i’ve had ocean vuong’s “on earth we’re briefly gorgeous” sitting on my shelf for the past few months. i’ve been putting it off, just kinda lazy about reading, and finally decided to open it up today.
and holy shit. i did not expect my eyes to water just from the first page.
i don’t know WHAT exactly it is. like knowing that it’s an extremely vulnerable, heartbreaking book about his complicated relationship with his mom, the vietnamese immigrant parent x american child aspect (which i can 100% relate to), the fact that his mom >!will/has passed away. !< it’s the first time a book has made me viscerally cry like this, and i had to put it down.
just kept making me think about my own parents and their difficult lives, my future without them, and also just… knowing that i don’t have such strong childhood memories with them, or even such strong ones now. also i feel like i’m kinda mourning the fact that my parents don’t really have hobbies of their own now. it’s mostly just housework, youtube and tv, and it makes me sad that they didn’t have as much of a chance to do and be whatever they wanted to be, and there’s not much interest now.
god i’m so upset and MAD this book got me like this just from 10 pages.
I don’t wanna yuck your yum but I reeeally didn’t like this book. It tried so hard to be something what it just wasn’t. I do think that there was some beautiful prose but it was just overdone and to me seemed pretentious after a while. I read a one-star review on goodreads that says: Beautiful prose can only get you so far and the more you stuff it in such a short novel, the more suffocated your reader feels.
I understand from other reviews that Vuong usually write poems. I can see how his writing style would work beautifully in a poem but I just don’t think it worked in a novel.