I cry over books roughly once a year. In 2024 I it was my very first read of the year that did it (Babel). This year, apparently it’s this one.

Friends, this book was *bleak*. There was just so much sadness oozing from it that at first I thought I could barricade myself against it but towards the end I just couldn’t hold on.

This novel, which I believe is partly autobiographical, deals with the experience of a gay Vietnamese young man in the USA and is written as a stream-of-consciousness letter to his mother. The prose here is absolutely gorgeous, and I felt like it was in the pleasure of it that I could get the tiniest amount of joy from this book.

Of course, writers don’t owe us joy. In a way, I felt a little bit like I did when watching the TV show It’s A Sin, which emotionally destroyed me. To me, that TV show (about the AIDS crisis in 1980s London) was written for a cis white audience in the hope to show them that queer people deserve to live. It was not written for queer people because although there is queer joy in there, there is mostly pain and sadness. I’m wondering if that might be the case for Ocean Vuong’s book — that it’s written for a white, cis audience in the hope to make them care about immigrants and queer people. And there’s obviously nothing wrong with that, it’s a noble endeavour. But I do believe we need as many depictions of non-white & queer joy as we need depictions of non-white & queer pain.

CW : racism, war, homophobia, drug abuse, death of loved ones, sexual content, terminal illness.