Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir by Tessa Hulls (Picador) ~Janet Brown

When Tessa Hulls was a child, in her mind, she “became a cowboy.” She dreamed of riding through landscapes “where space, silence, and independence were limitless” and where being an outsider is a heroic existence. 

She has been an outsider all her life. With a British father and a Eurasian mother in a small California town, in a house dominated by the presence of a Chinese grandmother who’s trapped in a morass of memories, Tessa lives far outside of any conception of normal. As soon as she can she runs away, bicycling across the US, deejaying in Antarctica, working in Alaska. Then her grandmother dies and Tessa returns home, facing her inheritance of ghosts.

With her mother, she travels to China, piecing together the turbulent history of her grandmother and the loneliness that engulfed her mother within the safety of an elite Hong Kong boarding school. 

Retracing her grandmother’s life, Tessa comes to know her as Sun Yi, a young journalist who was viciously targeted by the dictates of Chairman Mao. Sun Yi finds protection and betrayal in men who are ensnared by her beauty, .She has a daughter with a Swiss diplomat who leaves her with a baby and never contacts her again. Managing to escape to Hong Kong,  she places her daughter in one of the city’s best boarding schools before she falls into a gulf of mental illness that will claim her forever.

Tessa’s mother is saved by her brilliance but that survival is based upon jettisoning her feelings. When confronted by Tessa’s emotions, she interprets them as signs of the illness that erased Sun Yi. As Tessa struggles to gain her independence, her mother turns her over to therapists and medication. Parental love morphs into fear and rage that Tessa combats with her cowboy dreams.

Tessa Hulls has written a family history that sweeps over three generations, blending this into the cultural and political history that shaped Sun Yi, her daughter and her granddaughter. Drawing upon the bestselling memoir that Sun Yi wrote before she lost her mind, from fragments of letters and news articles, and from the accounts of Chinese relatives, Hulls gives her book a broad and chilling dimension as she unfolds the narrative in clear, crisp sentences.

It’s what she evokes in her drawings that conveys the darkness that destroyed her grandmother, crippled her mother, and sent her on journeys into the corners of the earth and the corners of her own being. Every sentence appears in its own frame with a picture. Every picture augments the words into something that comes close to being unbearable.

No matter how much history you have learned or how many books you have read, I’m certain you’ve never read anything like Feeding Ghosts. History, memoir, adventure all create a vast panorama that narrows into danger within its final pages. As Hulls fearlessly confronts her ghosts, she takes her readers into their own dark regions, places they may have always avoided. This isn’t an easy book to read. While it shows lives that few of us have known, it lures us into universal truths that have touched us, leaving their scars.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Memoir and other awards, Feeding Ghosts is a masterpiece.