“No matter my current place of residence, my identities follow me. I’ve told you I’m searching, that I’m on the market for belonging,” writes Freda Epum in her memoir The Gloomy Girl Variety Show. Epum’s debut is an impressive, and incisive exploration of connection, diaspora, mental health, and the search for home in a fractured world.
Freda Epum, a first-generation Nigerian American and on the precipice of despair, spent years in and out of treatment for acute mental illness. Merging memoir, poetry, art and cultural criticism she traces her narrator’s journey of finding her true sense of self amidst the shards that make up her life experiences.
With sagacity—”I knew I wanted a forever when I was deeply depressed […] As a tireless researcher, I intend to find the cure to my weeping”—and mordant wit—”I didn’t think my glow-in-the-dark vagina would end my nightmares”—Epum hooks the reader from the opening pages. Through her narrator’s vestige of memory, trials, and tribulations she launches readers into the multiplicity of otherness and into an emotional thicket, in search of wholeness and belonging. Along the way, she discovers the transformative power of community, the refuge of genuine love, trust, and the freedom of redefining home on her own terms.
Told in fragments, the memoir is structured in five distinct parts and takes inspiration from HGTV’s House Hunters. Following an introduction to the “House Hunter” the reader visits three houses—The Falling-Apart Foreigner Farmhouse, The Bountiful Blackness as Fear Bungalow, and The Imperfectly Ill Island Abode—each a section dedicated to a specific overarching theme and concluding with a “Housewarming” reveal.
The oscillation between first and third person reflects the narrator’s internal turmoil and puzzled sense of self and draws the reader into her struggle for self-definition, creating a profound sense of empathy. At times, she yearns for independence and self-reliance: “Right now, I am learning to be alone […] I want to be alone and productive, alone and cozy, alone and free and open.” Yet, this desire for autonomy is complicated by a sense of alienation and cultural displacement. She poignantly refers to herself as the “Nameless Heroine,” a “plain brown girl” existing in a space where her experiences of mental illness are unnamed and misunderstood: “In her family’s Nigerian language, there is no translation for her mental disorders. Simply put, her spirit is not well and her heart is not at rest.”
The narrator’s sense of and struggle with rootlessness throughout the book did not develop in isolation, “I resented my parents, grateful for their sacrifice but bitter about what I’d been deprived of: a sense of self.” This loss manifests in the scaffolding of her family life: “The key to this household is the way sound indicates performance—the way it gestures toward emptiness and pain for our nameless heroine.” Her inner grief, rendered with heartbreaking clarity and nuance, resonates deeply, forging a powerful connection with the reader. “I think of how I don’t belong there,” she observes. “How I am a no-place, a no-where.”
Clear-eyed and vulnerable, the narrator confronts her deep-seated anger stemming from her illness, the stigma surrounding mental health, and the prospect of lifelong medication, “Inside me was anger. I was angry that I was sick […] I was angry because of my difference. The rage inside was deafening.”
However, her quest for self-discovery and belonging transcends the personal; she seeks to define herself within a culture that relentlessly casts her as “other,” a perpetual stranger in her own land and body. It inevitable propels her on the tangled path of racial politics in America and Epum does not shy away from astute cultural criticism as she challenges the stark realities of Black health statistics and police brutality, commenting how “Eric Garner’s dying words, ‘I can’t breathe,’ become a performative utterance as they are uttered and re-uttered by activists that perform death at die-in protests. The phrase ‘I can’t breathe’ is no longer just a sentence; it is real. Black bodies—as dying subjects—are always gasping for air,” highlighting how a tragic moment has been transformed into a symbol of resistance and a grim reminder of the ongoing struggle for Black lives.
Epum’s memoir brilliantly captures the nuances and emotional complexities of mental illness, while illuminating the unflinching realities and impact of othering. Bending genres, she draws upon a variety of media including photography and self-portraits to enrich her flash narratives. In the end a not-so-gloomy girl finds her way home, scarred but with a spark of resilience ignited within her. This memoir is a powerful call for acceptance, not only of the truths and traumas we carry but also of the judgments that cloud our vision of those who walk a different path.
Britta Stromeyer is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, SF Writer’s Grotto, & PEN. Her writing appears in Flash Fiction Magazine, Bending Genres Journal, Necessary Fiction, On the Seawall, Marin Independent Journal, & elsewhere. She was a finalist for the Bellingham Review Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction. She is the author of award-winning children’s books. Britta holds an MFA from Dominican University, CA, an M.A. from American University, & a Certificate in Novel Writing from Stanford University. www.brittastromeyer.com