds of questions, pretty much every chance I get.

So when I was asked to sit down with author Mira Jacob and chat about her attempts to answer the many questions her son asks her in her latest book, a graphic memoir titled Good Talk (Bloomsbury India), I was expecting to meet a kindred spirit. On a surface level, it is like we had lived parallel lives: first-generation South Asian American women, daughters of immigrants from India who were raised in predominantly white American suburbs in the ’70s and ’80s, writers currently living in New York City, happily married for the better part of 20 years to childhood acquaintances, and one pre-tween aged child with a name starting with the letter Z. So I expected us to hit it off, and for her book to resonate with me, but our connection quickly went so much deeper than that.

In reading Jacob’s book, you would forgive me for thinking she had been a fly on the wall to conversations (and my inner dialogue) throughout my entire life. And I found myself sending the following email to her as I turned the last page and wiped away tears: One sunny spring afternoon, we had a chance to catch up in person in Tribeca over Greek coffee: