The 2025 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced on Tuesday, May 5th, and Seattle (unsurprisingly a City of Literature) was represented incredibly well! Local author and illustrator Tessa Hulls won for Memoir or Autobiography with her incredible graphic memoir Feeding Ghosts, while local author Stacey Levine achieved finalist status for Fiction with Mice 1961, Seattle Times reporter Lynda Mapes was a finalist for Reporting, and Port Townsend publisher Copper Canyon Press published An Authentic Life by Jennifer Chang, a finalist for Poetry.
As Feeding Ghosts was one of my favorite reads last year, I want to take a moment to congratulate Tessa Hulls on this achievement and offer some readalikes as the book will surely soar with holds in days to come! Before Feeding Ghosts, Tessa was already an SPL darling. After submitting a beautifully illustrated board for Book Bingo, she became the 2021 Book Bingo illustrator! Feeding Ghosts went on to be a staff favorite, featured on our 2024 Staff Favorites list as well as, in a full circle moment, a 2024 Book Bingo list!
Feeding Ghosts is a remarkable achievement, the story of Hulls’ processing of her intergenerational trauma, beautifully wrought in her poignant palette of black, white, and purple illustrations. She traces her family over three generations: her grandmother in Mao’s China, the move with her mother to Hong Kong, and her own upbringing in Northern California. Along the way, she connects familial stories and transitions with touch points in Chinese history, especially her grandmother’s past as a journalist who then becomes persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party, and the lingering impacts of that abuse which morphs into intense mental illness. Tessa’s mother is understandably deeply impacted by her own mother’s trauma, and the ways in which that reverberates through Tessa’s childhood is thoughtfully pulled apart. After years of thinking of herself as a lone cowboy, Hulls eventually embarks on a trip to China and Hong Kong to reckon with her family’s “hungry ghosts.”
The flurry of holds that accompanied this book’s release are sure to resume with the news of Hulls’ Pulitzer win, so here are some books with similar themes and appeals to check out in the meantime!
Thi Bui’s graphic memoir The Best We Could Do explores her family’s journey to the United States after fleeing Vietnam in the 1970s. Like Hulls, Bui uses art to help convey the brokenness and beauty of her family’s story. “A new mother, Bui returns to the theme of parenthood and family, and teens will recognize her yearning for stability and a happy future as well as her self-doubt and fear of repeating her parents’ mistakes.” (School Library Journal)
Though not illustrated, Ma and Me by Putsata Reang similarly delves into the complicated relationship between a daughter and her immigrant mother like in Feeding Ghosts. Reang escaped the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia as an infant, settling in Corvallis, Oregon, and traces her family’s difficulties adjusting to life in the United States after the intense trauma of surviving a genocide. After coming out as gay in her 20s, Reang’s central relationship with her mother fractures; this book is her attempt to build a bridge back to her.
For another illustrated memoir focusing on familial mental illness, try And Now I Spill the Family Secrets by Margaret Kimball. She uses her mother’s suicide attempt as a focal point to investigate the history of severe mental illness in her family: her grandmother’s schizophrenia, her mother’s bipolar diagnosis, her older brother’s break with reality. “…through unwavering honesty and sheer storytelling skill, Kimball creates an intimate portrait of the complicated, conflicting emotions that arise when one is confronted with a family member’s mental illness while highlighting how trauma reverberates across generations.” (Library Journal)
~posted by Jane S.
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