To Stay Tender and Touch Both Shores

“To stay tender, the weight of your life cannot lean on your bones.

‘We love eating what’s soft’, his father said, looking dead

into Trevor’s eyes.”

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One rainy Sunday in September, I read On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) by Ocean Vuong.

It was a gift from my family last Christmas, after I first heard of Vuong from one of my favourite authors. Billy-Ray Belcourt uses a quote from Vuong as an epigraph to his collection NDN Coping Mechanisms: “I wasn’t trying to write - I was trying to break free”.

Briefly Gorgeous speaks for itself. A young Vietnamese-American boy writes a letter to his illiterate mother and creates the most efficacious depiction of grief that I have read in a long, long time. Maybe ever. It speaks around the silence and stillness of grief. It writes around consuming memory. It asks how grief, how death, splits us in two, and into - as in, to be broken into by loss. When was the last time you were broken in two? Broken into?

But it also speaks about not being mistaken for the product of violence - to be not “of” or “from” violence, but to be a container that has held or experienced its passage. To remain unspoilt.

In these ways, Vuong writes the reader toward and away from what it means to address the site from which you came.

It’s a harrowing text. A little haunted. A touch of horror (so much consumption💀), erotica, shimmering proximity. A snapshot of contemporary American culture. The sadness always feels imminent, even when it isn’t expressly there. That’s not to say that it’s a sad novel, per se - I don’t think this book is bent on making you cry or trying to take you through some kind of catharsis - it’s much more than that. Steadier. Read it and see. No one will be disappointed.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is one of my favourite reads this year. 9.9/10.

Read if:

- You love compelling novels that are beautifully written without a drop of pretension

- You have an interest in American culture, world history, war, race and politics, queer literature, and/or ontology

- You like poetry or fiction

- You prefer character development to plot

Don’t read if:

- You are allergic to melancholy

- Theory/poetry is not your bag

- You’re big on conflict-driven or action-oriented storylines

Vuong has a very good and very funny Instagram worth checking out if you’re interested in learning more: @ocean_vuong.

There are also a variety of interviews with Vuong out there, but here's a link to one that I enjoyed about survival as a creative force and proximity as the framework for a (your) story.