Simple art conveys family’s trauma
When Tessa Hulls sets out to tell her family’s story, she’s feeding their ghosts in the best way she’s learned how: by pulling them into the light.
Hulls’ graphic memoir “Feeding Ghosts” covers three generations of women, starting with her grandmother, Sun Yi, who was once a bestselling author of a memoir. Sun Yi’s path wades through a treacherous Chinese history, from the brutal massacre of Chinese in Nanking by Japanese soldiers through her escape to Hong Kong in 1957. Then, as Sun Yi withdraws into a spiral of hospitalizations and mental illness, the story picks up through Sun Yi’s daughter, Rose, until we reach the author herself, Rose’s daughter, as she pieces together their past to make better sense of the reverberating wounds that have threatened to drown each of them in matrilineal succession.
It’s clear the story is going to address generational trauma right out of the gate. But you can rest assured there’s a profound sense of closure waiting at the end. Despite the extreme weight of the story, the density of the historical context and the way every bit of space is utilized to communicate pictorially or verbally, that information is surprisingly digestible — even nourishing.
The art is simple — cartoons drawn with black strokes on white paper — but what it conveys is so much more intricate. Panels often bleed into one another as if the gutters that divide them are mere suggestions, allowing for layered illustrations rich in metaphor.
“Feeding Ghosts” is courageously and heartbreakingly bare, and Hulls’ attempt to present it all in a subjective manner only heightens the memoir’s
emotional impact. Her words narrate the story while the art carries the weight of the emotions. And the author pauses more than once to remind the reader that a memoir is curated, and therefore only a slice of the truth. At the same time, hers is deeply grounded in historical fact. Pointing out when she takes artistic license only strengthens the story’s trustworthiness.
“The miracle of life is not that we have it, it’s
that most of us wake up every day and agree to fight for it, to care for it, to hold it in our arms even when it squirms.”
That sentence from Sloane Crosley’s “Grief Is for People” doesn’t get at how witty the book is, but it does highlight its central concern, which is how to grapple with the suicide of a friend and how to think about the everyday things you’d usually share with a person with whom you can no longer share anything.
Events of Crosley’s life neatly fall in line for this juxtaposition. One month before her friend and boss Russell Perreault died by suicide, someone busted into Crosley’s apartment, broke apart a cabinet she had purchased in the company of Perreault, and stole all the jewelry in it.
Fans of Crosley’s tart essay collections will
recognize her ironic humor and her instinct for the perfect detail. There’s a screwball quality to the jewelry theft, which finds Crosley unwisely making like Nancy Drew and pondering the wisdom of staking out a suspected burglar. The writer realizes how insignificant the loss of a few brooches is, particularly after Russell’s death, which is why the book is called “Grief Is for People” (not things).
But both events happening around the same time help her understand how “unruly” grief is, how impossible it is to compare one person’s sorrow to another’s. Crosley begins to see grief as an almost tangible thing that will always be with her, which is where her book may be most compelling for others who are grieving.
Written in the present tense, so everything feels like it’s coming at the author at once, “Grief ” also shows Crosley drawing to a close a career as a book publicist and launching a career as an essayist.
Hers is not a selfhelp book, but Crosley’s three-steps-forward, two-steps-back journey to a kind of peace could be useful for others who, like her, feel broken and confused.