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A Graphic Memoir
by Tessa Hulls
An astonishing, deeply moving graphic memoir about three generations of Chinese women, exploring love, grief, exile, and identity.
In her evocative, genre-defying graphic memoir, Tessa Hulls tells the story of three generations of women in her family: her Chinese grandmother, Sun Yi; her mother, Rose; and herself.
Sun Yi was a Shanghai journalist caught in the political crosshairs of the 1949 Communist victory. After eight years of government harassment, she fled to Hong Kong with her daughter. Upon arrival, Sun Yi wrote a bestselling memoir about her persecution and survival, used the proceeds to put Rose in an elite boarding school—and promptly had a breakdown that left her committed to a mental institution. Rose eventually came to the United States on a scholarship and brought Sun Yi to live with her.
Tessa watched her mother care for Sun Yi, both of them struggling under the weight of Sun Yi's unexamined trauma and mental illness. Vowing to escape her mother's smothering fear, Tessa left home and traveled to the farthest-flung corners of the globe (Antarctica). But at the age of thirty, it starts to feel less like freedom and more like running away, and she returns home to face the history that shaped her family.
Extensively researched and gorgeously rendered, Feeding Ghosts is Hulls's homecoming, a vivid journey into the beating heart of one family, set against the dark backdrop of Chinese history. By turns fascinating and heartbreaking, inventive and poignant, Feeding Ghosts exposes the fear and trauma that haunt generations, and the love that holds them together.
What are you reading this week? (7/2/2025)
I am reading "Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir" by Tessa Hulls. Graphic novels are a new love of mine and the Pulitzer's new memoir category killed it with "Stay True" last year so I gave it a chance. 20th century Chinese history has given us some great books.
-Anthony_Conty
What are you reading this week? (6/26/025)
I am reading "Babel" by R.F. Kuang, which is a must for any language teacher like me. It has a lot of great observations along with the dark academia. Next up is "Feeding Ghosts" by Tessa Hulls, the graphic novel that won the Pulitzer for Best Memoir.
-Anthony_Conty
Anisfield Wolf Awards...Colored Television wins
...Despots: A True Story of Slavery; A Rediscovered Narrative, with a Full Biography by John Swanson Jacobs , edited by Jonathan D. S. Schroeder Memoir: Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls Poetry: Yard Show by Janice N. Harrington Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa will also receive the Lifetime Achievement Award , recognizing...
-kim.kovacs
Pulitzer Prize, 2025
National Book Critics Circle Awards, 2024
"From start to finish, this book is a revelation ... A work that glimmers with insight, acumen, and an unwillingness to settle for simple answers." ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Hulls's epic, elegantly etched graphic memoir debut tangles with trauma's long tentacles as she follows three generations of her family...The shadowy, close-hatched drawings detail the landmarks of Sun Yi's past and render expressionistic portraits of emotional truths, filling panels with maze-like layouts reminiscent of David B. The result is a revelatory work as layered as the history it explores." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Detailed, vulnerable, [and] harrowing." ―Booklist (starred review)
"A deep, illuminating dive into Chinese history, mental illness, and inherited trauma." ―Thi Bui, author of The Best We Could Do
"With incandescent imagery and prose, Tessa Hulls excavates the incredible, sweeping story of her matrilineal lineage, wrestling with the ways in which her family's ghosts, experiences with mental illness, and loneliness reverberate across generations. A striking, gorgeous memoir from a spectacular talent, Feeding Ghosts will linger with readers for years to come." ―Kat Chow, author of Seeing Ghosts
"This riveting personal story, beautifully rendered in words and drawings, probes into three generations of women haunted by war, revolution, dislocation and not belonging. With breathtaking determination, the author/artist confronts her own fears across time, history and place, from Shanghai, London, San Francisco Bay area and elsewhere―even Antarctica. Feeding Ghosts will haunt you; I could not put it down." ―Helen Zia, author of Last Boat out of Shanghai
"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
This information about Feeding Ghosts was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Tessa Hulls is an artist, a writer, and an adventurer. Her essays have appeared in The Washington Post, Atlas Obscura, and Adventure Journal, and her comics have been published in The Rumpus, City Arts, and SPARK. She has received grants from the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture and 4Culture, and she is a fellowship recipient from the Washington Artist Trust. Feeding Ghosts is her first book.
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