This story was originally published in the Alaska Beacon.
Tessa Hulls was making sandwiches in the Alaska Capitol when she learned she had won a Pulitzer Prize.
Her book, “Feeding Ghosts,” is a nonfiction graphic novel that documents three generations of women in her family, starting with her grandmother, who was a journalist at the time of the Chinese Communist Revolution.
It had already won three national awards by the time the Pulitzer announcement came on Monday, placing her among America’s top writers. She won for the category of memoir or autobiography, which is in its third year and comes with a $15,000 prize.
“I’m having a surreal day,” she said, shortly after this year’s winners were announced. “Now I’ve got to go back to making sandwiches.”
A few hours later, she had more time to talk to reporters and still appeared dazed by the news.
“It’s basically the highest award someone can get. And as somebody who spent nine years learning and working on this history, I felt a huge amount of pressure to try and get it right, because I knew that I would end up speaking for a generation that I didn’t live through and would come to be seen as an authority on these things,” she said.
“And so making this book made me both a historian and a journalist, and so to have this recognition at this high level, that this role that I stepped into, that I guess I got it right — it means a lot as somebody who really wants to be careful with the material I’m working with.”
Hulls’ book talks about a century of Chinese history that isn’t well known in the United States, using her family’s history to tell the story. In the process, she uncovers her grandmother’s memoir, which she learns might be full of twisted information.
“It’s really about how mothers and daughters both damage and save one another,” she said.
The book explores personal trauma, and reviewers have frequently found connections to that issue in their own lives.
“I think almost everyone has a complicated relationship with their mother, so that’s who my book is for: people with complicated relationships with their mothers,” she said. “I think in my case, it was a little bit more concretely tied to specific history, but I think all of us are trying to understand our parents and why they ended up the ways that they did.”
Hulls, who was raised in Northern California, has lived an itinerant life that has included stays in all seven continents. To see the world, she follows the food, getting jobs in food service, she said. When it came to Antarctica, she followed a job opening for a chef.
For the past four months, she’s been working in the Alaska Capitol’s lounge — the building’s version of a cafeteria — serving food to legislators, staff and visitors.
When the Pulitzer winners were announced, it was lunchtime, and the lounge was full of lawmakers.
“We were just in there when she got the call. The whole lounge gave her a round of applause,” said Speaker of the House Bryce Edgmon, I-Dillingham.
Two representatives hurried downhill from the Capitol to the nearest bookstore, Alaska Robotics, which was already planning a book signing for Hulls on Tuesday.
One of the legislators grabbed a copy of “Feeding Ghosts,” then reconsidered and got three more, said the store’s owner, Pat Race.
Back at the Capitol, Hulls kept working behind the lounge’s food service counter until she finished her day.
Hulls enjoys cycling and the outdoors, so much so that she became known among friends for cycling to their weddings.
Juneau’s glum spring weather has given her plenty of time to be artistic, but she’s also looking forward to the end of the legislative session.
“Next month, I’ve blocked out a week that just says, ‘Tessa, go be alone in the backcountry.’ So that’s what I’m doing. Like, first available opportunity,” she said.
James Brooks is a longtime Alaska reporter, having previously worked at the Anchorage Daily News, Juneau Empire, Kodiak Mirror and Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. A graduate of Virginia Tech, he is married to Caitlyn Ellis, owns a house in Juneau and has a small sled dog named Barley.
