This book by Tessa Hulls recently won a National Book Critics Circle Award for best first book.

The author describes how a graphic novelist contends with her maternal family’s complicated history.

When Hulls was growing up, her grandmother was a constant but ill-defined presence “who shuffled around our house in gray Costco sweatpants.” The author knew only three things about her grandmother, Sun Yi: She was from the Chinese mainland, she had once been a journalist and had written a bestselling memoir, and “long ago, something happened and she lost her mind.”

In her astonishing book, Hulls sets out to discover not only what happened to her grandmother and how those events shaped her mother’s upbringing, but how all of the above informed her own relationship with her mother and the world around her.

She discovered that Sun had fled to Hong Kong with her young daughter — the illegitimate child of a Swiss diplomat — in tow. There she enrolled her daughter in a prestigious school, wrote her memoir, and suffered a breakdown from which she would never fully recover.

Hulls relates all this material in pages as meticulously researched as they are lushly drawn. She analyzes not only the cultural and historical context of her grandmother’s and mother’s lives, but also her own motivations, assumptions, and failures to truly understand and empathize with that maternal line.

In her willingness to examine each troubling detail, the author is painstakingly thorough and relentlessly honest. “Sometimes I feel so angry at Sun Yi and how her damage stacked the deck against my mom,” Hulls writes. “But I also see flickers of something much harder to stomach, where I use her as an easy target because I don’t know how to feel the anger toward my mom.” From start to finish, this book is a revelation.

This book glimmers with insight, acumen, and an unwillingness to settle for simple answers.