Freda Epum: On Intersectional Identities, Alienation, the Vicarious Pleasure of House Hunting Reality TV, and Her Memoir ‘The Gloomy Girl Variety Show’
In Freda Epum’s raw and unflinching memoir The Gloomy Girl Variety Show (Feminist Press, 2025), we enter a house. We enter many houses for we are on a house hunt, searching for a safe space as “her spirit is not well and her heart is not at rest.” From the very first house, we are haunted by the displacement and disconnection she experiences as a Black, disabled woman in America. The child of immigrant parents from Nigeria, Epum, who was raised in Arizona, struggles with her sense of self “in this sea of whiteness, of friends, enemies, and strangers.” In other houses and other rooms, Epum allows us access to the corners of her splintered mind, the depression and eating disorders, the suicidal ideation, the agoraphobia, the bouts of psychosis when the monsters calling to her “leave multiple messages, as if trying to get hold of someone in an emergency.” This is a multi-textual work. Epum blends her own art and photography with the works of other writers, thinkers, and artists as she questions the complex intersections of race and identity, offering critique and commentary of the lived realities and institutional functions of bigotry, xenophobia, and social prejudice.
During our recent Zoom conversation, Epum and I connected over my childhood years spent in Nigeria and her family’s own enduring connections to the country. We also discussed her motivations behind taking on the memoir form as a record of trauma and triumph and her hopes for others who, like herself, are searching for their forever home.
Tania Malik: The memoir is framed around a house hunt inspired by the popular HGTV show House Hunters. As you say in your book, house hunting reality shows have a game show aspect. They are framed as a high-stakes decision—what kind of house will they choose, how will it change their lives, will it make them happy? Tell us what was behind structuring your memoir in this way.
Freda Epum: The structure for the memoir came about towards the end of the drafting process. I was looking towards writing as a space for expression and healing. Like a visual artist that didn’t have access to a studio or materials, I wanted to find another way of expressing myself. This was at the time when I was experiencing a lot of mental health issues. I had written the first essay, ‘Scary Movies and Love Stories,’ in 2015, while I was at my parents’ house. And I thought to myself that this could be a book. I decided to apply for an MFA, to take this more seriously, to have more structure to complete the drafting process, and to learn more about the publishing industry.
I was doing all of these essays that were around migration, race, racial isolation, and mental illness. They were all different, but circling around the same themes. While working on my MFA thesis one of my advisors said that “finding home” is like the book’s central tenet. I had a few essays about house hunters, as it’s one of my obsessions that I kept returning to. When working with my agent, who’s also a House Hunters fan, she said we need a container for these stories, and each could be like an episode of that show. I did a few iterations of how I might structure the book as a narrator literally searching for a home. That is where we arrived at the introduction, setting up the stakes of the house hunt, returning to the house hunt at various points in the book.
TM: You write how you are far from the ideal African daughter and how you try on markers of the Nigerian identity and culture for size (clothes, food, language), and none of it fits entirely. This speaks to your search for “renovated spaces” to inhabit. There is a sense of alienation that seems particular to children of immigrants.
FE: I feel kinship with other children of immigrants around the sense of alienation. I’ve heard folks describe it as a “third culture kid,” growing up in-between spaces. In Arizona, there weren’t that many other Nigerians or Africans around. In one of the closing passages in the book, there’s a quote that talks about my country being almost an imagined construct. Growing up, that’s how I felt about my own relationship to my family’s place of origin—an imagined construct, far removed from the US. There wasn’t much access then as we have now with technology. It wasn’t until I got older that I had proximity to other Nigerians and could watch Nollywood movies and Nigerian News. I wanted to be able to articulate that for folks who were feeling that same way, for children of immigrants trying to manage space between two cultures.
TM: You recount your struggle with depression, eating disorders, anxiety. There are suicide attempts and you were in a psych ward several times. You described Black women living with mental illness as the “walking dead girls.” Talk about mental health and how it intersects with being a Black woman, and how it also embodies this sense of otherness.
FE: Oftentimes, Black folks are expected to feel pain. I think that is true historically, and true in the medical system, and true in the way that we talk about the racist images of police brutality. I wanted to be able to talk about this expectation that Black people, Black women, other minority folks are supposed to be resilient, are being lauded for their trauma that they’ve overcome. In the essay ‘Crazy Eyes and the Walking Dead,’ I talk about how there’s this subjectivity for Black people in America, where you are expected to deal with pain. As someone who already has mental health issues, I was really interrogating that for myself. Like when I’m looking at other Black women that have experienced mental illness, like Sandra Bland, who herself had suicide attempts, how that is often written off as not related to the condition of being in the US, or the condition of being under capitalism, but instead is a personal individual plight, and not a social model for mental health or disability.
TM: Within this exploration, you have drawn on the literary works and words of other artists and authors from Richard Fung, Nnedi Okorafor, to Tracey Emin’s art, and William Pope.L’s performance art, among others. I think it allowed you to deeply examine your own experiences while expanding the dialogue you and I were having on the page. What kinds of conversations should we be having at this time of crisis in our cultural, social, and political spheres?
FE: I love reading books with excerpts of other theorists, writers, artists. It helps me dive deeper into a subject matter. On a craft level, I wanted to have other voices be a part of the book because I’m interested in this idea of a citation as a dinner party: I’m inviting these other scholars and artists. We’re having this conversation about this central idea that is not just me thinking about it, but people have been thinking about it a long time over the course of history. In this particular climate, with books being banned left and right, these are attempts to erase history and conversations across different issues. I think it’s important to see the breadth of an issue, the ways that multiple people have attempted to answer these questions, attempted to talk about their struggles. Almost so that when someone picks up my book, they can follow along with these other citations, go down their own rabbit holes. I think it helps reach multiple people and bring in some of those voices trying to be erased.
TM: I did go down a few rabbit holes myself as there were writers or artists you cited that I wanted to learn more about. But, along with their texts, you included your own artwork, self-portraits, and photographs with you as the subject or focus. I want to talk about self-portraits and how they create a sense of being seen and unseen at once. This merging of words and visuals was quite powerful.
FE: The visuals weren’t a part of the book initially. I had one image, a drawing I had done where I was trying to illustrate a sense of chaos and seeing double. I couldn’t quite figure out how to describe that with words. So I included the image in the book. As I was sharing it with different editors and friends, they said there should be more of these images. I started to think about how I wanted to incorporate them, what I wanted them to mean. I look at this book now as an artist memoir as well. The story of an artist and how she is entangling her sense of self within her own artwork.
I brought in some artwork from the Cloud Series, particularly the performance piece that is the most featured throughout the book, where I’m wearing a giant rain cloud. I wanted those images to be in conversation with the text, to deepen the relationship between the words and the images, and to have the images themselves have their own emotional and visual arc.
TM: On the subject of arcs, there is a throughline of anger and rage against victimhood, which brings me to this phrase: “Meek Black Woman.” It is a clever twist on the other stereotype and illustrates how, in many ways, your illness gave you a voice.
FE: I’m happy that you like the “Meek Black Woman” title. I have always been an introverted, reserved person, more quiet, shy. I’m now seeing more people talk about “quiet Black girls,” which I find interesting because I didn’t really see people talking about that when I was a kid. What I wanted to be able to talk about was not being a strong Black woman, but being soft, not weak but vulnerable, a little sad. And I think that isn’t portrayed as often as I wish it could be, and for people to have the permission to feel how they feel to just exist, how they want to exist.
The “Meek Black Woman” idea was initially slightly more abstract. Then I realized that part of this arc is the narrator finding her sense of agency and self-acceptance, almost like a battle cry for the sick to be more well-respected. I wanted to show that arc of being someone who’s more unsure to someone who has more confidence in themselves.
TM: This expression comes through the different points of view that you employ, sometimes first, sometimes second. What did each bring to the table for you?
FE: The story of someone’s life isn’t always in first person. How I think about the second person, such as in the essay ‘Race Day,’ is where the narrator asks the reader to think about themselves. That’s usually how the second person is used, to implicate the reader, to bring them into the narrative. The third person is often used where I’m trying to create more distance, to go over a longer period of time, to talk more about the actual story and the events, and less about the interiority of feelings. For this book, it’s an assemblage of experiences. And sometimes those experiences are best told in POVs that aren’t first person, to be able to implicate the reader, to cover larger periods of time, to think through multiple truths.
TM: Can you tell us about the first essay that led to this piece of work, this manifesto?
FE: I started writing the words in this book while reading Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Her brilliance, her craft blew me away, and my writings in the margins ended up being my first essay, ‘Scary Movies and Love Stories,’ which was originally the title for the book before it became The Gloomy Girl Variety Show. I was really interested in the concept of the house as a container of deep emotions of a person, and I wanted to continue along with that idea, so that’s how I started to think of that first essay as an expansion point—in different directions, expanding on different themes. A lot of times in a memoir, people will write companion pieces, and I almost think of that as the companion piece that started it all, even though it wasn’t really a companion piece.
TM: Memoirs, though, have both universality and specificity. They have to be of interest to a broader audience, yet are specific to your experiences. Is there any advice you can give other writers who want to access the truth about themselves on the page?
FE: I have taught intro to creative writing and nonfiction workshops. The way that I usually try to encourage my students to access themselves on the page is through writing prompts, and one of the prompts that I really enjoy is taken from a book where there’s a series of questions, and some of the questions are like: who are you and what do you owe to your mother? Questions like these that are a little bit more aloof, but also thought-provoking. I typically start an essay by thinking about the central question I’m trying to answer. And with the memoir-in-essay form, which is how I would describe my book, I would use the questioning to create a portrait of a life.
I think if someone’s more interested in writing a straightforward memoir with an inciting incident, the middle falling action, and the resolution, then I think some of the other writing prompts I’ve used are more focused on painting the picture of each version of yourself. Who were you as a child? Who were you as a teenager? Who were you as an adult? How did those experiences shape the story of your life? What is the central incident that is sparking you to write this story? And so, I tend to think of it as either a series of life experiences or a series of questions as your entry point for writing.
I really love Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode, a book about design and pattern in narrative. I also really like Melissa Febos’s Body Work and Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir.
TM: Is there some helpful advice that you in turn have received?
FE: I was at a workshop in my MFA, and they brought in a guest speaker who had published quite a few books, and she said, “play the long game.” I didn’t like that advice then because I thought, I am trying to be a writer and I need to publish this book before I’m thirty. I have all these goals. Now, I encourage people to play the long game because I think it helps you develop yourself as a writer and an artist with your craft. It helps you build a writing community you’ll rely on when your book comes out. It helps you share your writing journey with people that might want to buy your book when it comes out in, say, ten years.
I’m actually happy that I played the long game. I’m seeing the fruit of all of that come to bear with the writing community I’ve established, with people who have followed me along on my writing journey, and with the satisfaction that I have with myself for writing the best book I could.
TM: You write about yourself: “What does it mean for her to write these pages? To assemble a collection of stories, an archival description of recurrent suffering?” It’s a question I’d like to ask you now that the memoir is done. What does it mean to you?
FE: I was at a reading in Chicago at Call & Response, a Black woman-owned bookstore. At first, I was worried that there weren’t many people. It was intimate, but it was one of my favorite readings that I’ve done. Everyone in the audience was a person of color. There were other disabled folks. There were a few Nigerians. It was a beautiful experience to read along with them, where they were holding my book, I was holding my book, we were just reading through it together, and sharing how I inspired them with their own creative work.
And I think that is what this book means to me in particular. It’s the communities that I’m able to reach. I’ve heard writers talk about having written a book that they didn’t see themselves in. I’ve not seen too many books like my own, and I want more of them to be out there. I hope this will inspire other people to write similar books where they’ll feel seen within the narrative. And that the hybrid genre will continue to grow and find a place both critically and in the mainstream.
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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 Competition. She is the co-creator of the Black American Tree Project. 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. Originally from Tucson, she now lives in Cincinnati. www.fredaepum.com
