The art of facing your family with author-artist Tessa Hulls
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Feeding Ghosts," a graphic memoir, joins us this month to discuss running away, coming home, and so much more
Friends, writers, readers! Memoiring’s September Book Club Pick is FEEDING GHOSTS, the critically acclaimed graphic memoir debut of Tessa Hulls. Get your copy and join us with the author-artist for an amazing Q+A-style convo!
RSVP here! 🗓️ Oct 2 at 6:30pm ET 💰 Free for Memoiring subscribers
New here? Memoiring Book Club convos are pretty much author Q+As! Free free to bring craft or content questions—or just come hang with us, zero pressure.
First, some REALLY cool news!
I’m excited to share that now you’ll be able to find Memoiring’s Book Club pick on Tertulia each month, alongside Jenna, Reese, Emma, and more book club royalty. Woo hoo! This helps our “More Memoir, Please” mission by reaching folks who visit the discovery platform and co-op bookstore looking for book recs. (No, it does not get us on morning television, which is not the mission, though yeah I would def do it. 😉)
So what’s our September book pick about?
In Feeding Ghosts, 30-year-old Hulls both seeks out and struggles to face the family history that explains what happened to her grandmother (a persecuted journalist in Maoist China who never recovered from a mental breakdown), and how her painful past affected her mother, and herself.
Hulls, who rather quietly won the 2025 Pulitzer (or so it seemed to me), shows us in word and image how she’d once strenuously avoided all things home, preferring her adventures far, far away from home. Think Antarctica. But as happens to someone becoming a memoirist, the need to dig out long-buried truths and return home becomes greater than the fear and risk of what she might find.
Need a copy of Feeding Ghosts? I encourage you to check out Tertulia this month. The discovery platform and co-op bookstore (co-led by a long-lost friend from my Random House days) is offering you 20% off your first purchase (unlimited number of any books) with code MEMOIR20. Yes, this includes Feeding Ghosts, which in hardback feels like an expensive collectible art book. Take a look!
In interviews Hulls says she saw her role as an author-artist to “give nourishment to the unfaced ghosts of the past that devoured her family”—even at the cost of being nearly devoured herself. She thought about quitting the project “all the time,” she told the New York Times. “But she stuck with it: ‘If I didn’t confront this history, there was no way out.‘” Ultimately, her process of writing and drawing—and the research, involving trips to China with her mother acting as translator—took Hulls nearly 10 years, a number that many writers of memoir will appreciate hearing.
Some pressing questions of mine for Tessa when she Zooms with us on 10/2:
How do we find the fortitude to write about things like trauma and family secrets that cause us pain without sacrificing craft?
Should writers help our families process the truth of the secrets we uncover?
And are there any craft books for managing the emotional work of the memoirist? (Asking for a friend/as a former psychoanalytic therapist who finds herself wondering this a lot!)
“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
A bit about Tessa Hulls, our September author
Tessa is an artist, writer, and adventurer who is equally likely to disappear into the wilderness or a research library. Her debut graphic memoir, Feeding Ghosts, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the Eisner Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Award, and the Libby Award, and was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, Pacific Northwest Book Award, and Cartoonist Studio Prize.
Tessa's creative practice weaves genres in category-defying ways, and she is pivoting her career to fuse her two great loves of creativity and the wilderness by becoming an embedded comics journalist in long-term partnership with scientists and Indigenous organizations working in remote environments. She would love to hear from you if you want to partner with her on this endeavor.
Enjoy reading Feeding Ghosts, available at Tertulia, Bookshop.org, and your fave bookstore or library—and see you on Zoom!
Thank you for reading all the way to the end. If you’re new here, check out this short and sweet FAQ for ways to hang out with us. And drop me a Comment or DM if you have thoughts or questions. I really appreciate you being here. Memoiringly, Melisse