Mira Jacob, Author

F***ing Shakespeare

If you have yet to read guest Mira Jacob’s 2019 memoir in conversations, Good Talk, we’re jealous. Praised for her “disarming wit,” Jacob achieves this by welcoming you into her indecision, her confusion, her wonder at raising a child against the backdrop of that tender point where politics meets the personal in 2016 America. In addition to it being hilariously funny and a master class in dialogue writing, the turn of Good Talk (and for that matter her exquisite novel The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing), is that she doesn’t flatten the world to make sense of it — she complicates it. She explains the stuff she knows, as well as the stuff she doesn’t know, about a world we think we know but don’t really. Before long, you’re laughing, crying, and struggling to figure it out right along with her.

In a talk she gave to young women writers at the NYC non-profit “Girls Write Now,” Jacob said that early on she didn’t know why she wanted to be a writer, she just wanted to make words that made worlds. In the podcast, we talk about how Jacob taught herself how to draw for Good Talk, her publishing journey in an industry that still caters to an imaginary white audience, discussing race with people you love, and the importance of maintaining curiosity as a parent. For the rich conversations that come out of the worlds she has wrought, we are so lucky.

Work by Mira Jacob:

• Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations (2019)

• The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing (2014)

Honorable mentions:

• Jason Reynolds

• Chris Jackson’s work with Ta-Nehisi Coates, Victor LaValle, and Mat Johnson

Things we learned:

• Jacob’s cat is named Samuel L. Jackson

• If her characters remind you of your own Malayali mother so much that you need to tell her in a drunken letter, She WILL read and in fact cherish it

• If you don’t tell the people you’re pitching your graphic novel to that you can’t draw, they most likely won’t ask, and then you can teach yourself to do it anyway

• We should drop the word panache from our collective vocabularies ASAP

Photo credit: In Kim