Invitation to Gloomy Girl Variety Show Book Launch!

It's a "Healing Journey" Celebration :)

Hi friends!

Happy New Year! I hope you had a fulfilling and relaxing holiday with family and friends. I’m reaching out because I wanted to personally invite you and your community to my book launch on January 15! It’s at the Mercantile Library and tickets are FREE.99 (as they say lol). There’s a reception from 6:00pm and programming starts at 6:30pm with a book signing and sale at 7:30pm. I’m excited to be in conversation with one of my favorite Cincinnati based Black woman writers, Dani McClain, author of We Live for the We: The Political Power of Black Motherhood and journalist at The Nation.

My first book, The Gloomy Girl Variety Show: A Memoir, is releasing soon from Feminist Press (publication day is January 14, 2025). It is now available for pre-order!

Merging memoir, poetry, and criticism, this radical literary revue traces a first-generation Nigerian American’s search for home and belonging on her own terms.

In three parts, The Gloomy Girl Variety Show traces the joys and despairs of an imaginary house hunt. Author Freda Epum takes the real-life housing inequity she encounters and spins it into a sprawling meditation on the larger cost of living and enduring as a Black disabled woman in America. Brick by brick, and despite the difficulties she faces, Epum creates space for women, people of color, people with disabilities, children of immigrants, and anyone else who has felt “in-between.”

In this formally inventive memoir woven with essays, poems, and images, Epum explores the opposing forces of her “no-place, no-where” identity. As a Nigerian American daughter who spent years in and out of institutions while she sought 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.

With raw honesty and a wry sense of humor, The Gloomy Girl Variety Show explores the complexity of coming of age under intersecting forms of oppression, and reveals what it takes to come back from the brink of despair and arrive somewhere safe, beautiful, and empowering.

I would love it if you could join me and Feminist Press in "creating a world where everyone sees themselves in a book" by pre-ordering Gloomy Girl and sharing the event with those in your community who might be interested. And attending of course! We’ve already got some buzz from Publisher’s Weekly and Kirkus Reviews! So far, Gloomy Girl’s been named a Most Anticipated Book of 2025 by Debutiful and The Chicago Review of Books!

See you there,

Freda