I specifically wrote that for queer folks. What compelled you to write about the underbelly of gay sex? It's so familiar to gay intimacy and yet rarely acknowledged, particularly in literature. I found it quite radical, especially when Little Dog loses his virginity, and you address the messier moments that can occur doing anal sex. I wanted to turn desire into the weather, to stay in a moment of potency. They're elongated.ĭesire is a force that coils and brews a storm in us, even when we're just looking at somebody. That's when we have a choice, and I wanted to stay there, in a place fraught with fear, terror, shame, but also power. Sometimes we don't have a say in what we do for a job, how our families see us, but we do have a say about where we find pleasure, who goes inside us and who we go inside of. Why have we been so whitewashed?įor so many queer folks, this is where we have the most agency. I read a queer book recently where the writer describes walking into a room, and it just said, "Love was made there." I thought, Okay, sure. A lot of times it was just his diaries, particularly his tape journals that were just released, and the essay “Closer to the Knives.” He's the only writer that really just said it, unabashed, uninformed by the literary etiquette that we are often asked to perform. There are a few guides, to be surprisingly honest, but David Wojnarowicz is the one. “The one good thing about national anthems,” Little Dog writes, “is that we’re already on our feet, and therefore ready to run.” In writing about America, Vuong has ultimately written a novel about American failure. He begins a relationship with a boy named Trevor, who’s addicted to oxycodone, while working on a tobacco farm. Throughout, Little Dog attempts to make sense of his identity through the fractured history of his mother, who works grueling hours at a nail salon, and his schizophrenic grandmother, a former sex worker in Vietnam. Framed as a letter from a 28-year-old son, Little Dog, to his illiterate mother, the novel doesn’t advance so much as unravel, freeing threads that examine queerness, class, race, and the inheritance of trauma. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous takes place against this backdrop of ultra-basicness, a Connecticut of mobile homes, bathrooms with “pea-soup walls,” and corner stores littered with food-stamp receipts. We can take basic to a celebratory extreme.” “That's just growing up and eating mayonnaise and Wonder Bread sandwiches.
The ultra-basic? “That's just growing up poor,” says Vuong, 30, who was born in Ho Chi Minh City before immigrating to Hartford, Connecticut, when he was two. “One of the factors is there is a lot of pent-up emotions that have very few releases,” he says, laughing, a week before the release of his debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.
ultra basic.” Three years ago, when he started teaching poetry at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, his students often rationalized his opinions by pointing out that he was a Libra, leaving Vuong, who was more familiar with Chinese astrology, feeling “so exposed.” He did some homework on the traits of Libras. By his own admission, at least on Instagram, Ocean Vuong can be summed up in four words: “very libra.
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