Discover the Best Books Written by Mira Jacob

Mira Jacob (b. January 5, 1973, in Albuquerque, New Mexico) is an American writer. She is the author of The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing (2014), a novel about a patriarch who starts talking to ghosts, and Good Talk (2019), a graphic memoir. Jacob earned her BA from Oberlin College in 1996. She earned her MFA from the New School for Social Research.

Jacob is the founder of Pete's Reading Series, a reading series in Brooklyn. She is the author of The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing, a novel about a patriarch who starts talking to ghosts and how his seeing spirits affects his family. The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing took Jacob 10 years to complete, during which time her father became sick and died. After his death, Jacob rewrote much of the book with the father character as her own father.

Jacob's second book, Good Talk, is a graphic memoir published in 2019. Good Talk was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, long-listed for the PEN Open Book Award, and named a New York Times Notable Book. Time, Esquire, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal selected it as the best book of the year. The memoir is currently in development as a television series with Film 44.

Jacob was born and raised in New Mexico to parents who immigrated from India in 1968, the same year they were wed in an arranged marriage. Because there were so few Indian Americans in New Mexico, people often assumed she was Native American; she told Kirkus: "They all thought we were Hopi or Apache or Mexican." 

When Jacob was 20, her parents fell in love, she wrote in an essay for Vogue. Jacob wrote that their renewed relationship allowed her to form her own romantic relationship with filmmaker Jed Rothstein, whom she later married. She now lives in Brooklyn with Rothstein and their son.