Belletrist Presents: Mira Jacob
The lovely women behind Belletrist (Emma Roberts and Karah Preiss)—which is so much more than a beloved Bookstagram account—have debuted a short video documentary series, Studio Sessions, in which they take a behind-the-scenes look at the artistic process of graphic novelists, illustrators, and designers.
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Last summer, novelist, illustrator, and overall powerhouse Mira Jacob participated in Camp David’s “Writers in Residence” program and debuted her bold, wry, and intimate graphic memoir Good Talk about American identity, interracial families, and the realities that divide us. Written with humor and vulnerability, this deeply relatable graphic memoir is a love letter to the art of conversation—and to the hope that hovers in our most difficult questions.
Good Talk, “is a series of drawn conversations” that, according to Jacob, “started when my son was obsessed with Michael Jackson…”
Like many six-year-olds, Mira Jacob’s half-Jewish, half-Indian son, Z, has questions about everything. At first they are innocuous enough, but as tensions from the 2016 election spread from the media into his own family, they become much, much more complicated. Trying to answer him honestly, Mira has to think back to where she’s gotten her own answers: her most formative conversations about race, color, sexuality, and, of course, love.
"I’m brown, my husband’s white, he’s somewhere between the two of us, and if you leave a kid like that alone with a bunch of Michael Jackson albums, he comes back with a lot of questions… One of the questions he had was “Is Michael Jackson brown or white?”
Directed and Produced by Asher Kelly-Nacht + Weird Heroes
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Mira Jacob is the author and illustrator of Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations. Her critically acclaimed novel, The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing was named one of the best books of 2014 by Kirkus Reviews, the Boston Globe, Goodreads, Bustle, and The Millions. She currently teaches at The New School, and she is a founding faculty member of the MFA Program at Randolph College.
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