Ocean Vuong's Visit With the LA Times Book Club

Ocean Vuong talked about his debut novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, with over 600 people gathered at the L.A. Times Book Club last week, reports staff writer Dorany Pineda. From the report:

His 2019 book is written in the form of a letter from the narrator, a young man in his 20s known only as Little Dog, to his illiterate Vietnamese mother who hardly speaks English. The book delves into a family history with origins in Vietnam and expands to Hartford, Conn., exploring a complicated, loving relationship between a mother and her son, as well as themes of race, war, class, sexuality and masculinity.

Vuong dedicated the book to his mother, Rose, who died of cancer at 51 last year, a few months after the book was published.

“It felt important to have my first book be something between two yellow lines,” Vuong said, choking up as he spoke about his mother. “It all felt really important to me. ... As an Asian American, particularly as a Southeast Asian American, we come out of a diaspora of war. Our parents are the first generation to come out of that trauma.”

Read on at the Los Angeles Times.