About this item
Highlights
- Merging memoir, poetry, and criticism, this radical literary revue traces a first-generation Nigerian American's search for home and belonging on her own terms.In three parts, The Gloomy Girl Variety Show traces the joys and despairs of an imaginary house hunt.
- About the Author: Freda Epum is a Nigerian American writer and artist.
- 224 Pages
- Biography + Autobiography, Personal Memoirs
Description
Book Synopsis
Merging memoir, poetry, and criticism, this radical literary revue traces a first-generation Nigerian American's search for home and belonging on her own terms.
In three parts, The Gloomy Girl Variety Show traces the joys and despairs of an imaginary house hunt. Author Freda Epum takes the real-life housing inequity she encounters and spins it into a sprawling meditation on the larger cost of living and enduring as a Black disabled woman in America. Brick by brick, and despite the difficulties she faces, Epum creates space for women, people of color, people with disabilities, children of immigrants, and anyone else who has felt "in-between."
In this formally inventive memoir woven with essays, poems, and images, Epum explores the opposing forces of her "no-place, no-where" identity. As a Nigerian American daughter who spent years in and out of institutions while she sought treatment for life-threatening mental illness, Epum examines her journey through healthcare and housing systems via a pop cultural lens: our collective obsession with HGTV's home buying and makeover shows.
With raw honesty and a wry sense of humor, The Gloomy Girl Variety Show explores the complexity of coming of age under intersecting forms of oppression, and reveals what it takes to come back from the brink of despair and arrive somewhere safe, beautiful, and empowering.
Review Quotes
"The Gloomy Girl Variety Show is a one-of-a-kind, thought-provoking tour of contemporary American life. Knitting vignettes to poetry and photography, this memoir urges us to reconsider how we think and talk about mental health, pop culture, and Black women's lives. Whether chronicling 'How to Be a Terrible No-Good African Daughter' or testifying on 'Why (I Choose to Remember), ' Freda Epum writes with tenderness and great wit. She is a vibrant new voice for our times." --Daisy Hernández, author of The Kissing Bug "Reckoning with identity, illness, and in-betweenness, Freda Epum's voice comes through these pages like a flame: crackling with insight, wryly humorous even as it sears, and impossible to look away from. This hybrid marvel of a book is not just a variety show but a magic show--you will be transformed." --Erica Berry, author of Wolfish
About the Author
Freda Epum is a Nigerian American writer and artist. She is the author of two chapbooks, Input/Output and Entryways into memories that might assemble me, which won the Iron Horse Literary Review Chapbook Competition. She is the cocreator of the Black American Tree Project, an interactive workshop about the legacies of slavery in American society. Epum's work has been published in The Rumpus, Electric Literature, Vol 1. Brooklyn, Entropy, Bending Genres, and others. She received her MFA from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Her work has been supported by Lambda Literary, the Tin House Workshop, VONA, the Ragdale Foundation, the Anderson Center at Tower View, and the Jordan-Goodman Prize. Originally from Tucson, she now lives in Cincinnati.
