Book Review: Good Talk by Mira Jacobs
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As promised, I want to continue to provide reviews for the books I recommended as the kind of bare minimum requirement for what we can do as white people in America. I want to reiterate again and again that reading a book is not enough. It’s the bare minimum. Hopefully it’s the kicking off point for concrete actions, so please don’t think you can read a few books and be suddenly free of racism. That’s not how this works. A couple weeks ago, I reviewed White Fragility and So You Wanna Talk About Race, but the book I want to share with you today is completely different. Good Talk is a memoir, told as a graphic novel, and this isn’t so much about learning history or studying the facets of systemic racism, it’s just a real look at the life of a woman of color in America.
Mira is Indian-American. Her parents are immigrants and Mira and her younger brother were raised in New Mexico. Mira eventually moves to New York to be a writer, and ends up marrying a white Jewish man and having a son. The book details many of the conversations Mira and her son have about race and racism, some light-hearted, some more serious. The book also shows us what it was like in New York after 9/11, and how Mira and her husband dealt with his parents, who voted for Trump, and the many familial issues stemming from that. I’ll admit to not being a huge fan of graphic novels, but something about this story being told in this format really hit home for me.
I loved so many things about this book. Mira’s son is similar in age to mine, so as she was relaying some of these conversations, I couldn’t help but laugh out loud at how universally bananas conversations with six year olds can be. We’ve been having lots of chats with Squirt about race and they are challenging, but never for the reason you would think. He understands the basic concepts of equity and fairness and discrimination very well, but his mind tends to jump around to a thousand different non-sequiturs. In one of the first conversations Mira and her son have about race, he keeps trying to tell her knock knock jokes and, well, the relatability is real. I also really enjoyed the discussion about her husband’s parents and the struggle with them not understanding how their vote for Trump felt like a personal slight. I know that has been one of the hardest things for many people over the past few years, reconciling with friends and family members who can’t (or don’t want to) understand how harmful their vote was.
Reading this book was, almost more than anything for me, about the enjoyment of the experience. I laughed out loud. I cried. It made me think. I think a lot of times, especially now, people are looking at book recommendations and seeing a daunting pile of 500 page tomes-and you should definitely read those-but it’s just as important to just read a different perspective. It doesn’t have to be a to do list of actionable items (though again, read those too), it can be a book that gives you insight into what it is like for someone other than yourself. This is a book I will read again and again, because it hit my emotions and it was beautifully written.
