The Gloomy Girl Variety Show: A Memoir of Ailments, Apartments, and African (American) Womanhood

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 The Gloomy Girl Variety Show, Freda Epum explores the opposing forces of her ＂no-place, no-where＂ identity as a Nigerian American daughter, diasporically displaced, who spent years in and out of institutions seeking 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--and a patchwork of poetry, art, and autotheory.

With raw honesty and glittering wit, this debut memoir maps the complexity of life under intersecting forms of oppression, revealing what it takes to turn from the brink of despair toward community and self-acceptance, find refuge in love, and reimagine home.

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 Prize. 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 Writers Workshop, VONA, the Ragdale Foundation, the Anderson Center at Tower View Residency, and the Jordan-Goodman Prize. Originally from Tucson, she now lives in Cincinnati. You can find her online at www.freda epum.com.