Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations

New York City is used both as a symbol and a motif in Good Talk. Mira and her family live in Brooklyn, and it is also where Mira originally meets Jed. Thus, most of her experiences in the memoir and with her family take place in New York City, making it a symbol of home. Mira has an attachment to the city. She finds it beautiful and includes it as the backdrop of many of her pages. The tone of each photograph of New York sets the mood for the scene that includes it. For example, after Mira has lunch with Bree and hears about Bree’s daughter who died, the end of their conversation is quite dismal and depressing and it is shown over a particularly foggy, gray day in winter. In another instance, Mira is on the subway with Z as they are telling knock-knock jokes and discussing whether Z should talk to Jed about thinking his dad might be afraid of him. Behind them are photographs of the subway maps of New York. Sometimes Mira and her family are simply walking down the streets of New York City with bustling people around them—a metaphor for the way that their family is just like any other.

One of the major events of the novel is the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. This is foreshadowed when Mira first moves to the city and shows herself standing in between the Twin Towers in front of the Brooklyn Bridge and again when Mira tells the story of the neuropsychologist who never called her back. The attacks take place a day after Mira moves to Jed’s apartment. Mira is on the street miles away, but she can see the towers going up in smoke and slowly collapsing. She remembers people having very mild reactions at first, as nobody was sure what was going on. In the weeks following the attacks, Mira finds the level of racism she once experienced has increased to a level like never before. People assume she is a terrorist because she is brown. She describes a “Paper City” (164) made of Missing Persons posters that covered New York after the attacks and the way she felt like her own neighbors had been attacked. She depicts this with a collage of posters shaped like the World Trade Center. Mira recognizes one man in particular and “would imagine him in the rubble, waiting” (165). The people of New York feel as if they have all been attacked, Mira included. She sees a poster of a girl who is a friend of the family and who happens to look just like her, and it hits Mira that it could just as easily have been her in the rubble. Mira notes two opposite reactions to the attacks: the need to help and the need to blame someone for their fear.

New York City is a microcosm of America itself. It is a highly diverse, multicultural city (“A lot of everybody lives on our block” [7]), which is supposed to represent freedom and liberty for all with its Statue of Liberty and endless opportunities. The United States is also supposed to uphold these values, but minorities in America still do not see the benefits of what the Land of Opportunity is supposed to offer. Mira holds on to this vision of New York throughout her life, although it is often close to being destroyed. She is largely able to do so because of her son Z: “If you still have hope, my love, then so do I” (347). When New York is attacked, all of America feels assaulted, and people search for someone to blame. When that blame falls on innocent brown people, who “have every right to be here” (180), it is they who suffer. Although an attack like 9/11 should have united the country, in Mira’s experience it only tore it further apart.