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 a Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers pick, shortlisted for India’s Tata First Literature Award, and long-listed for the Brooklyn Literary Eagles Prize. It was named one of the best books of 2014 by Kirkus Reviews, the Boston Globe, Goodreads, Bustle, and The Millions. Her writing and drawings have appeared in The New York Times, Electric Literature, Tin House, Literary Hub, Guernica, Vogue, the Telegraph, and Buzzfeed, and she has a drawn column on Shondaland. She currently teaches at The New School, and she is a founding faculty member of the MFA Program at Randolph College. She is the co-founder of Pete’s Reading Series in Brooklyn, where she spent 13 years bringing literary fiction, non-fiction, and poetry to Williamsburg. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, documentary filmmaker Jed Rothstein, and their son.

EB: Thank you so much for speaking with me, Mira! I loved your novel, and I was excited when you published a nonfiction book so I could interview you for this series. So, how did you first start writing, either fiction or nonfiction?

MJ: I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was in the second grade. I’ve just always been that person. I made books. They were weird. People would ask what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I would say I’m going to be a writer. I thought you sat down every day and wrote a new book and the world bought it! So I wanted to do that. I loved the idea of all the worlds you could open up with a story. I spent the next twenty, thirty years trying to figure out what it really meant to be a writer.

Eventually, I moved to New York to be a writer, which is funny, because I still didn’t know what that meant. What it meant for me was working four different temporary jobs while I asked people is this what it means to be a writer? I kept going to interviews at media companies and seeing all the different traps—jobs that sound like being a writer, but are most definitely not. I didn’t want to write bad copy, I didn’t want to write technological manuals, I didn’t want to write PR that is going to make people feel weird at the end of the day. But the kind of writing I wanted to do made no money, so that wasn’t great.

EB: Yup. I like what you said about traps. I get those LinkedIn “writer” job ads, but they’re always for a type of writing that isn’t really writing at all.

MJ: Yes! And it was also hard because my parents are immigrants, so anything that was paid was deemed by them a “successful” writing job. It took a long time to be able to parse that a successful writing job for them, while it afforded me the ability to stay in the city and pay my bills and eat and stuff like that, was actually very close to the opposite of the kind of writing I wanted to be doing.

EB: I find I talk up different parts of my jobs to make it seem appropriately successful depending on whom I am talking to.

MJ: Right. That makes me think of how I met someone over the holidays at a party, who, when I said I was writer, assumed I couldn’t possibly be. He said, well, if you really want to get into it, you should try blah blah blah-ing.

EB: Was he a writer?

MJ: No. He was sure he knew how to be one, though.

EB: Oh, yes. I get somuch publishing and writing advice from people who are not in publishing or writing. As someone who actually doeshave a lot of experience in writing both fiction and nonfiction, how does your fiction writing process differ from your nonfiction writing process? I know this is tricky because your nonfiction is also a visual work, which complicates things, but how is it different for you when you are world-building versus trying to make sense of the world you are already in?

MJ: World building is like running wildly across a field: everything is possible, so you are trying to figure out the constraints. What does this person’s body in this space feel like? The act of writing fiction is addictive, because of that: you are living a freedom like no other. You are living outside of your body. You are inhabiting lives that are not your own. And even if those lives are difficult, you are having fun living this lucid dream.

Nonfiction, for me, is the opposite muscle. It is getting firmly in your own body. What am I? Where am I? What are the boundaries around me? Within me? What are the ones I don’t want to think about?

Good Talk was intense because it was both enormously painful to write, and enormously fun. I balanced the moments of rage and sadness with the exhilaration of learning how to draw on a computer, which is a really weird thing to learn how to do. When you draw on paper it has a personality, and I was used to working in that way. Drawing on a screen is a very strange and weightless feeling, and there were a lot of technical things to figure out. How do I find the parts of me in this world that are limitless and boundless? Figuring out all of that was like taking a hit of oxygen before deep diving.

EB: So, in a way you were still world-building in Good Talk even though it was nonfiction, just through drawing instead of through prose?

MJ: Yes. I enjoyed placing a character in a certain setting, looking for the right photograph until it said exactly what I needed it to. And I got the same relief doing it that I get writing a good scene in fiction.

EB: Thank you for sharing that. How did Good Talk come about? I went to your panel at the AWP conference in Tampa last year when your memoir was still being finished, and you said it came about because you started doodling on your novel manuscript?

MJ: Whenever I don’t know what to write next, I draw. There’s something really relaxing about scraping a pencil over paper. Lynda Barry does a much better job of describing this than I ever could, but I think the movement of making lines unlocks your brain. It’s a way to relax that muscle and find another way to work into a scene. And I’ve always drawn—those books I made starting in second grade were all illustrated.

I first stumbled into this format when was I was trapped with my grandmother in a nursing home with India, watching TV all the time. One day the power went out and she turned and looked at me like I had just popped into existence and said, what’s wrong with your face? And then she said, when the British came, we dropped out of college and took to the streets shouting. We fought and fought and they took my brother and threw him in jail because they thought he was a revolutionary, but he was just a seventeen year old boy, but still we kept fighting. I said, Nothing I’ve ever done matters. And she said, That’s okay! It was just… surreal. I knew that writing it would lose something, so I drew her and I drew me, I cut us out of paper, and I put the conversation in bubbles over our head. Then I posted it on Facebook for my cousins. And they got it. That was really gratifying. It was what I love the most about writing fiction—dialogue—but I got to it much more quickly.

So then when my son was six and was really into Michael Jackson and started asking all these really difficult questions about color and who he was, I realized I could just draw us. I wouldn’t have to explain it, which was really helpful because then I wouldn’t have to interact with white skepticism, to write all those sentences for the kind of person who was bent on believing racism no longer exists.

EB: Thank you. You actually answered my next question, which was why did you choose to write your memoir in this illustrated format instead of a traditional prose memoir? But, yeah, it sounds like you were able to write about some really challenging conversations without having to do all that difficult, weird analysis of your own life.

MJ: It’s hard when you’re a person of color in this country or the son or daughter of immigrants, because our realities are shown so little in culture, so when you try to talk about your experiences, people just want to keep going back to the things that they don’t understand—wait, your brother was born where and you were born where, and, wait, you’re also bisexual, but how does that make sense, aren’t you Indian?—you know, a bunch of stuff that they have no context for and you’re bored of explaining. There is a level of disbelief, like one person can’t hold all these stories, because they are exposed to so few of these stories. So there is something really great about deciding, nope, I am not going to explain myself to you. I’m not going to make sense of my humanity for you. Because, on some level, you don’t want my humanity to make sense to you, and I can’t argue against that, so I’m just going to show it to you. You see if it you want.

EB: Your first book. It was a novel, so I know, of course, that book is not your life. I love how in the acknowledgments of The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing you apologize to your mom and brother for people thinking they are the fictionalized versions of themselves—

MJ: My poor mom and brother! Everyone thinks they are the characters in that story. I feel terrible for them.

EB: [laughter] Even though that book is fiction, there are clearly some similarities to your own life. How did you choose what themes and events to explore in fiction versus nonfiction?

MJ: I knew, in the novel, I wanted to make it a Syrian Christian family like my own, because when you see Indian stories in America, when you rarely do, it’s always Hindu, often Bengali, often a certain kind of Indian. I wanted to set in in New Mexico because my parents have now lived in that state more than fifty years, and people still come up to them now and ask, how did you get here? like they materialized from Mars. So it was important to me to locate it where it was located.

Initially, when I started writing the book, I had another father in it. He was really funny, short, argumentative, a schemer. And then I got a phone call from my dad and he told me he had cancer. I stopped writing around then. I couldn’t keep all the emotional pathways open that you need to have open to write fiction, and I just didn’t have the emotional bandwidth. And after my dad died, when I went back to the novel, I started writing my dad instead of the original father. I felt so bad about it, I did it in secret. It felt like a dangerous lie—this wasn’t my dad’s story, these things didn’t happen to my dad, he didn’t do this stuff to his family—and yet I was writing as though he had.

But I think now, when I wrote that book, I was trying to build a world where I could lose him more gently. In life, he died in a lot of pain. It was awful. In the book, I got to mitigate the circumstances a little.

EB: That is something really special about fiction. I guess you can do that in memoir, too; you can reclaim your story, but you can’t rewrite or change what happened.

MJ: It’s not that you’re retelling it to have a happy ending. You’re retelling it to calibrate with the emotion as it happens. You’re retelling it so you can eventually resurface from the depths.

EB: Let’s talk about writing about people you love not in a novel. One of the things I find most challenging about writing personal nonfiction is writing about people I love and care about. How do you approach that? What is your strategy?

MJ: I showed it to everybody! I showed it to my mom, my brother, my in-laws, my husband, and even my son. I showed my son the portions that concerned him—not the adult parts, but as he’s gotten older, we have talked about most of the things that are in there, and I’ve read some of the harder passages with him, so no one surprises him with it.

I didn’t tell anyone they could change anything, but I did say if there is anything we need to discuss, let me know. And nobody asked me to discuss anything. Not one of them asked to me to change.

EB: You wrote some pretty hard truths. The stuff with your Trump-supporting in-laws is so painful. Did you have difficult conversations with them, too?

MJ: They don’t know how to talk about this with me, but they love me. So that has been good. And weird. I said, you don’t have to talk about it, I just needed you to know I made it. And they said, we appreciate it, and we love you very much, and that’s where we left it.

EB: That’s so generous of you to share everything with everyone. Everyone I talk to has a different strategy for this. Some writers ask for permission, others don’t show anybody anything until it’s published; others give loved ones full veto rights…

MJ: I would never do that! If I gave full veto rights, then nothing I wrote would ever get published.

EB: [laughter]

MJ: With Alison, my best friend, I was really concerned about getting her right and our conversations right, because how do you fit a conversation that happened over four months into one scene? That was really hard. But what I said to everyone was, tell me if I am having you say something you wouldn’t say. There is this fight scene with my husband towards the end of the book, and when he read it, I thought he would say enough, too much exposure! Because he is sucha private person, and he has his own career and public persona as a filmmaker. So I showed him the scene, and he said, I don’t think you understand, I’m just saying blah blah blah and we got right back into the same fight!

EB: [laughter] What do you find most challenging about writing nonfiction? Is it fighting with your husband about privacy?

MJ: Actually the hardest thing [about Good Talk] is knowing that I have written something that can be taken out of context because of its format. You can clip any of those pictures and pull them out and use them to, you know, cancel me. How do you write something honest about race and the confusion you have around it? How do you leave those things on the page? There are a lot of scenes in there that made me wince when I reread them. The hardest part was knowing I was writing things that I would regret. If I am doing it right, I’m going to look back on this book one day and think hm, wouldn’t say it like that now. That was—and is—terrifying!

EB: Thank you for saying that, because I feel like we all grow and change and are constantly learning and trying to be better, but there is this idea now that you have to have been born woke, and that’s just not true for anyone. I said some things in high school and college that, looking back, I realize were really racist or transphobic, and I would never say those things now, but because I have grown and changed since then.

MJ: Right! I am so frustrated with that idea of the erasure of our previous sins, because I think there needs to be a way to talk about those things. You need to be able to say, yup, I did that, I said that, and yup, it was horrible and terrible and at the expense of you and your life. But having that conversation is really hard and scary.

Though I have to say, I don’t actually hear a lot of people of color yelling, you can’t have that moment! When I hear it, it seems to usually come from other more recently quote-unquote woke people. Anyone who has been thinking through this stuff for a really long time understands that you’re never fully woke, you’re always in the process of waking. We’re just too fallible for that. That was part of the reason why I wanted to contribute to this conversation, too. I wanted to say that I, too, am confused and have made mistakes, and I am also in this body that, too, has had many of your mistakes made upon it. Can we hold both of these at once? Because I hold both of them in my body.

EB: And what do you find most rewarding about writing nonfiction?

MJ: Exactly that pivot: I am going to do something that is going to make me queasy and that could be used against me, and step into very fraught territory, but I am going to do this to try to have a conversation with both myself and the world at large. The feeling the power of holding onto all of that… it’s something.

EB: Finally, what is a favorite passage of nonfiction by a fellow non-man writer?

MJ: Emily Raboteau recently wrote a piece for the New York Review about climate change that I loved because it somehow got to the psychological complexity of living (and dying) with climate change:

Is it possible to be haunted by the future as well as the past? The precise and intimate term for this feeling is “solastalgia,” the desolation caused by an assault on the beloved place one resides; a feeling of dislocation one gets at home. I suppose one might feel this in the case of war, domestic abuse, or dementia, but the difference with environmental upheaval is the ingredient of guilt. I walked past the bright theater marquees and the slovenly Port Authority bus station, the brownstone on 43rd Street where my friend C. had thrown me a baby shower in her rent-controlled garden apartment, past the high rise on 10th Avenue where I’d screwed my high-school boyfriend on his parents’ ratty foldout couch—past my former selves, and the ghosts of twentieth-century peepshows and nineteenth-century slaughterhouses, to join my partner at the waterfront.