Good Talk: A Memoir of Conversations

"Sometimes, you don't know how confused you are about something important until you try explaining it to someone else." Starting with a premise similar to Ta-Nehisi Coates's in Between the World and Me—trying to explain to her son the America he is growing up brown in—Mira Jacob has made a very different, but equally thought-provoking, book. Jacob is a novelist, but here she uses a collage comic-book style that turns out to be ideal for her approach of layering conversation after conversation—with her son, with her Indian-immigrant parents, with her Jewish husband, with friends, lovers, kooky employers, jerks in bars—that capture the difficulty, the weirdness, the humor, the sadness of talking about identity, especially with those you love. A brilliant, funny, challenging, and appropriately mixed-up read.