The Gloomy Girl Variety Show

Epum debuts with a touching and unconventional portrait of her experiences as a disabled Black woman with bipolar disorder. Taking inspiration from HGTV’s House Hunters, Epum organizes the account into three “houses”: a “falling-apart foreigner farm house,” in which she recalls being raised by Nigerian immigrants in Tucson, Ariz.; a “bountiful Blackness as fear bungalow,” which focuses on her complicated feelings about race; and an “imperfectly ill island abode,” which illuminates her struggles with suicidal ideation and her stays in mental institutions. “I’m on the market for belonging,” Epum writes in one typically lyrical passage. “I want to inhabit renovated spaces, to establish a sense of home.” She expounds on those desires in short, poetic essays that range in topic from her exhaustion at being “the INTERESTING SUBJECT in the literature seminar on the FEMINIST DAY” to her development of a drinking problem, and punctuates her points with her own photographs and illustrations. The cumulative effect feels more like a chapbook than a full-fledged memoir, but 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. This is a good bet for readers who like to venture off the beaten path. Photos. Agent: Reika Davis, Def Literary. (Jan.)