Kim's Reviews > Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations

One of the best books I’ve read this year.
Jacob’s graphic memoir opens with a conversation she’s having with her 6-year-old son Z, who is curious about whether Michael Jackson was brown or white. With a brown mom and a white dad, Z has questions as he observes the world. Much of the memoir is given to conversations with Z as Jacob tries to answer his many questions honestly and in a way that doesn’t overwhelm (my favorite is the racism dialogue on pages 80-85).
Through other conversations, we meet her parents and brother, her extended family in India, her friends, various lovers, and finally Jed, the white, Jewish guy she knew vaguely growing up in New Mexico, and ultimately married after they reconnected in New York.
Jacob navigates racism, colorism (her lighter-skinned relatives in India are distraught at how dark she is), and sexual harassment. After 9/11, she deals with fellow New Yorkers calling her a terrorist. Her conversations allow us an intimate look into her relationships with her parents, her husband, her friends, her in-laws, and her son.
And her graphics— pen and ink cutout drawings of each person involved in the conversation, against a photographic background and with speech bubbles guiding the readers— work beautifully. She can relay so much through slight shifts in the cutout’s positioning on the page.
Masterful.