What We’re Reading: Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls

Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir by Tessa Hulls has won the Pulitzer Prize! Feeding Ghosts traces the reverberations of Chinese history across three generations of women in Hulls’ family, and is the second graphic novel to ever win the Pulitzer.

Tessa’s grandmother, Sun Yi, was a Shanghai journalist swept up by the turmoil of the 1949 Communist victory. After fleeing to Hong Kong, she wrote a bestselling memoir about her persecution and survival—then promptly had a mental breakdown from which she never recovered. Growing up with Sun Yi, Tessa watches both her mother and grandmother struggle beneath the weight of unexamined trauma and mental illness, and bolts to the most remote corners of the globe. But once she turns thirty, roaming begins to feel less like freedom and more like running away. Feeding Ghosts is Tessa’s homecoming, a vivid, heartbreaking journey into history that exposes the fear and trauma that haunt generations, andthe love that holds them together.

Hulls has contributed a blurb praising the forthcoming Girls Write Now anthology, Hope Lives In Our Words:
“As we live through a moment where stories are under attack, these powerful young voices are a much-needed shout against silence and erasure. We would do well to listen to what these growing writers have to say.”