Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations is a hard hitting, relevant graphic novel with unique execution. The starting point is discussions Mira Jacob has had with her mixed-race son in the wake of the Trump presidency. She then goes back and forth between these more recent conversations and her life story, illustrating poignantly the experience of growing up and creating a career in America as a woman with Indian heritage.

Jacob has done an excellent job at choosing the scenes from her life. You feel you get to know her in a short amount of time, and each of the chapters, or conversations, point to larger issues still unresolved. With the next US election drawing closer, this, or something similar, should in my opinion be mandatory reading.

As I said, the execution is quite unique. Jacob reuses the same drawings of people’s faces attaching them to different photograph backgrounds and keeping the focus on the speech bubbles. This really is a collection of conversations and for that, the style works. In another kind of graphic novel I can imagine hating it.

I also want to mention that having loved The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing (Jacob’s fiction novel), Good Talk offered interesting background into the author’s life, and I think they complement each other very well.