10 Questions To Help You Discuss Dua’s November Monthly Read, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong 

Welcome to 10 Questions, where the Service95 Book Club provides you with everything you need to start your own discussion about Dua’s Monthly Read. Whether you read alone, with a book club or a group of friends, these questions will help you peel back the layers of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Dua’s Monthly Read for November

1. Was it hard not to read this novel as a memoir?  

2. ‘A name thin as air.’ How did you interpret the name Lan gives the narrator, ‘Little Dog’? How do you picture him?  

3. ‘When does a war end?’ How does the book explore the idea of inherited family trauma? How do Rose and Lan’s experiences of war bleed into Little Dog’s American life?  

4. The author has said: “What I learned from these refugee women is you don’t have to talk it out. That’s the great Western myth.” In the book, what do the women do with their memories?  

5. What role does Paul play in the novel?  

6. “I wanted to address these tropes of shame around queerness,” says Vuong about the book. How has he explored ‘shame’ in the relationship between the narrator and Trevor? 

7. Sex is hard to write. Ocean explained that he wanted the final sex scene between Little Dog and Trevor to represent an act of rescue. How do you read that scene? 

8. There are so many themes in this book: the Vietnam war, pain and violence, the first- and second-generation immigrant experience, the opioid crisis, queer life, language; all told in a letter that could be a poem that won’t/can’t be read. What has stayed with you after reading?

9. At the end of the book, who or what is the hurt thing in the field? 

10. If you wrote a letter to your own mother, whether she could read it or not, what would you tell her?