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.
“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 “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 |
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Praise for The Gloomy Girl Variety Show
In the luminous, formally inventive memoir THE GLOOMY GIRL VARIETY SHOW, Freda Epum interrogates ideas of home and safety as a Black woman with mental illness. Epum’s genius is her ability to weave lyric fragments, cultural and political criticism, and her own photographs and art into an incisive, cohesive constellation. This work, like her journey, is “both festering and healing”. I have been waiting for a book like this all my life. --Jami Nakamura Lin, author of The Night Parade
"Unforgettable. The Gloomy Girl Variety Show is a love song in medley form to the 'raced and disabled,' the sick and unseen. Don’t let the title fool you, this memoir is more wit and humor than doom and gloom. Organized like a series of TV shows about househounting, Epum writes with fierce creativity about race, migration, and mental illness as she navigates the search for home. Her bold voice and visual art show that this is Freda Epum’s world and we are lucky to be welcomed into it." –Jen Soriano, award-winning author of Nervous: Essays on Heritage and Healing
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“The Gloomy Girl Variety Show has everything I could ever want in a book. Dazzling, darkly funny, and fiercely incisive, Freda Epum takes center stage to deliver her profound insights on mental health, diaspora, belonging, and her search for home in a fragmented world. A masterful showman, Epum invites readers in with an honesty and heartfelt vulnerability that lingers long after the final word. These essays blew me away. I love The Gloomy Girl Variety Show, and you will too.” —Edgar Gomez, author of High-Risk Homosexual
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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.
Publisher's Weekly Fall 2024 Adult Preview: Memoirs & Biographies
Brittle Paper Freda Epum’s Forthcoming Memoir Explores Living with Disability in America
Movers & Makers SW Ohio artists, organizations receive thousands in state funding
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.
Publisher's Weekly Fall 2024 Adult Preview: Memoirs & Biographies
Brittle Paper Freda Epum’s Forthcoming Memoir Explores Living with Disability in America
Movers & Makers SW Ohio artists, organizations receive thousands in state funding
Excerpts from THE GLOOMY GIRL VARIETY SHOW
The Rumpus, "The Aesthetics of Safety"
Electric Literature, "How to Be a Terrible No-good African Daughter"
Heavy Feather Review: #NO MORE PRESIDENTS, “Race Day”
Rogue Agent, “The African Dream”
Third Coast, “I am sorry to inform you about the banana peel thrown at the black girl: A One Woman Show”
Nat.Brut Beyond Resilience Folio: Edited by Kay Ulanday Barrett, “MARKED MANIFESTO,” “Segment on the inner workings of a first-generation girl"
Reading of “The African Dream,” appearing in THE GLOOMY GIRL VARIETY SHOW
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In the evenings, I picture every detail of my future life there. This period of imaginary Africanization fixes me. Rebuilds me from broken, remolds my tongue, deconstructs the Atlantic. I zigzag against the current of the borderlands, never arriving. |