Tessa Hulls, an artist and writer raised in Point Reyes Station, won the Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography last week for her graphic novel “Feeding Ghosts,” a visually arresting account of matrilineal inheritance set against the backdrop of China’s turbulent 20th century. It is only the second graphic novel to win a Pulitzer.
Spanning continents and three generations of women, the book is both a sweeping historical narrative and an intimate act of excavation, unearthing the ways in which trauma transmits vertically through families, morphing across years and decades.
Ms. Hulls’s grandmother, Sun Yi, a single mother and journalist in Shanghai, fled China for Hong Kong in 1957, and soon after spiraled into madness. Her daughter, Rose, attended an elite boarding school in Hong Kong before immigrating to the United States in 1970, eventually settling in Northern California.
Ms. Hulls herself grew up in Point Reyes Station—though at her mother’s request, the town goes unnamed in the book.
“Living in a town without the context or support of an Asian American community, my mother carried her country of origin like a phantom limb,” she writes in the memoir, which was published last March. “My mom didn’t bring me up to think of myself as being both Chinese and American. Instead, she taught me I was neither.”
Itinerant by nature, Ms. Hulls, who’s 40, spent her young adulthood in motion, identifying not with her upbringing but with the mythos of the American cowboy. “I can feel how much it hurts my mother to want a daughter and instead have a cowboy,” she writes.
She sought new frontiers with restless intensity, bicycling from Southern California to Maine, painting murals in Ghana, hosting book clubs in Denali, and working as a cook and amateur D.J. in Antarctica.
“I ran away from my family’s darkness at the first moment I could, putting a literal world of distance between myself and our ghosts,” she writes.
Ms. Hulls is a jack-of-all-trades. She has worked as a painter, a teacher, a bicycle mechanic and, since January, a sous chef in the state capitol’s legislative lounge in Juneau, Alaska. Before “Feeding Ghosts,” she had never written a book—and she says she doesn’t plan to write another anytime soon.
After Sun Yi’s death in 2012, Ms. Hulls turned to her grandmother’s memoir, a best-seller written in Mandarin and published in Hong Kong, and one of the few—if unreliable—sources of her ancestral history. She commissioned a translation and undertook two research trips to China and Hong Kong, traveling with her mother, who translated as Ms. Hulls interviewed relatives. Along the way, Ms. Hulls learned some Mandarin and schooled herself on the history of the Cultural Revolution, China’s Great Famine and Mao’s Great Leap Forward.
A decade later, Ms. Hulls had sifted through the detritus of the past, discarding old ideas and salvaging what could be used. The resulting memoir portrays a writer reckoning with the legacy of a scarred family tree, while contending with the barbed and contradictory love of a mother whose devotion often came in the form of smothering overprotection.
Rendered in bold, haunting panels that blend the mythical with the historical, mother and daughter often appear as sparring archetypes—Tessa in cowboy boots, spurs and holstered pistols, and Rose, a soigné woman in the form-fitting traditional Chinese garb known as qipao. They fight for mutual understanding. In one panel, Rose vomits black, wormlike ghosts, her grief spilling onto the page as she pleads for her daughter to join her in the maelstrom. In another, Tessa is a marionette, suspended by strings clutched in her mother’s hand.
“My mother and I learned the same skills as children, burying our softness behind tall walls from which we snarled sharp-toothed warnings,” Ms. Hulls writes. Where her mother “doubled down on being a good Chinese daughter,” Ms. Hulls “retreated into the feral romance of the Wild West, where space, silence, and independence were limitless.”
The Light reached Ms. Hulls on Sunday in the middle of a bike ride 25 miles from Juneau, where she now lives.
Sophia Grace Carter: Wow, congratulations. You must feel like you’re in a total whirlwind right now.
Tessa Hulls: I think I’ve always been pretty good at disappearing, so yes, I’m definitely overwhelmed, but I’m taking the weekend to be a normal human. It’s been pretty funny watching everywhere I’ve ever spent time suddenly claim me as a local.
Sophia: Us included, but I think we count. I’m so curious—what have the last few days been like for you?
Tessa: Well, I’ve still been working my day job. I’m a sous chef in the legislative lounge at the Alaska State Capitol, feeding elected officials. Yesterday was the first day I got to wake up and actually start wrapping my head around all of this. And honestly, it feels very fitting to be talking to you while sitting on a boulder, after biking about 25 miles down the only road in Juneau, just staring at the mountains. I jumped in the ocean before this, too.
Sophia: You’ve painted murals in Ghana, worked as a cook and amateur D.J. in Antarctica, and bicycled from California to Maine. How did you end up cooking for lawmakers in Alaska?
Tessa: I moved to Juneau the day before New Year’s. I knew I wanted to live here, and—like most things in my life—it came together in this totally unexpected way. It’s not something I ever would’ve sought out, but it hit all points of having a job with coworkers and structure and a way to be part of the community. Freelancing can be so isolating, and I didn’t want that in moving to a new place. So now, I work in this private lounge in the beating heart of the legislature, where only elected officials are allowed in. I’ve gotten to know all the senators and representatives—as people rather than by their politics. It’s a really interesting time to be part of that world.
Sophia: You spent years getting this memoir right—and it shows. You’ve said it took nearly a decade, roughly a quarter of your life, and it’s one of those rare works where you can actually feel that timescale. Did you have any idea how long it would take when you started?
Tessa: I thought it was going to take three to five years. It would’ve been great if it only took that long. But I think I allowed the story to change me. And with any memoir, if you end up writing the book you thought you were going to write at the outset, you haven’t been honest.
Sophia: Were there moments when you wanted to quit?
Tessa: I’ve always been someone who finishes what I start. But if there had been a way out, I would’ve taken it. You said I spent a quarter of my life making this book—but I spent half my life prior to that running from it. From middle childhood, when you first start realizing there’s a world beyond your family’s story, until just a few months ago, this story was my life. I made this book because I couldn’t outrun it—and I really made a good-faith effort to run. You can’t get farther away than Antarctica, and my ghosts were still there at the bottom of the world. So quitting never felt like an option because I knew if I didn’t finish, this was always going to haunt me.
Sophia: The graphic novel form feels essential here. Did you always know this story would take that shape?
Tessa: Yeah, immediately. Partly because I knew it would be too dense and academic as a straight prose book. But I also think the power of graphic novels is that they remind you that history is something that happens to people. It takes things that might otherwise land as dry facts and reminds the reader that every act falls on an actual body. I knew the only way I could depict that was as a graphic novel, so I had to teach myself how to be a graphic novelist.
Sophia: Your work feels of a piece with “Maus” and “Persepolis”—these sweeping stories of 20th-century upheaval told through family and the exploration of consciousness. Were there specific touchstones for you?
Tessa: Definitely those two. Also “The Best We Could Do” by Thi Bui. But the book that made me see the potential of the form—and that I felt the most kinship with—was Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home.”
Sophia: I can see a clear thread between them—obviously as stories about daughters trying to understand their lineage and this simultaneous mistrust of, and yearning for, closeness. Something I loved about your book is how each chapter opens with an epigraph—from Adrienne Rich, Rebecca Solnit, Edward Abbey, etc.—that sets the tone.
Tessa: Before I swtitched mediums and became a graphic novelist, I was primarily a painter—that’s always been my first love. When I do solo shows, they often begin with a sentence that arrives in my head fully formed. I don’t know what it means at first, but I make the paintings to understand. So the very first thing I have before anything touches paper is the title of the show. I’ve had shows called “In the Eye of the Storm,” “Scenes from the Exodus,” “How Goes the Battle?” So those epigraphs were actually the first thing I found when structuring the book.
I found my way into the structure while living off-grid for six and a half months in the woods, during the PEN Northwest Marjorie Davis Boyden Wilderness Residency. I was the caretaker for 94 acres and walked to the river every day. That’s where I wrote a 10,000-word outline—not a script, but more like a creative nonfiction essay—to understand how it all fit together. The epigraphs helped me find the bones.
Sophia: That image of you walking to the river every day feels formative. Water is everywhere in the book—in those chapter openers, with the swirling currents, and then, of course, all the water crossings.
Tessa: Yeah, every section of the book ends in water, either literally or metaphorically.
Sophia: “Feeding Ghosts” is also a meta-narrative—about the process of writing itself. Did you always plan to write a book about writing a book?
Tessa: Not at all. It was going to be a book about history. No feelings. I wasn’t even going to be a character. But once I got the translation of my grandmother’s memoir, I realized the story I needed to tell was infinitely more complicated. And that’s when I started asking: What does it mean to craft a story? What does it mean to be broken by a story? That became the heart of the book.
Sophia: You break the fourth wall more and more as the story goes on.
Tessa: My creative process is kind of feral. I think of it like a wolf darting through the background—sometimes I glimpse her dragging an arm and think, “Oh god, what now?” My narrator started going rogue and hijacking the structure in increasingly bonkers ways. I didn’t plan it, but once I saw it happening, I leaned in. And I was lucky—I chose an editor who saw that I was doing something weird and encouraged me to make it even weirder.
Sophia: The story isn’t linear—it weaves together all these different timescales, but it never feels disorienting. How did you approach structuring something so layered?
Tessa: That 10,000-word outline I wrote while living in the woods? That became the picture on the front of the jigsaw puzzle box. I knew vaguely where everything was going to go and then I told my editor to leave me alone for at least a year and a half while I drew the whole thing simultaneously.
She agreed—probably because she’d never worked on a graphic novel and didn’t realize I was proposing something that was the most audacious moonshot. I had that picture on the front of the box and then I made every bespoke piece to fit it.
It was anything but linear. In my studio, I had a huge wall gridded out with color-coded index cards for the six time signatures I was working in: China (past and present), Hong Kong (past and present), my past, and my present. Each section of the book contains all six. That’s where being a systems-based, mechanically inclined visual artist helped. I needed to build a structural model that could bear weight—only then could I move into the drawing and writing.
Sophia: It sounds incredibly easy to get lost.
Tessa: That’s why I started this book at 30. There’s no way I could’ve done it any earlier. Sometimes you read a memoir and the story is powerful, but the writer isn’t quite there yet—either in technical skill or personal processing.
Everything I’d done professionally up to that point was training. I’d spent years drawing seemingly disconnected things, weaving them together with unhinged metaphors, and figuring out how to make those metaphors land. By the end, the reader sees that every strand was calculated, that the things that seemed arbitrary were of the most emotional resonance. I was practicing that for a long time before bringing it to bear on this story.
Sophia: To tell a story like this, you really have to bare your soul—and your mother’s, and your grandmother’s. Was it daunting to put that out into the world?
Tessa: I managed it by not thinking about the audience or external reception. This was something I had to do to heal a wound in my family. That was my job. And if I was going to ask for that level of vulnerability from my mother and grandmother, I felt I had a duty to be as revealing with myself.
Sophia: I don’t want to end without asking—since I spend a lot of time on the trails out here—what are some of your favorite spots in Point Reyes?
Tessa: Sky Trail, for sure. Watching that landscape regrow after the Mount Vision fire was hugely influential for me. On a somatic level, that shaped how I think about growth, change and healing. Having access to that silent wildness is absolutely why the book is what it is—and why I’m now talking to you from a rock in Alaska.
Sophia: Any other formative places?
Tessa: The Point Reyes Library was my first real home. I remember when it was in its original location, just two tiny rooms, next to where Side Street Kitchen is now. I felt so trapped in my life, but the library was a place I could go to feel free. Between that and the trail network, I had two places that always felt like home.
Almost every time I draw myself as a child, my face is buried in a book—that’s literal. I used to tape together my favorite series so I could reread them as one mega-book. I’d try to finish the entire summer reading challenge in a single weekend.
Sophia: What were some of your favorites?
Tessa: Tamora Pierce’s “Lioness Rampant” series. A girl who doesn’t want to be a proper lady—she wants to be a knight. She disguises herself as a boy, trades places with her brother, and becomes a total badass. It was the first book I read that introduced the idea of what it means to push back against gender roles—and what it means to be strong but also feminine, how can you be somebody who wants love and softness even when you are in this powerful role.