Feeding Ghosts
Tessa Hulls ’07 explores love, grief, and exile in her genre-bending graphic memoir.
In a graphic memoir that melds genres and generations of matrilineal heritage, Tessa Hulls ’07 tells the tale of her grandmother, Sun Yi; her mother, Rose; and herself—exploring love, grief, and exile. By delving into Chinese history and doing the delicate, painstaking work of engaging with relatives near and far, Tessa faces the complexity of the past and sheds new light on family mythologies. In the process of writing about her family that was “formed around the contours of negative space” and a grandmother who shared their home in California but was never truly present, Tessa discovers how much these women were haunted by various kinds of dislocation. She uses evocative imagery as well as prose to reflect on inheritance and identity—her illustrations may be black and white, but it is in the gray areas of her narrative that the courageous heart of this story beats. (MCDxFSG Books, 2024)
This inventive and affecting work has received praise from Prof. Peter Rock and artist-author Lucy Bellwood ’12.
“Feeding Ghosts is a tremendous achievement—a fierce and artful recounting of generational and historical trauma, and a tale of mothers and daughters that is rife with hard-won wisdom and surprising humor. Feeding Ghosts is a rare thing, a graphic memoir that would be a great memoir even without the graphics. This book is a demonstration of how closed hearts can be opened.”
—Peter Rock, author of My Abandonment and Passersthrough
“Generous, raw, meticulous. I absolutely loved this book. Every page ripples with ink, but nothing in the telling is black and white. Tessa Hulls careens through time to knit the hopes and horrors of her family’s history into a tale humming with emotion, symbolism, and insight. Intractable traumas melt and transform under her brush. Feeding Ghosts shows us that we needn’t be consumed by the past, but if we’re willing to face its complexity, we each have the capacity to transform it.”
—Lucy Bellwood, author of 100 Demon Dialogues and Baggywrinkles
Tags: Books, Film, Music