On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

It's beautifully written but this book is not for me. (See updates: this book ended up growing on me and I liked it quite a bit.)

What's great: an intensely personal memoir. The author's courage to be loose and fluid with prose and narrative, to veer into poetic where needed. The unique personal perspective, the marrying of the experiences of a child of Vietnamese refugees and a young queer man. It's powerful and true.

Part of why this book isn't for me is I don't relate to that perspective. The Vietnamese-American experience is not mine. I did appreciate reading this as an outsider, the insight he shares with us. But the queer perspective is mine, or at least I thought it might be. But his dirtbag boyfriend and the awkward life they have is not the gay narrative I had or want to read. Again I respect the writing for being true, I just found it unrelatable. I was hoping to connect to it more personally.

The other challenge for me is the writing style. I admire it but it was too elliptical for me to hold on to. These days I think I'm favoring more linear and straightforward writing. That's a failing of mine, not the book's.

I read this for a book club. Feeling a little apprehensive about talking about it with folks I don't know well. The parts I connected with are the most intimate and sexually explicit, particularly the description of anal sex towards the end and the awful juxtaposition to his grandmother's fecal incontinence while dying. I mean.. woof.

Update: I listened a bit to the audiobook, Vuong himself reading it, and wished I'd experienced the whole book this way. In his reading the poetry of his words come through. Particularly the alliteration, the careful diction. The chain of plosives in the phrase "the wet clicks of his cock as he stroked his spit along its length", remarkable writing that I missed just seeing words on the page.

Update 2: book club discussion went well and it made me appreciate the book more. There's a lot of depth and nuance here. I came away from the discussion feeling much more sympathetic about Trevor, the boyfriend, who still seems like a dirtbag but maybe not a bad one. I was particularly moved by the outcome of that final anal sex scene, Trevor's washing away of the narrator's shame.

One thing I completely missed reading this: this is a novel. It is fiction. Clearly it's autobiographical in parts but not everywhere. That makes the narrative much more complicated to parse and judge. The story is how it is because of the author's choice, not the accident of personal history, and that's left me more room to consider what's going on. The book is more complex than I appreciated at first.

Update 3: revised my rating up one star. I keep talking about this book and thinking about, there's more there than I first appreciated.

Update 4: this book really has gotten under my skin. I've quoted it a lot, been arrested by hearing Ocean Vuong on the radio. I finally re-read it as an audiobook, let the words wash over me. It really is a lovely work. I'm well past my initial reaction of not relating to the narrative. I now appreciate much more how Vuong has shown us a true story of a different kind of life, his own life or something very similar.