We hear and read a lot about what it feels like to live in New York City as an adult person of color, but less about what it feels like to raise a child of color here. It's a different experience. And it can be very challenging. In her new graphic novel Good Talk, Indian-American author Mira Jacob tackles the subject in a series of conversations with her extended Indian family, her white and Jewish husband, and especially with her young Indian-American/Jewish son. 

Jacob told WNYC's cultural critic Rebecca Carroll that even though her son is growing up here, he feels the same "sense of singularity" she felt growing up outside of New York. But she says "it just shows up in different ways. And then he has different ways to reconstitute it as he moves through the city." 

When it came to explaining what it meant to look and be South Asian in the wake of 9/11, Jacob found herself realizing some hard truths. "We were seen as Americans until somebody with a similar bone structure and similar skin color attacked America," she said. "And then suddenly all of us, all South Asians I knew, were suddenly on guard in a way where they thought, 'oh, my neighbors don't trust me anymore.'"

How do you explain that to an eight-year-old? Along with an entire audience of readers — in particular, readers who are not of color? Somehow, Jacob manages to make it feel both easy and hard, and incredibly pointed. "I don't even know that I want a specific feeling to be held as much as I want someone to hold all of [their feelings] and stop asking me and my friends and my family to perform a pain for them to judge."