On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) by Ocean Vuong is a luminous, heart-wrenching novel in the form of a letter from a Vietnamese-American son, nicknamed “Little Dog,” to his illiterate mother. Blurring memoir and fiction, Vuong’s prose—lyrical, visceral, and steeped in poetic precision—explores themes of immigration, trauma, queerness, and the silences that shape family history. Little Dog recounts his childhood in Hartford, Connecticut, raised by a mother and grandmother haunted by the Vietnam War, while tracing his own awakening as a gay man in a first love affair with a rough, addicted farm boy named Trevor.
Vuong, an acclaimed poet (Night Sky with Exit Wounds), infuses every sentence with startling beauty, even in brutality. The novel interrogates the violence of language and love, asking how we survive the past without being consumed by it.
A groundbreaking work of autofiction that redefines the immigrant narrative, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a testament to the fragile, fleeting moments that make us human.
