Online Reading Challenge discussion

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

SUMMARY

Ocean Vuong’s debut novel is a shattering portrait of a family, a first love, and the redemptive power of storytelling

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 — a history whose epicenter is 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, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded 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.

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 of many years.
(Summary provided by the publisher)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Writer, professor, and photographer, Ocean Vuong is the author of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, winner of the American Book Award, The Mark Twain Award, and The New England Book Award. The novel debuted for six weeks on The New York Times bestseller list and has since sold more than a million copies in 40 languages. A nominee for the National Book Award and a recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Grant, he is also the author of the poetry collections, Time is a Mother, a finalist for the Griffin prize, and Night Sky with Exit Wounds, a New York Times Top 10 Book, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award. A Ruth Lilly fellow from the Poetry Foundation, his honors include fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, The Elizabeth George Foundation, The Academy of American Poets, and the Pushcart Prize.

Selected by Foreign Policy magazine as one of its 100 Leading Global Thinkers, Vuong's writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Granta, Harpers, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Village Voice, and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets.



Born in Saigon, Vietnam and raised in Hartford, Connecticut in a working class family of nail salon and factory laborers, he was educated at nearby Manchester Community College before transferring to Pace University to study International Marketing. Without completing his first term, he dropped out and enrolled at Brooklyn College, where he graduated with a BA in Nineteenth Century American Literature. He subsequently received his MFA in Poetry from NYU.

He currently splits his time between Northampton, Massachusetts and New York City, where he serves as a Professor in Modern Poetry and Poetics in the MFA Program at NYU.
(Biography provided by the author)

QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

• When we meet the narrator of this novel, we don’t know his name, only that he is writing to his mother in a language she cannot read. He says, “I am writing from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son” (10). How does the book explore the interplay of language—how he identifies himself and communicates the world—and lived, corporeal experience?

• What do the animals in the book—the monarch butterflies, the buffaloes, even the “little dog” after which the narrator is named—represent for the narrator? How does he try to understand their instinctual movements and behaviors?

• Names are precarious and shifting throughout the novel, for both the narrator and his mother. How does he feel about the name his grandmother gives him, Little Dog? Does his reflection that “to love something, then, is to name it after something so worthless it might be left untouched—and alive. A name, thin as air, can also be a shield” suggest acceptance or dismissal of his given name (18)?

• Without having language to connect them, how do the narrator and his mother communicate their love for one another? How would you describe their signs of affection, such as his kneading out her back and fetching her cigarettes? What is conventional and what is unconventional about their relationship?

• How does Lan act as a buffer between Little Dog and his mother? What holes does she help fill in in how he is raised, and what he understands about his past?

• Do the narrator and his mother have the same idea of what is required, or what it means, to be an American? How do their expectations compare with their experiences—his as a student and hers in the nail salon?

• How does being raised by two women, whose own relationship is complicated and fraught, impact the narrator? What does he come to understand about violence, sexuality, and loyalty from them? How does their triad blur the lines between generations, and within typical mother-daughter/mother-son relationships?

• Whom does the narrator have as a father-figure, if anyone? What does his relationship with Paul offer, and how is it limited?

• What does the narrator take away from the story of Tiger Woods? How is his example both inspiring and unattainable?

• What are the terms of the narrator and Trevor’s love, if any? What does their refusal to name or speak about their relationship do to free, or limit, it?

• Part II ends with a poetic ode to Trevor, in which the narrator switches his point of view. How is he able to write about Trevor in the context of the letter? What would happen if his mother read it?

• What is the author’s relationship with pain and violence, inherited and lived first-hand? How does he represent pain he suffers (from his mother and Trevor) in his writing? Compare how he relates painful versus pleasure: “Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you’ve been ruined” (119).

• How are both Trevor’s family and the narrator’s marginalized by society? Discuss the role of drugs for the young men and their friends in how they exercise agency and respond to the uncertainty of their lives.

• How does he respond to Lan’s PTSD from the war in Vietnam? What about his life is like a war?

• What sacrifices do all the characters make in the novel? Consider which ones are voluntary and which are involuntary with regards to this reflection by the narrator: “What do you call the animal that, finding the hunter, offers itself to be eaten? A martyr? A weakling? No, a beast gaining the rare agency to stop. Yes, the period in the sentence—it’s what makes us human, Ma, I swear. It lets us stop in order to keep going” (118).

• In addition to being a letter, the words of the book are an oblique ode to Trevor. How does the narrator use language to honor his memory, literally and metaphorically? Consider the description of his scar like a comma, and a mouth like a period.

• Discuss the setting of the novel and its various enclaves—the city versus the tobacco farm, etc. Does the narrator seem to be shaped by his environment, or vice versa?

• Does the family’s story evoke pity or sympathy from you as a reader, and why if so? Consider how they use mood rings to evaluate if they’re happy, and the idea that “Good was more often enough, was a precious spark we sought and harvested of and for one another” (214).

• While reading, did you know that the novel was autobiographical? How did that affect your understanding of the story if so, and if not does that change your interpretation of it now?
(Questions and topics for discussion provided by the publisher)


ACCOLADES AND AWARDS

Instant New York Times Bestseller
LONGLIST for the National Book Award
WINNER of the American Book Award
WINNER of the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award
WINNER of the New England Book Award
WINNER of the Massachusetts Book Award
WINNER of the Connecticut Book Award
WINNER of the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize
WINNER of the Publishing Triangle’s Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction
WINNER of the Digital Book World: Best Book

Honor Title for the 2020 Asian Pacific American Award for Literature & 2020 Stonewall Book Awards’ Barbara Gittings Literature Award

Finalist/Shortlist for the 2020 PEN/Faulkner Award, Lambda Literary Award, Kirkus Review Book Prize, Center For Fiction’s 2019 First Novel Prize, Goodreads Choice Award for Best Fiction, Goodreads Choice Award for Best Debut Novel, Dylan Thomas Prize, Lambda Literary Award, VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, Dublin Literary Award, Premio Terzani Prize, & Kulturhuset Stadsteatern International Literature Prize

Longlist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence & PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel

A "Best Book of the Year" at:
The New Yorker / New York Post / The Washington Post / Los Angeles Times / Bay Area Reporter / Amazon.com / The Guardian (UK) / Times Literary Supplement (UK) / Buzzfeed News / Chicago Tribune / Digg / Elle / Entertainment Weekly / Entropy Magazine / Esquire / Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Good Housekeeping / Goodreads / GQ Magazine / Literary Hub (#1) / Vanity Fair / Variety / New York Public Library / Chicago Public Library / Denver Public Library / Oakland Public Library / Somerville Public Library / King County Library System / Hudson Booksellers (#1) / Foyles Booksellers (UK) (#1) / City of Asylum Booksellers / Powell’s Books / Book Depository / Kirkus Reviews / Kottke / Library Journal / She Reads / TIME / Thrillist / NPR / Maureen Corrigan (NPR) / WBUR / Paste Magazine / Penguin Random House Speakers’ Bureau / The Harvard Crimson / The Michigan Daily / The Week / Houston Chronicle / The Dallas Morning News / PopMatters / Publishers Weekly / Book Riot / BookPage / Boston.com / Current Affairs / Fredericksburg.com / Barnes and Noble / Read It Forward / Refinery29 / Spectrum Culture / The Straits Times / Yahoo! Lifestyle-PureWow / Apple/iTunes (audiobook) / Libro.fm (audiobook) / Google Play (audiobook) / 10 Daily (Australia) / Australian Financial Review (Australia) / Readings (Australia) / The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) / Die Presse (Austria) / Dhaka Tribune (Bangladesh) / De Morgen (Belgium) / De Standaard (Belgium) / Knack Focus (Belgium) / Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (Canada) / Toronto Star (Canada) / KulturNews (Germany) / Radio Eins (Germany) / Athenaeum (Netherlands) / Boeken FM (Netherlands) / Het Parool (Netherlands) / NRC Handelsblad (Netherlands) / InfoSperber (Switzerland) / Financial Times – Readers’ Picks (UK) / The Skinny (UK) / The Sunday Times (UK) / The Times (UK)
(Accolades and awards list provided by the author)