Growing up in America as a first-generation immigrant while living with your mother and grandmother would be challenging enough for anyone. In Hull’s case, such challenges went to the next level. Her grandmother’s fame in China for writing a bestselling memoir; the family’s unstable racial and class identities; the history behind why the family fled China in the first place; her mother’s conflicted way of handling it all; and the harmful role therapy played as well; all make for a profoundly complex and layered narrative. No wonder it took Hull nine years to finish, and no wonder it won a Pulitzer Prize.