In Detail: Everything You Need To Know About Dua’s Monthly Read, On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous 

Here, Service95 Book Club gives a round-up of everything you need to know about Dua’s Monthly Read for November, On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong.

About the author

If you’ve read Ocean Vuong, you’ll know that in whatever form he writes, he’s a poet. His 2016 collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds won the TS Eliot Prize, and his latest poetry collection, Time Is A Mother, was released in 2022. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he was raised in Connecticut, US in a family of nail salon and factory labourers. You will find echoes of this in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, which is his first novel.

While writing On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong lived with noisy roommates – he shares that he hid in his closet to find the peace to finish the book: “For a gay writer, the irony is not lost on me, but I thought… ‘What was once a prison I’m going to turn into a portal.’” The result: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous was a New York Times bestselling novel  was nominated for the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction, in the same year Vuong was awarded a MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant. In 2020, the book won the American Book Award, the New England Book Award, and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award.

Vuong is currently is a professor on the NYU Creative Writing Program and his work has been featured in The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times.

Synopsis

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — with the epicentre rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, sexuality and masculinity. Asking questions central to a moment in American history immersed in addiction, violence, and trauma, but buoyed by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard. This is a novel that asks the question: how do we survive, and make of it a kind of joy?

Why Dua loves it

“This beautiful book had me hooked right at the title. And while it is a novel, Ocean Vuong’s poetic language dances on every page.

“It’s told in the form of a letter written by a young man called Little Dog to his illiterate Vietnamese mother as he flits between past and present to make sense of their relationship and his upbringing. The story unfolds from the paddy fields of Vietnam to the shopping malls and tobacco fields of Hartford, Connecticut, slowly revealing the layers of intergenerational trauma left by war and family violence.

“Addressing class, race and the immigrant experience, it’s also a queer coming-of-age story. At the heart of the book is Little Dog’s teenage love affair with Trevor, a white working-class boy whose ultimate self-destruction with drugs can be traced to the toxic masculinity that surrounds him. As much as it is a commentary on the dark side of the American Dream, it is also a tender testament to the unbreakable love between a mother and son. Little Dog’s mother tells him: ‘You have a bellyful of English. You have to use it.’ And my goodness, does he use it” – Dua Lipa

What others say

“Vuong is surely a literary descendant of the author of Leaves Of Grass. Emerging from the most marginalized circumstances, he has produced a lyrical work of self-discovery that’s shockingly intimate and insistently universal… Not so much briefly gorgeous as permanently stunning.” – Ron Charles, Washington Post 

“Vuong as a writer is daring. He goes where the hurt is, creating a novel saturated with yearning and ache… He transforms the emotional, the visceral, the individual into the political in an unforgettable – indeed, gorgeous – novel.” – Viet Thanh Nguyen, Time Magazine

“A bruised, breathtaking love letter never meant to be sent. A powerful testimony to magic and loss. A marvel.” – Marlon James, author of A Brief History Of Seven Killings 

Delve deeper: more interviews with the author

Read 

Ocean Vuong: ‘As a child I would ask: What’s napalm?’ 
The Guardian, June 2019 
The interview charts how a Vietnamese refugee came to write what many are hailing as the ‘great American novel’.

Ocean Vuong pens love letter to his mom and working-class Asian Americans 
NBC News, June 2019 
When Ocean Vuong moved to New York City after high school, he was startled to hear the general perception of his hometown. 

On Death, Music and Motherhood: Björk & Ocean Vuong in Conversation 
AnOther Magazine, September 2022 
Björk speaks with vulnerability and candour to the acclaimed author, poet and ardent fan Ocean Vuong. 

The White Review interview with Ocean Vuong  
The White Review, March 2022 
In the following conversation, which took place in the wake of a spate of high-profile anti-Asian hate crimes, Vuong discusses Asian American literature with the performance artist and writer Alok Vaid-Menon. 

Listen 

‘Start With Truth And End With Art’: Poet Ocean Vuong On His Debut Novel 
NPR, June 2019 
“What I wanted, what I hoped to do, was to speak to a rich American tradition of autobiography, all the way down to Herman Melville and Moby-Dick,” says Vuong in this interview.

Watch 

Ocean Vuong Wrote His Debut Novel in a Closet 
NBC Late Night with Seth Meyers, June 2019 
Ocean Vuong talks about basing his fictional characters on his own experience and his mother’s response to his novel. 

Ocean Vuong on War, Sexuality and Asian-American Identity 
Amanpour and Company, 2019 
Ocean Vuong in conversation with Michelle Martin. 

Further resources  

Ocean Vuong and Teaching: “When I write, I feel larger than the limits of my body.”  
Louisiana Channel, Sept, 2022 
“I think being a teacher has been one of the most transformative experiences of my life,” shares Vuong in this interview. “The idea of handing over knowledge in order to share and bond is something our species has done not only to sustain and bolster each other but to survive.”

Ocean Vuong reads Ode to Masturbation
Split This Rock Poetry Festival, 2016
Ocean Vuong performs a reading at Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2016: Poems of Provocation & Witness at the National Geographic Grosvenor Auditorium in Washington, DC.

Ocean Vuong’s 5 Points of Culture
CULTURED Magazine, May 2024 
The writer shares his creative touchpoints, from cage fighting to the work of film director and screenwriter Andrei Tarkovsky.  

Grieving His Mother’s Death, Ocean Vuong Learned to Write for Himself 
Time, March 2022 
In March 2019, three months before the publication of Ocean Vuong’s novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, he called his agent from the hallway of a Conneticut, hospital. “There’s no way I can go on tour,” he said. “My mother has cancer. It’s over.”