How Tessa Hulls Became a Graphic Memoirist

“What I tell you is in no way what you should ever tell anyone about how a graphic novel is made, because I did not do this as a graphic novelist,” says Tessa Hulls, 39, of her debut graphic memoir, Feeding Ghosts (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 400 pages, $40). She laughs and clarifies, “I basically went straight from a 60,000-word, written outline to inking final pages and I made every part of the book simultaneously.”

Feeding Ghosts explores three generations of women, starting with Hulls’ Chinese grandmother, Sun Yi. A once-famous journalist who wrote a memoir called Eight Years in Red Shanghai: Love, Starvation Persecution, Sun Yi wrote the book, then immediately “lost her mind,” as Hulls puts it, after suffering years of constant surveillance and intermittent arrests by the Chinese government.

Sun Yi had an affair with a Swiss diplomat (“Which is why I don’t look more Chinese,” Hulls notes), then gave birth to her daughter Rose, whom she smuggled out of the country in the bottom of a fishing boat. But by the time Sun Yi and her daughter left China, the psychological damage had already been done. Sun Yi—and, later, her daughter, Hulls’ mom—would suffer years of PTSD and struggles with their mental health.

“I grew up in a family choked by ghosts, with my grandmother Sun Yi at the center of a darkness that was felt but never named,” Hulls writes. Feeding Ghosts seeks to name that darkness and to explore its origin.

Hulls had to immerse herself in her family’s story and in China’s tumultuous history. She conducted extensive research, ultimately spending nine years completing Feeding Ghosts.

“I always wrote just for myself because that’s how I process and understand the world, or work through anything that’s complicated or that I don’t understand,” Hulls says. “I taught myself the medium for this project, but my first love and main career was as a painter.”

Hulls describes part of her writing process as “going feral in the woods.” She completed a large portion of the memoir during her time at the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency, an isolating, monthslong retreat at the Dutch Henry Homestead in the Rogue River canyon.

“When it came time to edit, my editor and I worked off of that word document outline, which is about 60,000 words—which is way high for a graphic novel.”

Bringing Feeding Ghosts to the world has been a struggle for Hulls, who first brought the book to MCD Books (an imprint of FSG) because the editor she wanted to work with was also a mixed-race Chinese American.

“The first time we met we had a four-hour hotpot and just talked loving shit about our moms,” Hulls says. Unfortunately, the editor departed before a publicity and marketing strategy for the book was solidified. “So the ship has been going into this without a captain,” Hulls recalls.

The experience with a Big Five publisher has certainly opened Hulls’ eyes to the realities of the business.

“My only friends who are having even remotely palatable experiences are all with indies, and it seems like, you know, that’s the deal with the devil that you make,” she says, adding that she’d like to create a panel at AWP Conference & Bookfair called “Biting The Hand That Feeds You” for writers who’ve had upsetting relationships with the publishing industry (count me in).

Despite the publishing battles that plagued Feeding Ghosts, Hulls is proud of the book—and hasn’t lost the idealism of her childhood, when Calvin and Hobbes comics instilled in her a lifelong love of visual storytelling.

“My childhood sketchbooks are just totally full of me redrawing all of my favorite Calvin and Hobbes strips,” Hulls says with a nostalgic smile. “I loved the idea that you could use a simple narrative to talk about some of the most fraught existential questions.”

GO: Tessa Hulls will be in conversation with Rebecca Clarren at Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St., 800-878-7323, powells.com. 7 pm Tuesday, March 5. Free.

See the rest of 2024′s Spring Arts Guide here!