Books
ON EARTH WE ARE BRIEFLY GORGEOUS
BY OCEAN VUONG
It’s been a while since I’ve been completely blown away by a novel. Ocean Vuong’s devastatingly beautiful first offering is the coming-of-age story of Little Dog, a Vietnamese immigrant in the US. Framed as a letter from a writer in his 20s to his illiterate mother, the fragmented narrative pieces together the trauma of a very broken family struggling with PTSD from the war and the complexities of immigration. (His mother is illiterate because her education came to an end at the age of seven after her school was napalmed during the Vietnam War).
Vuong draws on his own personal experiences to describe the painful confusion associated with adolescence and sexual exploration. When Little Dog comes out as gay, we’re invited into an extremely private,