Tessa Hulls goes back generations in her Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir ‘Feeding Ghosts’

If you asked Tessa Hulls to introduce herself, she might share that she’s an artist, writer, and adventurer. She’s also doubling down on the fact that she’s not an author—at least not primarily. Her debut graphic memoir, Feeding Ghosts, was born out of stories that the ghosts of her ancestors demanded to be told, but the particulars of it coming together were a longer process. This memoir weaves together the stories of Hulls, her mother, and her grandmother against the backdrop of Chinese history and diaspora. In Hulls’ words, “it began with an intimate question: What broke my family?…But what is a family if not a shared story? And what is a fissure if not a place where truths diverge?”

I sat down with Hulls about how her work is rooted in healing, the process for working with her mom to bring this graphic memoir to life, and the way her relationship with the book has evolved since its release.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Aleenah Ansari: How did your graphic memoir, Feeding Ghosts, come to be?
Tessa Hulls: Like many of your readers, I had a really intense Asian mother, and I got to a point where I wanted to fix my relationship with my mother. This required me to go back multiple generations and trace back the thread of why our relationship was broken. That was the starting point for healing.

AA: How did you work together on this book? Did you set any ground rules for how you worked together?
TH: My mother was willing to talk about the past, and we were able to work collaboratively in a way that was powerful for us both. It involved a lot of talking, and sometimes that talking involved my mom crying, or feeling angry, or disappointed. We had to learn to establish a new practice of being around each other’s emotional responses without running away. It took nine years to finish this book, so there was a lot of time where I had to sit with the emotions that came up.

This project also put us in the same room, both literally and figuratively. Traveling with my mom to visit my mom’s Chinese family for the first time turned her into a three-dimensional person instead of a flattened caricature of her trauma. We were able to hold grace for each other in a way that wasn’t possible before starting this project. It also reminded me that the more you sit with someone’s stories, the more you allow compassion into your heart and mind.

AA: Why did you decide to tell this story as a graphic memoir?
TH: It was the only way I could tell such a complicated, layered story in a way that was emotionally accessible. Feeding Ghosts is about the relationship between the personal and political. I drew inspiration from books like The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui and Maus by Art Spiegelman, which are incredible examples of graphic novels that use family stories to share history.

AA: How did you learn to trust yourself throughout the process of creating this book?
TH: I trust my intuition deeply, and it’s a muscle that gets stronger the more I exercise it. I also have a strong sense of serendipity. This is something I learned after biking 5,000 miles from Southern California to Maine. Being in motion across America changed everything about how I think about this country, and how I believe people extend grace when there’s room for it.

I spent four months on the road, and I paid for a place to stay once. I also got to see that once a place is outside the sphere of what is considered “known,” people saw it as dangerous, different, or other. Because I did this during a time before smartphones and GPS were ubiquitous, I would pick a cardinal direction and go. I saw things like redlining in action, and it made me think about how political decisions and policy impact the ways our physical and material worlds are structured. That experience gave me an unshakable sense of who I am.

AA: How do your intersecting identities inform your work?
TH: The book is telling a complex story from the place of embracing “both and.” As somebody who grew up mixed race, I’m always reading the room and aware that my identity depends on the context of where I am and what people know about me. I’m incapable of telling a singular story because everything I do is through the lens of multiple realities.

AA: Feeding Ghosts won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for memoir or autobiography. What does this mean to you?
TH: It’s validating to have my book recognized with the Pulitzer and several other major national awards because nine years of my life were dedicated to it, to the exclusion of all else. It feels validating that people recognize how much I gave to it.

AA: As you reflect back, where do you sit with this story today?
TH: When you draw an expression, you’re also making that expression. If you’re drawing a pose, your body is often mirroring that pose. Making a graphic novel is an act of reenacting everything you’re depicting. I walked in the footsteps of my mother and grandmother and their history. At the end of it, I’m left with so much gratitude and compassion for both of them. That’s what I’m most proud of.

When you look at the traditions of storytellers and healers, it’s integral to have members of the culture who work with webs of stories and heal fissures with them. Now that I’m almost one and a half years out from the book coming out, I’m starting to see what I did as a healer. That feels much more resonant and authentic to how I want to be an artist than the capitalist goal of selling books. Making Feeding Ghosts helped me see my practice as one of healing broken bonds.