Mira Jacob Books in Order

Mira Jacob was born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the daughter of immigrants from India. Growing up in one of the state’s few Indian families gave her an early, personal view of how quickly people make assumptions about race, belonging, and where someone is from.

She studied at Oberlin College before earning an MFA from The New School for Social Research. Writing did not arrive as a clean leap. While working toward her first book, she held corporate jobs and wrote late at night, often after her young son was asleep.

It took her ten years to finish her first novel.

That decade changed the book, and Jacob, in painful ways. While she was writing, her father was diagnosed with cancer. She put the manuscript aside for several years, then returned to it after his death, finding that the father on the page had begun to carry her own father’s mannerisms, humor, and way of moving through the world.

Published in 2014, The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing follows the Eapen family across India, New Mexico, and Seattle. When Amina learns that her father is speaking to dead relatives, she is drawn back into old family wounds. The novel makes room for grief, migration, sibling tension, romance, and the strange comedy that can surface even in a family crisis.

Jacob’s next book took a very different form. Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations is a graphic memoir built around her efforts to answer her six-year-old son’s questions about race, color, and identity. Those talks expand into memories of her childhood, her marriage, her family, and the sharper political divisions of the 2016 election.

The questions get bigger as the book goes on.

Jacob had long used drawing as part of her creative process, especially when she was stuck in prose. In Good Talk, drawings and speech bubbles let readers sit with conversations that are funny, awkward, loving, and unresolved. The book does not pretend that difficult subjects can be fixed with one perfect reply.

Her work often returns to family stories and the gap between how people see themselves and how they are seen by others. Good Talk was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and longlisted for the PEN/Open Book Award. Her essays and drawings have also appeared in major newspapers, magazines, and literary journals.

Jacob helped build community around books, too. She co-founded Pete’s Reading Series in Brooklyn and spent thirteen years bringing fiction, nonfiction, and poetry to its stage. She has taught creative writing, and she lives in Brooklyn with her husband, documentary filmmaker Jed Rothstein, and their son.