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epitome of incomprehensibility
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Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations by Mira Jacob has a unique art technique - the people-figures are various cutouts placed on photographic backgrounds. Most characters have a few different poses.
I thought the one representing Jacob's young son could have more poses, since children tend to be dynamic when talking - walking around, swinging arms and legs, making faces...
But that's my only criticism. As for dynamism, I love how the backgrounds can zoom in and out to create motion, to focus attention.
Plus, the good talks are rich and realistic. Like real talk that's been distilled, boiled down: juicy. What's in it? Art? Politics? Justice and injustice? Silliness? Yup, and sometimes all that in one conversation.
Take the woman who hires Jacob to write her family's story. At first she comes off as a clueless airhead. For example, Jacob says her parents are from India; the other woman is all, "Oh, it's so spiritual there! I love yoga!" And then, maybe not maliciously but annoyingly, she keeps calling Jacob HALF-Indian, as if to be a writer you have to be at least *partly* white. In any case, it shows she's not paying attention.
But this same woman reveals a grief from her recent past, and all of a sudden she isn't only some clueless rich girl.
The memoir as a whole starts in the recent past - around 2016 - and goes back to Jacob's childhood in the 80s. She's a few years older than me; she was a young adult living in NYC when 9/11 happened.
And it's déjà vu when the U.S. faces the Annoying Orange's first presidency (if only it were the only). Both for the sense of danger and the Islamophobia. If dark-skinned South Asian Mira got suspicious looks, what about her son, more easily mistaken for Middle Eastern? The boy, only six or seven, already worries: he and his name "look Muslim" and Trump doesn't like Muslims. It won't matter that his parents come from Christian and Jewish families (Mira and her husband Josh, respectively) - it's more about how he looks.
So, on the next page, he wants to be something different. He wants to be able to switch between black and white...like Michael Jackson!
Mira: Um...
Kid: And do the moonwalk! I want to do the moonwalk!!
Mira: Hey, you CAN do the moonwalk.
(I wish I had the book here so I could quote it exactly. It's somewhere in Dorval Library right now, unless someone borrowed it.)
Anyway, I recommend it. Something to read more than once, to savor the conversations.
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