Ten Books That Helped Ocean Vuong Write His Debut Novel

Vuong's debut novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, has received glowing reviews from publications near and far. At Literary Hub, Vuong tells readers about the books that supported and informed his creative process. "As a culture, we often fetishize the debut writer as some sort of self-arising wunderkind," he writes, "someone that comes 'out of nowhere' or had 'splashed onto the scene' unannounced, seemingly without a pre-history or predecessors." Picking up from there: 

This is compounded for writers of color, who seem, according to this narrative, to arrive at the literary table by “transcending” their cultural, economic or racial milieu into the hegemonic literati. I want to take a moment, in light of this, to put some shine on 10 books that made my debut, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, possible.

Some of these texts (in no particular order) are canonical, some are not—but they each had an idiosyncratic force on my education as a writer and informed and enriched On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, and in particular, supported the novel’s metaphor-rich approach. The metaphor, heavily used in the 19th century as a means toward the ecstatic sublime, became more passé after the World Wars, when the pastoral dream was no longer feasible amidst European fields rotting with cattle corpses. I wanted to use the metaphor differently, on terms removed from a Eurocentric worldview.

Vietnamese refugees, for example, use metaphor as a coping mechanism; metaphor provides a way to talk about trauma without stating the experience outright. An abortion is described as having “papaya seeds scraped out of you,” or sexual assault as having “the doorway of your body broken into.” To die is to”“get on the road.” Likewise, when Abel Meeropol wrote the poem “Strange Fruit” about the lynching of African Americans in the South, he was not reaching for the Romantic sublime—but to render the horrific via an alternative speech act. The metaphor in the mouths of survivors became a way to innovate around pain.

Read on at Literary Hub.