Themes I can’t resist: explorations of personal relationships with television; women and mental illness; immigrant cultures and assimilation in the U.S., addiction; the film industry; fantasy and delusion as blockers for a sense of self; using narrative and imagination as a way back to one’s self.

Freda Epum’s much anticipated debut, The Gloomy Girl Variety Show, has all this, and it comes in risk-taking forms. The book’s three main sections (House #1, House #2, and House #3) follow the format of an episode of HGTV’s House Hunters. This structure toys with the American Dream—the love and obsession with television, reality TV in particular—and tours us through a/the narrator’s life and experiences with performance, Blackness, femaleness, mental illness, and being an intellect and an artist.

In “House #1: The Falling Apart Foreigner Farm House,” we stay at the Tucson home in which Epum grew up first generation raised by Nigerian parents, visit Western Massachusetts (specifically Smith College, where she got her bachelors) and witness some of the physical, mental, and spiritual experience/nightmare of institutionalization for undiagnosed mental illness.

In “House #2: The Bountiful Blackness as Fear Bungalow,” we meet the home that is the body, specifically the Black body and the performance of Blackness on stage and in life. We meet what the Black body receives in this country, specifically, we meet the Black woman’s body, and the experience of having one in America.

In “House #3: The Imperfectly Ill Island Abode,” we travel deep inside the mind and through the corners and crevices of mental illness, to a life that is a home, real and imagined, which the narrator builds for herself in Cincinnati, Ohio.

The book is in fragments, poems, quotes and images and footnotes that span hundreds of years, unfinished phrases and sentences. It shifts from second to first to third person, plays with storytelling and what’s true in the form of creative nonfiction, and experiments with the ways a Black woman in this country can tell and become her own story on her own terms. At no point is it difficult to read or access, but only creates reason to pause, read again, and find new meaning.

I talked to Epum about journeys to healing, (not) belonging, loneliness, and the third largest global movie industry in Nigeria known as Nollywood. As well as many excellent book recommendations.

[This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.]

As somebody who writes about mental illness, and a formerly TV-obsessed person, I'm really compelled by this book, especially the elements that are about living inside a fantasy and a delusional space in order to escape what's going on around you. What do you make of  this experience of being lonely, whether you're alone or not?

Yeah, I like this dichotomy that you're creating between loneliness and being alone while having community. I think about the relationship I see between loneliness and mental health in really tangible ways. I realized that part of my mental health issues were due to racial isolation, so I recognized that sometimes you're existing in someone else's imagination.

I've been reading a lot of Ruha Benjamin, who talks about a white imagination versus a Black imagination. Since I've been able to travel, and live in a very opposite world from the one I lived in, [a very] New England WASP [space], or in Tucson with my very African parents, I see the different imaginations that people have. When you're in a place where the dominant imagination isn't your own, then people can write you off, assume something is wrong with you, and you can start to write yourself off—believe that something is wrong with you.

Imagination is such an important resource in addressing things that don't work. In the vein of using imagination to create the world we want, I’d love to hear your ideal scenario for care in this country, perhaps starting with Black people. What does that look like? 

For me, a lot of my close relationships serve as care. When there were moments in which I felt misunderstood in my life, there were friends and relationships that were a safe place for me.

In All About Love by bell hooks, she talks about love as this radical tool for healing. I do tend to think of it that way myself, in the sense that, if we have true community care, that can allow folks to access more resources, to interrogate the medical industrial complex. Saying, “I had this really shitty experience with this doctor—don't go back to them,” is important. Having a mirror to reflect yourself and your experiences [is important]. It's its own kind of care. Sometimes through that care, we can make sense of the world and the systems that we interact with, and that changes our decision making. So I would say community care was a really big part of my own healing journey. We're in an age where folks are feeling more and more isolated. It makes me wonder about how folks are accessing community care, and the rise of mental health issues.

The question that exists for me, too, is how do you combine modern medicine with this care and this love that is at least as essential. How do you get everything?

The care helps with discernment. For example, I'm in the middle of a possible misdiagnosis with my bipolar, and that's something that I've read a lot about: other women of color being misdiagnosed. Maybe it's more PTSD. Maybe it's just something that western medicine doesn't understand yet. I also don't want to push too much on the side of “go to therapy” or “just see a psychiatrist,” because I don't know if that's always the answer. I do think it's worth not stigmatizing those things, so that it can be an outlet for people, while also digesting experiences of medical trauma with other people in your network.

I'd love to hear more about your relationship with Nollywood—what role it plays in your life, if any, especially around this concept of return.

Yeah, I love Nollywood. Usually when I'm at home visiting my parents, there's some Nigerian movie on YouTube. And I talk to my mom about what's going on, and she usually doesn't know either, but it's just a fun time. There are sometimes tropes of curses, evil spirits, a local girl versus a big city girl. Trying to be a good wife to your husband.

It does have a subconscious impact on my writing, I think because it's a background setting of emotion. It taps into my senses, the sounds of watching those movies and the conversations I've had with my parents. That lends itself to the writer’s search for home within a family, and within the interior environment of a home. What shapes the particular interiors, the sounds and the smells and the visuals that we have.

At the start of the book, you use the second person a lot. Who were you imagining writing to or about? There are lots of ‘you’s.

There are a few different ways that I section off the book. It starts with the House Hunter [introduction], then the three houses, then [ends with the] the housewarming. I talk about the ways in which I came to know myself throughout, and there is a passage towards the end of the book where we're in “House #3”, and I'm talking about how my illness became the last way that I have known my body. There's a continuous rediscovering of self, and different parts of the self are emphasized or played down, returned to and deconstructed.

At the beginning of the book, I really wanted to situate this House Hunter narrative from a place of not belonging. I thought the strongest way that took hold was through the notion of a foreigner, both to your own country and your family’s. I wanted to create that narrative feeling of searching for something, so I thought that particular section was the best one [to use second person].

I'm curious about when and where the “I” arrives. Is there a time in your life when you started to feel like the tour guide? 

I think when I started to feel that sense of agency, more outspokenness, more connection. I was living in Cincinnati, and where the end of the book is situated: me living in Cincinnati with my partner, in a domestic life, where I feel at home on my own. The Aesthetics of Safety essay was written during the uprisings in 2020, when I was doom scrolling, feeling sadness, anxiety. That is where I had the central idea of home. In writing about safety, both in a country and in a mind and a body helped me understand: This is what a younger version of myself had been looking for this whole time.

Yeah, I really appreciated that safety and home can be radical desires when they don't come easily. I’m learning from you in reckoning with my own desires for those things. In seeking selfhood and honesty on the page, how did you decide how much of you to put in the book? 

I was starting to think about the politics of writing, about the ethics of writing about your family, what you reveal and what you don't reveal to a reader. How much you allow a reader to actually know who you are, versus a version of you. I was wrestling with all those questions as I was starting to get more serious about the book. I started to think, “Oh, shit, my family might read this.” I wanted to be very careful with how I portrayed my family of origin.

I listened to this podcast episode on minorities and publishing with Bassey Ikpi, another really amazing Nigerian memoirist. She wrote, I'm Telling the Truth But I'm Lying. In that podcast, she was talking about handling her mother with care, and depicting someone as a three-dimensional character. The focus of my book is a lot on my own internal feelings, and on processing the world rather than creating characters. There are no fully dimensional characters in the book. I was more interested in the multiple truths to the story. There's my truth, but there's also someone else's truth. I wanted to lend the reader a healing experience, not necessarily one where the narrator ends on a sour note, but a continuous one.

What is the benefit that you feel,inviting people into this personal experience while also using artifice and art and craft itself to keep a distance? What is the benefit of letting the public into this life that you love?

I think a lot of truth with a capital T is always going to be continuous, as history evolves and relationships evolve. Moving away from cliches of safety and home can sometimes be more edgy or risky. I also think about what Melissa Febos was talking about in Body Work—that a lot of confessional writing was done by women and looked at as not intellectual, not rigorous. That's the writing that I love to digest and I think of as strongly intellectual, reflecting your place in the world rather than more abstract concepts that might not directly impact someone else's life. That's also how confessional writing is more accessible to the average reader than a lot of academic books or books written by theorists. I wanted to make the book more accessible to readers, and have those readers know that the journey in the book is a continuous one where the characters in it are also continuing along with the narrator.

I've really had to think about [how much I let the public see of my life] over the last few months, because publicity is a grind. I've gotten a little depressed a few times. I've really had to think, why am I doing this, why is this fun for me? Why did I spend almost 10 years writing this thing? I've always been a very goal oriented person, so when I set a goal for myself, I will most likely achieve it even if it takes a long time. I set this goal for myself, I wanted to write a book. It was a milestone for me as an artist. I felt compelled to give voice to other uncertain Black girls like myself. I wanted to have a book like this in the world because I haven't seen many books that are similar to mine in these very specific ways: fragmented, a Black woman's mental health, with theory and as speculative nonfiction. I wanted to be able to connect with my readers, so that's what is giving me a lot of joy right now. Getting messages from friends or people DMing me on Instagram, sending emails about how much the book has resonated with them. When I'm reminded that this book made an impact on someone else's life, even if for the couple hours it took to read it, then I know that what I spent so much time doing was worth it.

When you've been through all that you have, if you were to draw a map or give directions to somebody without a central identity, what would you tell them it is, knowing they don’t have any idea? 

As a person that had a lot of depression as a teenager and into my early 20s, into my 30s, it's something that I've dealt with for most of my adult life. By being more proactive in my own healing, it gave me a sense of self respect and a sense of self preservation, and I think sometimes a lot of folks with mental health issues will write themselves off as feeling worthless. I think it's pretty normal for most of us to be depressed right now, but there is often a focus individually on, what's wrong with this person? Rather than a social model, or a collective care model. I had the fortune and privilege of having more resources, being highly educated, a middle-class income, having access to books on healing and therapy. Not everyone has those things, so I don't necessarily want to say, oh, it gets better for people. It doesn't always. I think sometimes that that is an even more radical thing to say. I was hoping that this book, if someone picks it up, might be the start of their own healing journey.

In keeping with the concept of this journey being continuous, what is home to you now? The narrator says at one point that this book was home, so I wonder: is it the next book? 

For my next book, I’m thinking about a burnout memoir. My experience in the workforce, a Severance-type memoir.

Otherwise, I've been thinking about home in relationship to decolonization. I recently read Magical Realism, a really great book talking about a migrant's journey. There is a diagram on part of the first page, and the story goes from a search for belonging to feelings of acceptance. A return is the final form of the migrants journey, and then it kind of restarts.

I'm starting to think more about a return and my American sensibilities, and wanting to reconnect with my Nigerian sensibilities and Nigerian culture. I'm thinking of home as a return at this moment; whereas, over the last few years, I thought of home as a place of safety. Now I'm at a point where I want to take more risks.

What seems to recur over and over again in memoir and fiction in the last few years especially is this theme that going to an ancestral place of origin is definitely not home. Being where you are certainly doesn’t always feel like home. I wonder if you can speak to the specific ways this not quite belonging anywhere is in your book as well.

The first thing you know about the narrator is that this is a person who feels like they don't belong. They don't belong where they grew up, or where they will be in the future, and they're searching for something. I thought a lot about belonging as my relationship to people in my immediate surroundings, and less so about my relationship to myself. I think that if we're looking to other people for validation of our own belongingness,  we might not ever feel like we belong anywhere. Self belonging or self acceptance is how I chose to end this particular book, realizing that it's not pointing the finger back at me that I don't belong, but more a hugging of myself, that I do belong, with myself.

The Gloomy Girl Variety Show was published Jan 14 via Feminist Press.