Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir

Tessa Hulls is an artist, writer, and adventurer whose restlessness has carried her to all seven continents. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Atlas Obscura, Adventure Journal, and The Rumpus, and in solo museum shows commissioned by the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History and the Wing Luke Museum. She is an alumna of Hedgebrook, Yaddo, Storyknife, and Ucross, and received the Washington Artist Trust Arts Innovator Award. Feeding Ghosts is her first book. In her acclaimed graphic memoir debut, Tessa Hulls traces the reverberations of Chinese history across three generations of women in her family. 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.