An Interview with Mira Jacob

WEST 10TH: You wrote your debut novel, The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing, over the course of ten years. How did the novel change for you as you faced trials and tribulations in your own life, and how were you able to maintain commitment and enthusiasm for the project over so long a period?

MIRA JACOB: When I started The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing, I intended to write a book about a man developing a rapidly accelerating form of Alzheimer’s. Then, a few years in, my own father was diagnosed with cancer. I stopped writing completely when that happened—I really just couldn’t put a fictional father into peril when I was losing my own. Three years later, shortly after my dad died, I went back to the book and was embarrassed to find that whenever I’d tried to write about the fictional father, my own father’s characteristics would creep in. I was in mourning, I guess, and just needed to see him somewhere. It took me another four years after that to finish the book, but I can say for sure that my “enthusiasm” was more like getting used to a world without my father without drinking myself to sleep every night.

WEST 10TH: What advice do you have for other writers who also feel that they inevitably and unwillingly keep drawing on their own biography within the genre of fiction?

JACOB: Well, it helps if the people from your real life are dead. Ha— terrible but true. Here’s the thing—I didn’t start the book with a father like mine, nor would I have never written a father like mine if my dad hadn’t passed, and not because I’m a good daughter or have anything as dubious as strong morals, but because doing so would have killed the book. It’s hard to let characters take the turns they need to when you are beholden to a living person. Whether or not you are aware of it, you think “but she/he wouldn’t do that” and you cut off so many potential outcomes. But by the time my dad entered the book, it was over half done. The life wasn’t his, the family around him wasn’t ours, and so I found myself in a weird moment of watching a man who had died live another life, albeit fictionally. I get notes from readers telling me he is their favorite character, but in my mind, he is the thinnest. That again works for a story about a man who is on his way out of the world. You can never really see him fully.

WEST 10TH: Your novel is rooted in multiple locations: Seattle, New Mexico, and India, and is read in countries across the globe. As a writer, how do you weigh establishing a strong sense of place against rendering themes that transcend cultures and locales?

JACOB: Oh, I wish I had a better answer to this, but the truth is, I don’t weigh that at all. I write the story that needs to be written and go wherever it asks me to go.

WEST 10TH: The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing also moves across decades and manages to maintain balance between all of its distinct threads. What challenges came up for you when using this technique of time-jumping, and how did you address them? For example, did you find yourself wanting to privilege one of the narratives over another?

JACOB: I only came up with that structure when my agent told me that no one would buy the book as I had written it. She was right—I’d done the kind of structure that works better for a short story in the initial draft (present/past/back to present for the climax), so I needed something more complex to hold up all the jumps in place and time. My husband is a documentary filmmaker and he mentioned story boarding to me, which never in life believed in until went to his office and saw how he did it. That night I went home and restructured the entire novel with post-its. I also cut two hundred pages right then and there to keep the engine running. It was harrowing but also liberating.

WEST 10TH: Being asked to restructure a story you’ve pored over must be incredibly daunting. I’m wondering about your approach to editing. How do you keep your own vision alive amidst all the other opinionated voices around you (your agent, your editor, perhaps your family and friends)?

JACOB: I was just talking about this with another writer—the conflict between addressing the flaws in your work and protecting it from endless doctoring. We’ve all heard about things that have been “workshopped to death” and I think that can easily happen. At this point, I have a few very trusted readers and I just know when I get their feed-back I’m going to want to deck them, especially if they say something that I’ve been taking pains to overlook to just get the work done. But that feeling—the anger—is a good sign to me because it means that I know this is a weak point in the story, too. Getting hit in it by someone who cares gives me the opportunity to strengthen it. I’ve also walked away from plenty of advice because it just doesn’t feel like a direction I want to go in, and at the end of the day, it’s my name, my work, my vision.

WEST 10TH: In an article for the Telegraph, you wrote about how you were “raised to believe in ghosts” by your parents. Ghosts also figure in your novel in both figurative and more literal ways. Are ghosts—in whatever form they may take—something you often find yourself confronting in everyday life, and how do you translate that experience into prose?

JACOB: My parents believed wholeheartedly in ghosts, and often talked about the ones they ran into the way you’d talk about some weird neighbor. I saw a see-through lavender man standing beside my bed last night—that kind of thing. They believed in good ghosts and bad ghosts and on the occasions that I just lost my mind about it—what do you mean there are ghosts?—they would shrug and tell me not to get hysterical. And avoid the bad ghosts. Because that’s a totally doable thing. As a result, there’s an element of the supernatural in everything I write, but always in the most straightforward way possible. Here is a tree, here is a house, here is a sink full of dirty dishes and the ghost of your mother not washing them.

WEST 10TH: You gave the keynote speech at a Publisher’s Weekly event and spoke about the problems that writers of color face in publishing, but no one seemed to listen. Could you talk a bit about the representation issues you see in the publishing world, and how you managed to navigate the industry yourself?

JACOB: We talk a lot about the statistics facing writers of color, the lack of representation, but I’ve had numbers about diversity quoted to me my whole life and I’ve seen the faces of my white friends glaze over when that happens. They have no idea what people of color are up against and a statistic does absolutely nothing to change that. So when I wrote that speech, I wanted to provide anecdotes that people in the industry would have a context for and then be able to realize, perhaps even in a small way, what it is like to be one of the “chosen few” who is allowed into the room just long enough to satisfy white curiosity. And that place, that so-called privilege, is absolutely maddening. How do I navigate it? With a lot of fury and disbelief and sadness and deep breathing exercises and hope.

WEST 10TH: What changes do you think need to be made in the publishing industry to combat the silencing and underrepresentation it seems to perpetuate?

JACOB: There’s really just one solution in my head with this, which is to have diversity within the positions of power. We can talk all day about nuanced points of view and education and understanding but until the power to move money lands in the hands of people who dlive in the populations underrepresented, who know what that audience wants to see and read and consume, the business model is failing us.

WEST 10TH: Has your experience of being misread as Native American in New Mexico impacted your perception of the function and identities of your characters? How do you conceive the broader role of literary characterization—and fiction in general—in defying racial misconceptions, mystification, and bias in America?

JACOB: I grew up with the great conundrum of seeing my family welcomed to America while the other “Indians” were cordoned off to the least inhabitable plots of land and left very few ways to thrive. I remember thinking when I was little that I was part of the lucky Indians, a thought which came with a certain kind of greasy shame. Why were we lucky? At whose expense were we lucky?

In terms of the role of fiction in defying racial misconceptions and shaking the foundations of bias, I’ve got to paraphrase John Waters here and say that it’s our job as thinking humans to read the kinds of books that tell us something we didn’t know or haven’t experienced and doing that is inherently uncomfortable and should be. The corollary for fiction writers is that it is our job to keep writing about the worlds we know others can’t imagine, no matter how uncomfortable or disconcerting the writing of that can be because (and now I will directly quote John Waters), “Fiction is the truth, fool!”

WEST 10TH: What other projects are on the horizon for you? Do you plan to write another novel, or are you looking to dip into other genres?

JACOB: I’m drawing my next book. It’s a graphic memoir called Good Talk: Conversations I’m Still Confused About (Penguin Random House, 2017).

WEST 10TH: What led you to create a graphic memoir? Has art always been a part of your life?

JACOB: I draw constantly and have since I was little. In my twenties, when I would travel, I spent a lot of time painting these tiny leather journals, and whenever I see them, I get the same feeling I had making them, which was just this endless sense of possibility. All that paper, all those colors. Anyway, last year I was sitting in India with my grandmother who regularly knifes me in casual conversation—your face is too dark to ever be pretty—that kind of thing, and partly as an act of self-preservation, I started drawing us and writing our conversation in bubbles. My grandmother has lived through a lot, including fighting for India’s independence while the British jailed her brother, and our conversations will bounce between that and my failures as a woman (other faults include having only one child and “thinking all the time”). Something about drawing the conversation, and letting it just be what it was felt really good to get down, really easy and true and cathartic. Not so tangled up in backstory. From there, it was pretty easy to imagine a book. Now that I’m teaching myself to draw on a computer for the first time, it’s much less easy, but I’m psyched every day to try to figure this thing out, and I think that’s really the best an artist can hope for.

Mira Jacob is the author of the critically acclaimed novel, The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing, which was shortlisted for India’s Tata First Literature Award, honored by the APALA, and named one of the best books of 2014 by Kirkus Reviews, the Boston Globe, Goodreads, Bustle, and The Millions. She is the co-founder of much-loved Pete’s Reading Series in Brooklyn, where she spent thirteen years bringing literary fiction, nonfiction, and poetry to the stage. Her recent writing and short stories have appeared in Guernica, Vogue, the Telegraph, and Bookanista, and earlier work has appeared in various magazines (RED, Redbook, i-D, Metropolis, STEP), books (Footnotes with Kenneth Cole, Simon & Schuster; Adios Barbie, Seal Press), on television (VH-1’s Pop-Up Video), and across the web. She has appeared on national and local television and radio, and has taught writing to students of all ages in New York, New Mexico, and Barcelona. She currently teaches fiction at NYU. In September 2014, Mira was named the Emerging Novelist Honoree at Hudson Valley Writer’s Center, where she received a commendation from the United States Congress. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, documentary filmmaker Jed Rothstein, and their son.