Why “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” is One of the Best Books You’ll Read
If you know me, you know I absolutely love anything Ocean Vuong writes. Nestled in the space between an autobiographical story with memories spilling out and a profoundly fictional one, the way On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous warps memory and time is enough of a reason to read it.
Ocean Vuong wrote the first draft of this book by hand in a closet. The story follows Little Dog who reminisces in letters he writes to his illiterate mother. Little Dog is a great observer and an introspective writer. He writes about grief, about his life and adventures - sexual and otherwise, about his mother and grandmother who both have PTSD from a war in Vietnam and have made a daring escape, but can’t speak English very well. However, this language barrier is what turns these letters almost cathartic. An ode to all the barriers language can break, and the ones it can’t.
“Is that what art is? To be touched thinking what we feel is ours when, in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us?”
“Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you've been ruined.”
“In Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same: nhớ.
Sometimes, when you ask me over the phone, Có nhớ mẹ không? I flinch, thinking you meant,
Do you remember me?
Vuong writes of all the things — good and bad — that have turned him into an artist. Through Little Dog’s story, he embodies how it feels to be the first in his family to go to college and then to go on to study the very thing that makes him feel estranged from the two people he’s been impacted most by. He writes of summer afternoons and tulips, conversations that led to love, and how his mother sings Happy Birthday to comfort him because it’s the only song she knows in English. Of the annihilation he feels through heartbreak, through the death of his grandmother and all the stories she told him, of freedom. But he also writes of a liberation, and you can almost feel it.
“All freedom is relative—you know too well—and sometimes it’s no freedom at all, but simply the cage widening far away from you, the bars abstracted with distance but still there, as when they “free” wild animals into nature preserves only to contain them yet again by larger borders. But I took it anyway, that widening.
Because sometimes not seeing the bars is enough”
Like most poets, Ocean Vuong writes the book’s strongest, most intense parts when he writes about love. Little Dog falling in and out of love for the first time dominates part of the book and captures the beauty of first loves perfectly. The infiniteness of it all, the blissful ignorance and recklessness, and the hope that lies in living with a heart that’s never been broken.
As someone who romanticises Before Sunrise and the fact that poetry always comes back to love, the way Ocean Vuong writes about love is part of why I absolutely adore his writing.
In Little Dog’s powerful confessions to his mother and through him, the author’s, the things he wished he’d done and the mistakes he never had the courage to apologise for, the intensity of the story manifests in the best of ways and fills you with Vuong’s stories of the memories he has with the people he is most grateful for, even when he doesn’t love them the most.
“I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful.
If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you're born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly.”