Tessa Hulls Confronts Family History in 'Feeding Ghosts'

I knew immediately that I was gonna have to do it as a graphic novel for a couple of different reasons. I think the main one was that if I had done this just as a written book, it would have ended up so history-heavy it would have been relegated to an academic or a niche sphere. Because there would be no way to convey that much information without boring the hell out of people and having their eyes gloss over. Since so much of the book is about not being able to trust a narrative and there being multiple competing realities, I knew I had to make it as a graphic novel, because that was the only way I could bring the viewer into this meta point about stories that are in conflict. And to really show how that's playing out on the page, where often the visuals and the words will contradict each other in a way that's incredibly intentional.

I also knew that doing it as a graphic novel would basically allow me to dance through time in a way that I couldn't do if I had just written it. So by having the device of myself as the narrator and being in my studio, it gave me the ability to literally interject and really guide the reader through how they're experiencing the story. I did know from the jump that it was gonna be a graphic novel, and I knew that meant I was gonna have to learn a completely different skill set, because I very much did not know how to draw comics going into it. Along the way, I also had to become a historian and a journalist. So I think that's part of why I'm just so burned out from it, is that the life that I've ended up leading is something that I created solely to make this book. And I think I probably would have taken a really different trajectory if it hadn't been for that. So it's an interesting case study in what happens when you have one project and you have to have a series of skills that require you to completely change your life in order to pull it off. I'm not sure I would recommend it.

I feel perhaps an overly compulsive due diligence to try and get it right, especially because I'm working with history that I haven't experienced firsthand. And, you know, just the fact that the Communist Party is so militant in controlling the flow of information and essentially dictating reality. Once you start really reading primary sources and reading the wide web of writing about this time, you start to realize, like, oh fuck, you can't actually talk about what happened unless you basically educate yourself about it from this 360-degree vantage point. So I definitely read over 100 books just learning the history for this. Because once you start to read enough things from a similar time period, you start to see the biases and the perspectives of the way that these historical incidents are refracted through different voices. I felt like I needed to read enough to get as close as I could to knowing what it was like to live through it in real time while also knowing that there were these massive government-disinformation and altered-reality campaigns happening within archives.

I think I really just tried to lay it out as a choose your own adventure narrative for the reader, where I don't think that there actually is a truth. The point that hopefully I made in the book is that truth is just something that we decide to believe, and it's never going to line up, there is no objectivity. I try to be as transparent about that as possible. So it is interesting to me now that advanced copies are out in the world enough to be getting some feedback. It's like a Rorschach test to see what people decide is true out of this.

There's this line in Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother? — that I'm gonna butcher because I haven't actually read it in a while — but it's something to the effect of, the artist's duty is to the story. I think that was a really important distinction where I felt my duty was to the story. I tried to be respectful and responsible and accurate in every way that I could. I did work with my mother closely on many aspects of this book, and I think that's part of the reason I tried so hard to put into the bones of the book this idea that we're all choosing our own truths. I'm not saying that any one perspective is right. Hopefully the fact that I hold compassion for all of these different viewpoints comes through. I tried to walk that line between explaining what happened and really showing that everyone in the book is a flawed but ultimately very understandable character. The decision to never actually name any of [my grandmother's] diagnoses was really deliberate.

Honestly, I just think the process of working on something for this long was just so psychically devastating, and doing it during COVID as the world was falling apart, it did a number on my relationship with my creative process. I feel like I'm really trying to work my way back to the ability to feel any sense of curiosity or play or joy. I think I will get there. But for me, this book going out in the world is like having to go on tour to celebrate a horrific car accident that I'm still learning how to walk from. And it's not like I ever wanted to do this, it's that my family ghosts hijacked me and basically told me I had to. So for me, this book was very much a project of stereotypical immigrant kid duty where I was like, oh, fine, if I have to, I will. Yeah, so that's, that's kind of how I'm feeling about it.

I think it's clarified for me that my way of being an artist is wanting to be out in the world and engaging with and responding to what's happening — it's always been a really interactive and additive process. Sitting alone in a room drawing my crying mother through the depths of COVID was the opposite of that. So that's kind of where I'm at with it — I'm working on it.