BOOKS: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Ma,” writes Ocean Vuong to his mother, “You once told me that memory is a choice. But if you were god, you'd know it's a flood.” His memoir, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, is a delicious flood, a cascade of memories told in an impressionist style in vivid prose that approaches poetry. He is a young boy at the beginning and a young man by the end, but the path between is no straight line. It is a series of experiences, impressions, recounts of stories handed down from mother and grandmother, not chronological but emotionally true, presented in the form of letters to his mother. His words and phrases are like brushstrokes in an impressionist painting, splashes of color up close that converge on images as you step back to regard them in perspective. His grandmother fled Vietnam after the war in search of the soldier who fathered his mother; his mother fled an abusive marriage. Their experiences are absorbed into him through their tales and their scars: a revving car engine can conjure helicopters, and his father’s violence against his mother flashes in his mind in an unexpected way as he has his first sexual experiences. Immigrant life, coming of age, and coming out are all well-trod themes, but his voice is so fresh and his memoir so beautifully expressed.