When people write memoirs, they often can’t help but bring their parents and other relatives into their story.
But in her new graphic novel memoir Feeding Ghosts (hardcover, Kindle), author and artist Tessa Hulls didn’t just include her mom and grandmother, she invoked her grandmother’s memoir in telling her multi-generational story.
In the following email interview, Hull discusses why she decided to write this book, and as a graphic novel, as well as what influenced both the words and images.
Photo Credit: © Gritchelle Fallesgon
Let’s start with the text. What is Feeding Ghosts about, and when and where is it set?
Feeding Ghosts tells the story of three generations of women in my family, starting with my grandmother, Sun Yi, who was a journalist writing in Shanghai during the 1949 Communist victory. She ended up caught in the crosshairs of the Communist party’s thought reform campaigns, and she found herself intermittently arrested and forced to write endless false confessions of her wrongdoings. She and my mom eventually fled the country for Hong Kong, where Sun Yi wrote a bestselling memoir titled Eight Years In Red Shanghai: Love, Starvation, Persecution, then had a mental breakdown that left her institutionalized.
I use the bones of my grandmother’s story — and the direct text of her memoir — to teach about a century of dark Chinese history, and to trace the painful arc of how her damage ricocheted through my mother’s life and my own.
Why did you decide to write a memoir?
The science fiction writer Connie Willis once wrote that asking authors why they made something is “…like asking Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, ‘Where do you get your leeches?’ You don’t get ideas. Ideas get you.”
I grew up in a family deeply haunted by its unexamined past, and for the first thirty years of my life, getting as far away as I could — literally, I went to Antarctica — from this story. But I knew that ultimately, the only way I could find peace for both the present and the past was to turn around and face my ghosts. So I just gave them the entirety of my thirties to tell their story.
And why did you decide to write a memoir as a graphic novel, as opposed to a prose novel?
Graphic novels allow for so much more fluidity in how a maker can manipulate time, and the complexity of the story I was trying to tell — three generations of characters, with each of the book’s sections containing past, present, and future, all while interweaving the deeply researched academic density of a century of Chinese history — required a format that would give me that freedom to dance across time. If I’d simply written this book in prose, it would have been unreadably dense, and the reader would have become lost in the weeds. But with the ability to use visual metaphors, there were places I knew I could have one panel do the work of ten pages of written text. Only a graphic novel would allow me to not only explain the Cultural Revolution in three pages, but also show how it impacted my family members, and how that trickled down into my own life.
In preparing to write Feeding Ghosts, did you look at anyone else’s memoir — graphic novel or otherwise — to see what to do, and what not to do?
I grew up reading Tin Tin, Asterix And Obelix, Rupert Bear, and Calvin And Hobbes, so I think a lot of what I first learned about comics came from those childhood influences. I have always been a voracious reader, and my tastes are very broad, so I think I magpie picked up a lot of the writing side just by loving osmosis. I didn’t start reading graphic novels until I began this project, and I think that was actually a huge benefit, because it meant I was coming at the genre with the critical thinking and skillset of an adult, which made it easier for me to learn the rules of the medium in order to break them.
I’ll answer this question more fully with an image:
Switching over to the art, why did you decide to go with black & white line drawings as opposed to something more colorful or maybe something painted?
I initially planned to do the book in color, using different accent colors of red, blue, and purple to denote when we were moving between generations. But my background before teaching myself comics for this book was as a painter, and when I started drawing comics I was doing it with that skillset — and what makes for a good painting is not what makes for a good panel. So ultimately, I think taking color away from myself was part of training myself in a new medium and learning the more simplified, streamlined vocabulary I needed to make this story visually approachable.
Finally, if someone enjoys Feeding Ghosts, what graphic novel memoir of someone else’s would you suggest they check out next and why that one
I would recommend all the ones that influenced me, but maybe a particular shoutout to David B.’s Epileptic because it’s strangely not widely known in the U.S. I absolutely think it should be part of the Maus / Fun Home / Persepolis / Blankets top tier pantheon.
