On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel
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.
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Community Reviews
This is a sad, gut-wrenching novella about the protagonist's relationship with his mother. It is beautifully written and hauntingly memorable. There are moments in the book that I felt were too vulnerable for my own taste.
If your self care has room for a book that slices you open slowly with a dull blade and then salts the wound and massages it with sandpaper all dressed as novel combinations of words and ideas that create vivid images you cannot unsee, then read On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. If you need to learn more about immigrants and war and atrocities, this is a deeply beautiful teacher, in the way that your blood is a beautiful shade of red as it throbs out of the palm you cut open because you needed to learn better knife skills. Pair it with watching The Killing Fields and schedule trauma care for yourself.
This is a lyrical, intimate confession to a mother. It is both sentimental and haunting but always remains wholly authentic. The book reads as a series of love letters to Vuong's mother, in a relationship notably marked by an absence of language. This novel is not only an attempt at self-expression and acceptance but also an attempt to understand his mother.
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