THE GLOOMY GIRL VARIETY SHOW

A writer and artist muses on mental illness and identity.

The Arizona-born daughter of Nigerian immigrants, Epum felt profoundly alienated, not just from her family but also from American culture. Her isolation eventually gave rise to a “crisis of identity” and displacement, both of which manifested in young adulthood as body dysmorphia, anxiety, and recurring bouts of depression. Building her narrative on the concept of a house hunt, Epum explores moments in the struggles that drove her to “find the cure to my weeping” and a place to call home. As she expresses her personal fragmentation by moving between a past and a present she punctuates with photographs, drawings, and other artwork, the author dissects memories—like those involving American pop songs mythologizing Africa as a place of “drums, rain, and wild dogs” and the “ten pounds of racial slurs” she carried from living in a brown body—that she associates with her identity crisis. After college her internalized self-hatred metamorphosed into voices that claimed Epum was a “stupid, crazy bitch” no one wanted. The author then began a series of psychiatric hospital stays that offered only modest improvement. Desperate to break the cycle of hospitalization and to avoid becoming an “unemployed zombie,” she went to Ohio to pursue a writing MFA. There, she came to accept her “intersectional identity—raced and disabled”; as she did, Epum also found nonjudgmental love and an unexpected homecoming to herself through the words she did not know would save her. As it examines the relationship between illness and xenophobia, this book also celebrates a resilient woman’s hard-won understanding of the meaning of home in a racist world determined to annihilate her spirit.

A unique memoir about the struggle to find wholeness in a white supremacist society.