Feeding Ghosts

“Like an archaeologist of the unspeakable, Tessa Hulls carefully excavates her complicated relationship with her mother and grandmother, digging through layers of secrecy, silence, and personal identity, disentangling her family history from the horrors of the Sino-Japanese War, Maoist China and colonialist power structures. The sentence you just read is a dry and clichéd attempt at suggesting the astonishing depth and power of Feeding Ghosts, which, frankly, is the greatest graphic memoir I have ever read. This book taught me things. This book made me cry. This book gave me hope.” —Jason Lutes, author of Berlin

“Can something be monumentally vulnerable? This big book is—it is a searing history of the most private deformations to three generations of women in one small family, set smack in the operatic context of the convulsions that racked China in the 20th century." —Kay Ryan, former United States Poet Laureate and MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellow

“I savored every page of Feeding Ghosts. The inking is gorgeous, the history is clear and digestible (while also being devastating), and it threads the line between honesty and compassion that I appreciate so much in any memoir, but especially one dealing with family. Shelve it with Maus, Fun Home, Persepolis and The Best We Could Do." —Maia Kobabe, author of Gender Queer

“Tessa Hulls's Feeding Ghosts reads like an allegorical fever dream. It's a brilliant story of a mother, daughter, and granddaughter, as they defy historical silences and generational trauma to carve their own paths in the world, both toward and away from each other. Every inch of Tessa Hulls's graphic memoir is a beautiful feast, from the lines on the page to the art on the pages.” —Asale Angel-Ajani, author of A Country You Can Leave

“This is a book of immaculate courage and hard-won healing, gritted with the revelation that we are all of us born hungry to be held by our mothers but instead, some of us are handed tricky histories of family discord perforated by mental illness. Feeding Ghosts is a magic trick of a memoir, managing to be both sparse and expansive in its exploration of inherited trauma, the weight of cultural expectation and the limitations of language to explain where and what hurts. This—of all knotty family stories—is one that demands dexterous hands and a vulnerable heart in bending propulsive prose into poignant art; Tessa Hulls is the rare artist-writer who brilliantly pulls this off.” —Putsata Reang, author of Ma and Me  

“A visual and literary masterpiece. This graphic memoir’s gripping intergenerational and transcultural narrative combines with Hulls’s striking graphics and careful research to serve as a testament to the power, joy, and agony of living between worlds. Downright unputdownable, Feeding Ghosts is a tour de force and a triumph of a debut!” —Melody Moezzi, award-winning author of The Rumi Prescription

“Feeding Ghosts is an artistic and intellectual tour de force. Part memoir, part history, it is a lesson in intentional graphic storytelling in which people are simultaneously rooted and unstuck in time and space. As profound and dark as Art Spiegelman, as mortal and relatable as Marjane Satrapi, as authentic and folksy as Li Kunwu, her artistry sews together country and family, trauma and revolution, feeling and analysis. The result is not only an expedition into Tess Hulls's family past, but also the humanity within history, the need to negotiate with the past, and the legacies of trauma within us all.” —Trevor Getz, author of Abina and the Important Men

“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 Passersthrough

"Feeding Ghosts is a brilliant, profound accomplishment, and provides a vivid account of how trauma is passed down through generations. Merging history, memoir, travel writing, psychology, and comics, Feeding Ghosts is an arresting and transformative blueprint for navigating personal and intergenerational healing. It is a must-read." —Anne Liu Kellor, author of Heart Radical: A Search for Language, Love, and Belonging