Mira Jacob (born 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 is the founder of Pete's Reading Series, a reading series in Brooklyn.[2] 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.[3]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.[4]
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."[4] 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.[11]
She now lives in Brooklyn with Rothstein and their son.[2][4]
^ ab"Mira Jacob". Penguin Randomhouse. Retrieved September 6, 2015.
^ abCollins-Hughes, Laura (August 2, 2014). "Book review: 'The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing' by Mira Jacob". The Boston Globe. Retrieved 2015-12-22. Moving forward and back in time, Jacob balances comedy and romance with indelible sorrow, and she is remarkably adept at tonal shifts.
^East, Ben (July 6, 2014). "Mira Jacob's debut novel The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing took 10 years to write". The National. Retrieved 2015-12-22. "I've reached the age where the tragedies I face are unimaginable, but also unavoidable. You lose people that you love, and it's a bludgeoning experience. So in this book I wanted to explore that. I didn't want to lie about how devastating death can be, or make light of it, but pay homage to the sustaining strength of the family – be they Indian, Italian, or whatever – in that moment."
