Seven books that explore whiteness in intimate relationships

Lisa Low is the author of Crown for the Girl Inside, winner of the Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest from YesYes Books. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a Gulf Coast Nonfiction Prize, and her poems have appeared in Copper Nickel, Ecotone, The Massachusetts Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago.

Low's full-length poetry collection is Replica.

At Electric Lit she tagged seven "cross-genre books explore interracial relationships by inverting the white gaze." One title on the list:

Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations by Mira Jacob

Jacob’s graphic memoir opens with her six-year-old son’s obsession with Michael Jackson, a fixation that generates endless questions about race and identity—both the pop star’s and his own. Conversations with Z, who is half-Jewish and half-Indian, ramp up as the 2016 election approaches, prompting Jacob to self-reflect. Colorism in Indian culture, her childhood, her parents’ arranged marriage, even her own love life gets reconsidered. We encounter weird white guys, women across races, her first real boyfriend, who is Black, and Jed, a white classmate from childhood who becomes her husband and Z’s dad. Jacob’s relationship with Jed is only one of the threads followed, but their conversations on mixed-race parenting and Trump-supporting family members are some of the most salient and complicated in the book.

Read about another entry on the list.

Good Talk is among Catherine Pierce's five titles to read in the early days of parenting and Amy Butcher's eight defiant books by women.

--Marshal Zeringue