Book Discussion Group reads “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” by Ocean Vuong

January 11 from 11:00 AM to noon at the Stonewall Library

Simultaneously on Zoom via this link: Book Discussion Group
(Meeting ID: 275139 4844 and Pass code: 076609)

 In this month’s selection, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” by Ocean Vuong, a young man writes a letter to his illiterate mother in an attempt to make sense of his traumatic beginnings.

When Little Dog is a child growing up in Hartford, he is asked to make a family tree. Where other children draw full green branches full of relatives, Little Dog’s branches are bare, with just five names. Born in Vietnam, Little Dog now lives with his abusive—and abused—mother and his schizophrenic grandmother. The Vietnam War casts a long shadow on his life: his mother is the child of an anonymous American soldier—his grandmother survived as a sex worker during the conflict. Without siblings, without a father, Little Dog’s loneliness is exacerbated by his otherness: he is small, poor, Asian, and queer.

Much of the novel recounts his first love affair as a teen, with a “redneck” from the white part of town, as he confesses to his mother how this doomed relationship is akin to his violent childhood. In telling the stories of those who exist in the margins, Little Dog says, “I never wanted to build a ‘body of work,’ but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work.” With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel in many years.