Paperback Edition
ISBN: 9781558613102
Publication date: 01-14-25

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.

”Touching and unconventional . . . Epum effectively transports readers inside her mind and offers bracing, funny testimony that will feel familiar to those who’ve struggled with their own anxiety and depression.” —Publishers Weekly

“The Gloomy Girl Variety Show has everything I could ever want in a book. Dazzling, darkly funny, and fiercely incisive, Freda Epum takes center stage to deliver her profound insights on mental health, diaspora, belonging, and her search for home in a fragmented world. A masterful showman, Epum invites readers in with an honesty and heartfelt vulnerability that lingers long after the final word. These essays blew me away. I love The Gloomy Girl Variety Show, and you will too.” —Edgar Gomez, author of High-Risk Homosexual: A Memoir

 “Reckoning with identity, illness, and in-betweenness, Freda Epum’s voice comes through these pages like a flame: crackling with insight, wryly humorous even as it sears, and impossible to look away from. This hybrid marvel of a book is not just a variety show but a magic show—you will be transformed.” —Erica Berry, author of Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear

“The Gloomy Girl Variety Show is a one-of-a-kind, thought-provoking tour of contemporary American life. Knitting vignettes to poetry and photography, this memoir urges us to reconsider how we think and talk about mental health, pop culture, and Black women’s lives. Whether chronicling ‘How to Be a Terrible No-Good African Daughter’ or testifying on ‘Why (I Choose to Remember),’ Freda Epum writes with tenderness and great wit. She is a vibrant new voice for our times.” —Daisy Hernández, author of The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation’s Neglect of a Deadly Disease

“In the luminous, formally inventive memoir The Gloomy Girl Variety Show, Freda Epum interrogates ideas of home and safety as a Black woman with mental illness. Epum’s genius is her ability to weave lyric fragments, cultural and political criticism, and her own photographs and art into an incisive, cohesive constellation. This work, like her journey, is ‘both festering and healing.’ I have been waiting for a book like this all my life.” —Jami Nakamura Lin, author of The Night Parade: A Speculative Memoir

“Unforgettable. The Gloomy Girl Variety Show is a love song in medley form to the ‘raced and disabled,’ the sick and unseen. Don’t let the title fool you—this memoir is more wit and humor than doom and gloom. Organized like a series of TV shows about house-hunting, Epum writes with fierce creativity about race, migration, and mental illness as she navigates the search for home. Her bold voice and visual art show that this is Freda Epum’s world, and we are lucky to be welcomed into it.” —Jen Soriano, author of Nervous: Essays on Heritage and Healing