Review: Gloom to manoeuvre

Poetry, photographs, essays and art reviews make this fizzy memoir a structural delight.

Freda Epum’s sparkling memoir deals with messy life; she’s not afraid to dive into its gory intestines. Switching between first and third person (and occasionally second), it describes the highs and lows of growing up Black in the mostly white Tucson, Arizona; mental illness; unemployment; and, finally, happiness.

At the centre of The Gloomy Girl Variety Show is Epum’s longing for home. It begins with a dream of “a fully furnished home with a great stove to cook family recipes, large windows to look out at the landscape, a couch to fall asleep on, a bed to lie in for hours, a bathtub to soak my pain away,” and ends with a description of the first home she owns.

In between, an existential searching for what home even means. “I am without my own definition of home,” she says.

A first generation Nigerian-American who learnt to mispronounce her surname for the comfort of those around her, Epum grapples with the dislocation pain of a third-culture kid. “I resented my parents, grateful for their sacrifice but bitter about what I’d been deprived of: a sense of self,” she says.

She muses on her relationship with food, memories of hospital admissions for mental healthcare, and sessions with therapists and psychiatrists.

The memoir includes a stellar essay on “corpsing” and “terminal Blackness”. She ponders the expectations of motherhood, the burden of capitalism, and art. And she tells us how she finds love.

Epum may call herself a gloomy girl, but she is cool to hang out with in these pages. Her memoir is lively, sometimes sad, and always vulnerable. And she is upbeat, if somewhat wry. It’s a raw, beautiful and deep work.