Ocean Vuong
Appearances
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
But that day it was clear. And I went across the street diagonal to my friend Big Joe's house. I knocked on his window. I remember putting both of my hands on the windowsill. And I have no shirt on. I'm just sweating. I'm so angry. And I just told him, I said, please let me borrow your gun.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
Okay. I think what I'm trying to get at is that I didn't become an author just to, like, my goal was not to, like, have a photo in the back of a book. and be like an author, writing became a medium for me to try to understand what goodness is. Because when I was begging my friend, I said, please give me your gut. And I know that gun because we used it. We would shoot it.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
He would take me to the woods, and we would just shoot. And I'm like, please, just get out real quick. And I had it in my head. I imagined it in my head. And he says, I'm not going to do that. He said, I'm not going to do that. You need to go home. And I think what was really... So touching to me is that I was not responsible for that. Someone else's better sense saved me.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
And in Buddhism, we have this idea called satori. And Satori is kind of enlightenment, but it's enlightenment in life. These kind of brief moments of illumination. And you've probably experienced it like, you know, I'm laying in bed at night. I can't sleep. And then all of a sudden you realize, oh, I need to be a better partner. I'm going to wake up. I'm going to be a better brother.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
I worked at a place called Boston Market in a place called Panera. And I was living in HUD housing. It's a one-bedroom apartment with my mother and my brother. It was this kind of situation where if your family income surpassed, then you can't live there anymore. But the next housing opportunity would be unaffordable to us. So my mother literally...
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
I got to be more patient. I got to stop being petty. Like these moments, right? And then you wake up and then life happens. You get a bad work email. Someone's being annoying. And then you lose sight of all that. So satori is like a brief window. And the idea for Buddhists is to then... allow the understanding in that brief window to then alter your life.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
And monks, some monks widen that window probably for the rest of their life. That window is their life's width. For me, I get little brief moments. And I think I was spared that horrible outcome because of Big Joe Satori. And any other day he would have done it, right? But he saw that it's not going to be good. And it was his wisdom.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
And, you know, you tell yourself you can control your life and all that. But moments like that happen and you're just like... I don't know. It was up to me that I got here. It was somebody else. A week after that, I went to the public library. Because I would take my grandmother to the library. And she was schizophrenic. So she was kind of like a thousand Asian grandmas in one.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
So she kept making altars all over the house. And she would go to the library and she would steal pictures of Buddha and frame it for her altars. And I would just sit there and she would just sit there and just cut out and put it in a folder. And then I started to like, I'm like, what is this book? You know, let me just read this. What was the book? I would just start reading Buddhism books.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
But then I end up in the Buddhism religion section, right? And I would go back by myself. And I was deeply interested in like understanding the suffering. And Buddhism was so enticing for me serendipitously because the Four Noble Truths is that life is suffering. And I was like, oh my God. Yes. I'm in there, right? And it's like, you are not your past. You can alter your life, right?
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
You don't have to wait for anybody. You don't have to negotiate with a higher being. Because Buddhism is all about action. It's all about your conduct. And I was trying to find a way out, and I went to my guidance counselor. And I told him, I said, there's a university called University of the West where you can study a liberal arts degree and then become a monk.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
I said, I want to help me, help me get there. And he said, I would love to get you there, but it's not accredited. And I think if you want to go to school, you should have a real degree, and then you could still be a monk. So he persuaded me to go to community college. My first class there, the syllabus was Baldwin, Annie Dillard, Foucault.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
Then I realized writing was not like writing a good respectable email to get a job. It was a medium of understanding suffering. That's when it changed.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
said, you know, when you get a job, just work at McDonald's to stay under. It was, you know, McDonald's $7.15 an hour, which is minimum wage. And in the summers, I worked on a tobacco farm, which is $9.50 cash. No Uncle Sam involved.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
I wanted to dedicate the book to her. I wanted to use her name to honor her as a real person. But long story short, after I dropped out of Pace University, I lost housing. Then I applied to Brooklyn College. I got in, but I didn't have a place to live. I was couch surfing. That quickly ran out. And I hesitate to call myself homeless because it was just two and a half weeks.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
I stayed in Penn Station for two and a half weeks. But it was not the way you think. I was a student at Brooklyn College. I had a library. I had a computer. But I would go to sleep in Penn State in the Long Island Railroad sector underneath Madison Square Garden. It's very warm.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
And what I would do is I would print out a fake ticket, and that would get you into the red hat area where it's much more comfortable.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I would do that until like 5.30. Then I would wake up and I would take the 1 and 2 down to Flatbush, go to the library in the corner and sleep until my first class at 9 or 10. It's one day where my partner... We were dating at the time, and he was living in Queens, but he was going home that day to Long Island.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
And I got to Penn State, and he's like, I'm going to Seaford. Where are you going? I was like, I'm here. You know, it was kind of sweet, but very strange in a way. And he was like, oh, my God, you know. And I was like, all right, well, he's, that's, you know, he's jarred and we left. I'm just sorry, just whatever. You wouldn't have to talk again. This is really weird. I'll text you.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
So you confront as a teenager immediately this kind of like antithesis of like American prosperity and upward mobility, where it's like, don't make too much money or we'll be homeless. Yeah. But a lot of people had that predicament. So I went to Boston Market, which is now like a very eye-opening experience of American life, I think.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
And then the next day he called me. He says, you know, I talked to my mom.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
my grandmother she was actually 84 at the time uh she lives in richmond hill she thought she will not go anywhere you know she's an immigrant it's her first american home she raised two kids there her husband's gone she won't go but she has some illness i didn't know i just thought i was going to help someone take medic medic like like vitamins you know and i ended up living there for two and a half years while i was studying and helping take care of her take care of her yeah and
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
I mean, I was 20, 21. But what was interesting was that we kind of started like a family. Because I was living in this row house. Right next to the train, the A train. And then my partner Peter would start visiting more. And I'm like, are we dating? Are we not? Like, what is happening? I'm living with your grandmother. But it was kind of beautiful that we didn't name it. It just came over.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
He's like, I think we're just together, right? Let's just try it out. And I lived in his mother's childhood room. down the hall from her. And it was a foundational experience in my life.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
It certainly requires endurance because you are in a heightened place of selflessness and giving with no determinate end. And so there's a kind of faith of the act itself. Like, I'm like, I'm just going to be here for as long as it takes. But in a way, it's really sad because it should also be what is possible without illness, you know, giving your loved one your best self.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
But then only when death nears do we truly do it, maybe because it's unsustainable otherwise.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
Yeah, yeah, I think so. Yeah. Yeah, that's good. Because there is no hope. You just want to almost merge with them. Like when I'm on my mother's deathbed, I said, Mom, anything, anything. And often she's just very political. You know, she just kept saying, like, raise me up. And we have this hospice bed. I'm like, Mom, it's the highest it can go. She's like, yeah, but keep raising me up.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
And I'm like, you know, and I just like, as a poet, all I can think about is the metaphor. I'm like, raise you up where? You know, are you going up there? And so it was, it changed everything for me. You know, everyone says that, but I think death becomes, it's just always here.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
I don't know yet. This is the first book I wrote from start to finish without her being alive. And I told myself, like any young writer, that I was this avant-garde, counter-formalist. I saw myself on this kind of high horse. And I thought, I'll write whatever I want. And I was very proud of that.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
But I realized after my mother passed that I was actually just trying to do well in the world so that I could take care of my mom. Like everything was kind of a strategic, right? It's like, oh, I got to get this job. I got to be a professor. I got to get tenure now. I got to do service work. And I just secure my family because, you know, I have one salary. It's a good one.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
But even now, there's nine Vietnamese refugees who I take care of. It's a blessing. I don't see it as a burden.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
Well, first of all, I learned that everything is about deception, right? We didn't cook anything. The entire thing was a series of microwaves in various, you know, it's taking frozen sacks of food in giant plastic bags, reheating it, and then presenting wholesome home-cooked meals. But what I learned was, you know, we have this idea of American life being the nuclear family.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
I support financially, yeah. But I was always strategic. And when my mom died, I was like, that was it. Everything was for her. I have a job. You know, I have a living. And ultimately, I got to ask a question I didn't want to ask yet, but I had to, which was that what would I write for myself? And this is the toughest book I wrote. And not like formally, but just existentially.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
It's like, okay, now what? Just write a book to say some things? And I felt that for a long time. And I told my agent, I said, I'm sorry I had a time. I think this is my slump book. A new one. Yeah, I felt that way. And I still feel that way. I don't know. The culture will decide. But I just felt like... What did you feel like you weren't accomplishing?
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
It wasn't clear to me why anyone should read it. And I think that's part of the question of, oh, if I wrote for myself, then I'm like, oh, I don't think anyone should read it if I wrote for myself. Whereas if I wrote to support my family, it was very clear, right? It was like, here's a book from a son to a mother who can't read. That's wham, you know?
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
Let's go, take off, right? Writing for yourself seemed selfish or hollow? It felt just very neutral. Yeah. You know, it just felt very limp where I'm like, oh yeah, I'm excited. It's a creative work. But when I lost that myth, and it is a myth, right? I made that myth up. I made the myth of like, I need to go.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
It's that quintessential oldest immigrant son myth, except that other people said, I'm going to be a doctor, a lawyer. But I said, I'm going to be a writer, the best writer I can be to take care of my family. And I was like, even as I tried to betray that Asian stereotype of like the immigrant making good, and I thought I would be like this radical writer, I end up doing it.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
It was the same thing. It's the same goal. And so when I finally got to do what I thought I was doing this whole time, which is like writing on my own terms, it felt really empty to me. But I don't fetishize an identity of writer. To me, this, what we're doing, is the same work. My teaching is the same work. When I give a talk at a university in front of people, it's the same thing.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
How do you characterize that work? A kind of sincerity of figuring this out. I think that's it. In the Buddhist sutra, it says, engage the phenomena of the world with earnestness. And I've always valued that. I just didn't know that our culture often values cynicism as a form of intelligence. And earnestness is kind of frowned upon because it almost means that you've been duped.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
It's like, oh, you believe in this too much? You clearly haven't thought deeply about it.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
Yeah, and earnestness and sincerity is overcommitting, right? Because you have to go all in. You have to have hope, optimism. But the synod gets to stay in the neutral line and judge the ones who go forward. So it's an easier position to be in, and there's very low risk of it.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
Where I'm from, reading itself is almost a betrayal. It's a class betrayal. It was kind of seen as like, oh, you're too good for us. You're trying to read to go to college. You're trying too hard to get out.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
But I think a huge portion of how this country is formed is through circumstantial family. labor, this arbitrary cobbling of strangers thrown together. And then we have to kind of sacrifice relationships with our own family in order to be here. And yet, intimacies arise despite that, because human beings, no matter where they are, will find bounding relationships.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
Hi again. Good to see you.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
Glad to talk to you again. I must say, before we start, there is some drilling happening in my New York apartment. So if you hear... whining, painful sound is, I promise, is not coming from my voice.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
No, you know, I tried to kind of like break down a poem for her. I tried to even talk to her about books I want to write. And I think it was hard for her ultimately to be in proximity of my reading and writing because it was almost like I was evidence of what she could have done if she had a normal life untouched by war. And when I realized that very early on, I stopped reading in front of her.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
Because it was almost like this mocking. It's like, I'm proud of my son, but gosh, he's in a world I'll never access. And I put the books away after I realized that. Because also, where I'm from, reading itself is almost a betrayal. It's a class betrayal. It was kind of seen as like... Oh, you're too good for us? You're trying to read to go to college? You're trying too hard to get out.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
And in the same way, it's like, I remember when I first started reading in high school, I would go to the library or the lunchroom and read, and I would hide. I would pretend to be asleep. I would put my head down on my hand and put the book in my lap. And it felt so natural. Like, oh, yeah, I got it.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
But in retrospect, it was so interesting but deeply sad that it was better for me to perform lethargy and unconsciousness. It was better to perform unconsciousness than to read and be perceived reading. I'm still stunned by that, you know, but it just, that was how you had to do it. If you wanted to read, you had to find a way.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
David, I still don't understand it because I've met so few people who've gone through it. I tried to explain this to my mother and my aunt, the kind of loneliness of class movement. It takes so long to study and realize what has happened to you. And I think of this in relation to Mark Fisher's work, who writes brilliantly about this as a theorist.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
He says, coming from the working poor, it takes decades of learning to realize what happened to you. And by the time you realize it, It's too late. Like right now, my grandma's dead, my uncle's dead, my mom's dead. You know, it's almost like there's a kind of helplessness to that realization. And so I think I've kind of come to an end of understanding all that, but it feels too late.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
I think it's a lot of grief. You know, you enter these rooms and even with my colleagues, they're all lovely, but it's hard to explain what we were talking about in our first interview. Like I don't, I never say that stuff because I feel like it's going to stop the room or people are going to, I just feel like I'm always kind of really alone in these spaces.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
And a month in, you'll start to know whose cough belongs to who. You'll know when, you know, Joe's drugstore deodorant will wear off at which hour, right? I'm like, we're at the third hour. I'm going to start to smell his BO underneath the deodorant. And there's nothing more intimate than that. But you also, you're so dependent on each other.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
And then when I come home, no one cares because
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
Like two years ago, I was bailing out my cousin, like truly bailing him out in a bail bond office who was having a mental health crisis. It was really bad. And police were being called. And I get a call from my aunt saying, it's like 1 a.m., come to this 24-hour bail bond. And I go, and I've never bailed anybody out. And I'm like, MacArthur genius? Who cares? New Yorker? Who cares?
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
None of that had any traction. I don't even know how to fill out a bail bond form. And I'm just like completely lost. Nobody cares what I do. And I think in a way that's refreshing, like I don't come home as Ocean Vuong, the writer. I come home as Ocean, the nephew, the cousin, the cousin who's gonna bail me out, the cousin who's gonna buy my new Yeezys that I saw online, you know, whatever.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
So it's refreshing, but there's no place that I'm recognized as a person other than like my close circle of friends who are also mostly not writers. And, you know, if I were to think about it further, David, like philosophically, I would maybe even push to say maybe none of us have a place. You know, like how much are we performing? We talk to our mother differently.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
We talk to our dean differently. We talk to our friends, our lovers. We're constantly code switching. And one thing I'm interested in as a writer is like, is there a center to me? Is there a center to you? Or are we just a matrix of instances? You know, it gets really heady. But on some days I feel like, all right, I am who I am. And some days I'm like, I think I'm just a series of utterances.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
But you don't want to go down that route too much. You might have to call your therapist.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
That's how we arrived.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
I am, right? I mean, every day has been a nail-biter, and I'm in kind of survival mode for them. And I just said, just, please just put your head down. It's so crazy, David, because I've said in the past, I said, our elders put their heads down so that the next generation can be known, can do what they want. I don't have to be a doctor or a lawyer. You know, I can be a poet.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
But here I am, the second generation or the 1.5 or whatever, telling my elders, please put your head down. Please just go to work. Don't get a speeding ticket until further notice. But the suspicion has always been there, you know, of government, of power. And I think this is true with a lot of Vietnamese refugees and refugees in general. In a lot of ways, it hurt us.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
Because the suspicion also applied to doctors. My grandmother never wanted to see a doctor until it was too late and it was stage four. My mother was afraid of doctors, missed her mammogram appointment by six months. And I said, why did you, she said, oh, I just, I get nervous going in there, even when I go with her. So that applies, that kind of trust in authority.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
I'm not a soldier, so I would never compare it to war, but it's just kind of like going through a battle sometimes, especially when you're about to close and a purple bus pulls up and it's a bunch of Catholic school kids after their prom and you're slammed. And you have to depend on each other. And there's a kindness that arises out of that. There's also a deep frustration. What frustration?
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
It's a fraught thing and it's hard to choose how you respond to your trauma.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
Yes, yes. I think I was in a world where anger, rage, and violence was a way to control the environment. And it was a way to control an environment for people who had no control of their lives. A lot of them were hurt and wounded. Another memory I had was, I think about this often, it's just seeing a kid get jumped for the first time. I was maybe 12, 13. And it was a kid called D-Nice.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
And I remember a group of 15, 20 kids. It was just so many of all ages. And they went up behind him. pulled his shirt over his head, and then they just went in. Just a flurry of fists. But I think because so much of that was close to me, I always had to look at it. And it behooved me to understand it in order to survive. So when I see cruelty, I look closer and I say, where is this coming from?
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
And a lot of times it comes from fear and vulnerability. You know, you're too scared and you have to strike first.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
Yeah, and so in a way, I have great compassion for that because the doorway through violence has always been suffering. I've never seen anyone commit violence and feel joy after. And it's interesting, you see the doorway in front of you and it feels so immense. It feels like the only path.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
But when you step back, if I can borrow a metaphor here, it's almost like the doorway is in the middle of a field. And you're like, oh my goodness, I can step back and I can just take one step to the side and go around and the whole world is before me. And there was a threshold in front of me that I could always pass through after that day with Big Joe.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
And in a way, my career so far has been a slow attempt at stepping back and stepping aside from that door.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
I didn't get it back to get my bonus. But I didn't make it to work. I still think about the feeling of that. And I just think, why did I rage out that day? And I think it was just that all that hope was robbed from me. I think that was what it was. I felt entitled to that bonus. And when someone else took that out of me, I think I lost sense of control.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
And I think about that, like, you have these epiphanies when you're kind of in a helpless state.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
I have this particular one and I didn't, I just felt, it felt kind of crazy, but I start asking my friends about it and a lot of them actually share it. And it's usually in the middle of the night. I can't sleep. I wake up in a kind of terror. It's almost like this moment before a true awareness arrives. There's about like a 15 second window of, oh my God, What is all this?
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
Frustration. That underneath it all, every employee kind of knows that this is not it. This is not the way out. And it's kind of the elephant in the room. And the manager is paid just a little more than us. I think at that time, they were paid maybe $13 to $15. We were paid $7 to $15. So, you know, almost double. But the suffering that they went through... showed us it wasn't enough.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
And what fills that is this kind of horror that none of it matters. We're all going to die. Why am I here? Why am I sitting in this apartment scribbling away when I should be trying to be a better partner? I want to apologize to everybody I've ever known. I want to redeem myself for everything. And I'm going to commit my life to trying to heal and help everybody I love.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
And that lasts maybe like three minutes. And then I pick up my phone and scroll on something. And then the culture just supplants it all. And so the trick of satari is to commit that realization into action. And I have a lot of trouble doing in the second assignment.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
But that strange existential horror, I think maybe because when my mother was on her deathbed, she said, son, now that you know how painful this is, you have to go and help people. And it was like a mandate. But I just thought, gosh, here's a woman taking her last breath. You know, she's not like, I don't want to romanticize her and make her some sort of martyr. But where did that come from?
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
You know, this idea that you have to then tell your son to go help people. You know, here we go again. You know, I just like. I'm still trying to find out all the ways that I could do that. You can't just make your art for yourself in a vacuum. I mean, there's diaries and journals for that. Nothing wrong with that. But when you make art to share, you have to think... How can I be amongst people?
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
You know, my favorite theorist, Trinity Minha, said it best when she said, I do not write about, I write beside. Gosh, that's so perfect. If I could do that my whole life, I would have a successful life as an artist, regardless of what happens. I never think I'm writing about something. I don't want to, like, render the people around me into a meaningful nugget. I want to just scribble alongside.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
That feels truer.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
Like my first, I watched someone get promoted and then turn it down, right? It was like, we had this ceremony. We're promoting somebody and it was a grand thing where the manager came out. We closed the store and said, all right, you know, we're going to promote Jennifer today and welcome Jennifer. And she's just like,
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
Yeah.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
Yeah, yeah. I think it's interesting because... the fast food restaurant in a way obfuscates the worker's humanity because everyone's in a uniform. You're just hands. Your most valuable asset are your hands, not your personhood. And I think there's, what I'm interested in this novel and in my life in general is when humanity breaches these moments.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
To this day, I think it's almost 20 years ago now, But till the end of my life, I will remember this one moment. I was being trained by this man named Ruben. One day we were cleaning the freezer. And I don't know what to do with this fact, but it's just, I didn't put it in the book because it's too dramatic.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
You know, sometimes life is like both cornier and more dramatic than any fiction you can do. But it's been haunting me for forever. I'm 19. And we have our backs together. It's like maybe like six foot wide. And it's almost touching. And we're just cleaning. And we're talking about family. And he stops and he says this thing. He has his back to me.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
He says, you know, it's something I can never tell my wife. I was like, oh, my God. And he says, I have three sons. And I only love one of them. And all I know how to do is just give affirmative. Like, I don't know how to receive this, you know. And I said, oh, okay, all right. Why, you know? He just says, you know, there's nothing. I have no real connection with the son that I love.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
And the others do right by me. I do right by them. I don't understand it. But I knew it early on. He's like, just watch out in life. That's going to happen. You're supposed to love people, but you're going to find out that God chooses these things for you. And to this day, I don't know what it means, but I thought it was just such an incredible... Did that ever come up again?
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
And it's like, why did that happen? Why in a freezer in East Hartford, Connecticut, does a man tell me something that I think has only been uttered in that freezer to this day?
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
You know, I think as a culture, we always want this sort of grand arc. Rags to riches. Gets the girl. Gets the guy. We know where the body is. We know who the killer is. It's like the Scooby-Doo effect. You always get the unmasking. And there's a payoff. And... I just wondered if I could write a book that didn't have improvement arcs. Because it also aligned with my observation of my communities.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
My brother has worked at Dick's Sporting Goods his whole life. My stepdad works at this auto parts company called Standardine.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
They're both in Connecticut. For 25 years, he worked from 3 p.m. to 12 a.m. I never saw him. I came home from school at 4 a.m. I only saw him on the weekends. He would sleep in. I saw, like, a tuft of hair poking out of the blanket in his room. That was it, you know? And so I just thought, we want stories of change. We believe in it. We buy it. And yet...
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
American life, even at its best, is often static. You drive the same car, I know people who live in the same apartment, but it doesn't mean that their lives are worthless, that it's meaningless, that they failed, right? So I'm interested in re-identifying the idea of the loser or loserdom, like economic losers, the left behind. In my first book, it's a queer story about someone who never leaves.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
Because the queer story is always ameliorated when you go to the city. I'm like, some of us can't afford to. Some of us have elders to care. Some of us need to be gay in the cornfield because there's nowhere else to go. And so this book, it's not a spoiler to say that nobody gets a better job. No one gets a raise. So what happens? You get people.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
And what I've been really interested in is this idea of kindness without hope. And what I saw working in the fast food, growing up in Hartford County, was that people are kind even when they know it won't matter. What is that? Where does that come from? You know, like, you know that whatever you're going to do is not going to help someone materially. Jumping their car.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
I watched co-workers get together and dig each other out of blizzards before anyone could go home. They could just dig themselves out and leave. go home sooner, hug their families. But they all stayed and they dug each other out. You know, the generosity that my neighbors had. Growing up in a black and brown community, we were invited into Baptist church. We knew no English.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
They gave us free bread. And I just said, what is kindness that is exhibited knowing there's no payoff?
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
I don't know. I write, you know, David, I've been really interested in kindness as an intrinsic thing and goodness as an intrinsic thing. Like my brother just has it. He came with kindness. I never had it. I had a desire to understand goodness. But I never had it the way like my brother does. And I know because I raised him.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
When my parents were at the factories in an ale salon, we're 10 years apart. So I was holding a little baby in my arms as a 10-year-old feeding him milk. So I'm like, I raised him. I didn't give him that. He had it. And I'm just interested in that because I don't, it's strange to me. I don't know it. You know, it doesn't come natural to me.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
And I've been in dicey situations in my life where I realized that very early on, I just don't have it.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
I don't know if it would be cruelty, but I think certain anger, certain rage, certain desires that I think would have never exhibited in someone like my brother. And there was a moment when I was 15 that I think I've been trying to articulate this for so long, and your question is now putting me down the slippery slope.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
I've been trying to articulate it because I think it's important, but I've been really ashamed of it. Because people ask me, you know, why did you become a writer? And I give the answer that I think makes sense. I went to Pace. I tried business school because I wanted to help my mother. And I couldn't do it. And then I went to Brooklyn. And then I went to the English department.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
Then I became a writer. That's not untrue. I don't know if it's honest. And your question is now bringing me to this idea of cruelty and goodness. I would say that there was this one event when I was 15 that I do think altered the course of my life. Although at that time, it was not an epiphanic moment. I didn't say, oh.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
But I would say that the desire to be a writer probably started with the desire to commit myself to understanding suffering. What was the moment? I'm trying to be eloquent with this. I don't know if I will be. When I was 15, I'll say it first and I'll describe it, right? When I was 15, I decided to kill somebody. Oh, my God. I didn't do it. Oh, my God.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
I was working on the tobacco farm every summer and I rode my bike every day. I didn't have a car. I didn't have a license. I was about five miles out. You wake up like at six in the morning. I rode my bike and I went to work mostly with migrant farmers. You get paid under the table. And if you show up every day, you get a $1,000 bonus at the end of the season. And it was this hot July evening.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
I was in my room and I look out the window and I see that someone has stolen my bike. And it was someone I knew in a neighborhood who was a drug dealer. And it was a time, it was like 2002, 2003. So everybody's outside. There's no indoor kids, at least not in my neighborhood. So you would put your bike outside in the stoop when you're running in and out.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
And this guy was known to just grab your bike, and he would never, like, give it back to you. It was just very, you know... And there's nothing you could do about it.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
Yeah, yeah. But he kind of knew, like he just didn't, the idea wasn't to steal. It was kind of like power.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
And whenever he needed it, he'll just grab a kid's bike. And you were under the mercy of him. So it was a chronic thing. Yeah. But I just snapped that day, you know, like I just saw him and I was so angry because I knew, I knew, I knew I'm like, I'm not going to get this back. I'm going to lose my thousand dollars. And for context, like when I ended up doing my mom's taxes, she made $13,000.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
And what I did was he was riding around, there's people, you know, and I go out and I said, just give me back my bike, you know. And essentially, he just said, F off. And I knew that, that's the vibe. But I just, I think that day I lost it, you know. I was on drugs at the time, you know. I had my first cigarette when I was 14.
The Daily
'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
Two weeks later, I'm doing lines of coke in the high school dugout in the baseball. But I was sober that day, right? Yeah. And it got worse in the farm because the migrant workers were using it too. You take a bump to do the work. To get through the day. To get through the day. And they loved that I did it because I was a kid and they kind of took me under. It was kind of really toxic, you know.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
And to this day, I'm haunted by what happened because he's talking about his sons. And he just says something. He says, you know, I can't tell my wife this. And I thought, oh, my God. You know, like, am I going to hear a crime of God or a crime of the law? Yeah. He says, I have three sons, but I only love one of them. Wow. And I'm 19.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
I don't know what to say other than give an affirmative kind of like, uh-huh. You know, like, I just don't know what it meant. Uh-huh. And he says, you know, there's no true connection I have with Jake. There's no reason for this. And the others do good by me. I do good by them. But I'm coming to realize it's such a strange thing that I only love one of them. Do you ever feel that?
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
And I said, I don't know. I don't know. I'm 19. Yeah. Yeah. But I think there's something about labor. There's enough anonymity. He knows that when we clock out at 6 p.m., I'll never see him until the next shift. I don't know where he lives. I don't know his sons.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
And there's something really unique about modern life and maybe all of life where that kind of laborious intimacy allows us to say things we won't even say to our priests, our loved ones, our family, our best friends, because there's no judgment.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
I thank you for sharing that story.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
I don't know why. I still think about that, and I don't understand it, but I just knew that I was receiving something really vulnerable.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
When I was a younger writer, I thought you had to fill the page or else nothing happens. But the more I work at this, the more I realize that writing is about listening to the world. You're collaborating with the world. You don't shut it away and go into your little desk or your cave and create genius work. It doesn't work like that. Ultimately, nobody writes a good sentence by accident.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
It comes with care. You have to really care for the world. And every author's book is multiple drafts, means it comes out of tireless care, obsession, worry. And when you hold up anyone's book, you're getting their best self. And the best self for me comes from really engaging with the world without judgment and really being interested in people. At the end of the day,
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
All I would say is that as an author, I'm just really interested in human beings. That's it. Everything else is craft. You can learn that. You'll find a way to get that. But what you can't learn is a deep investment in compassionate watching and listening of our species.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
I get one draft at Life, and I usually mess it up, but High got 12 drafts, so... He's a little more refined.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
I think at the heart of every writer, you have to really love the world, even when it's difficult to love. And I think description... is autobiographical in that when you describe something, you're giving it a point of view. How you describe something, how you see something says a lot about yourself. And I think I saw all these people in my life and I never heard anyone write about them.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
I have to say I was raised by women who were illiterate. And I think about this often. Where does it come from? I think even though they were illiterate, they were the first poets because they saw that when they came to this country with nothing, they realized that with language, they can make anything happen.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
And I said, if the sentence can pin life to the page, I want to pin these people who never got to get out. You know, we fetishize these heroes' journey about getting out of this town, And it's a very cathartic one. We love these stories. We want to feel that everyone can get out. But the majority of people can't. And won't. And won't. And sometimes by choice.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
Sometimes they have to stay and take care of elders who are ill. They have jobs they can't leave. And I just didn't see the literary world right about people who had to stay. Because that's actually much more interesting to me. It's easy to go to the big city... And have a different life. It's much harder but more interesting to ask yourself, how do I make do without escape?
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
That becomes an existential question. How do I make do in this body if I can't leave it? The book starts with a young man deciding to jump off a bridge. Yeah. And he's stopped by an elderly widow doing laundry. And it's a personal experience. Crux for me, because when I was a teenager, one of my best friends took his own life with a gun. He was 16. My uncle at 28 took his own life.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
And usually when we talk about suicide, it's usually like, oh, they struggled, but then they didn't do it. And that's triumphant. Great. Well, actually, what I'm more interested in is like, how do you live And go on in the aftermath of that decision. If you decide to end your life and then ultimately decide not to, what's day two look like? What's day three look like?
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
What's the aftermath of living and deciding to live and have the will to live without the hope of living? And I wanted to know that of my uncle because I didn't get that from him. So I think I write in order to understand that, you know, what if he got to have an aftermath where he's still alive? What would that life look like?
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
That seemed like a much more interesting place to write a book from rather than to say, oh, well, they didn't do it. End of story. Everyone clap.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
Oh, I felt, you know, on one hand, they're very different. He's 19. She's 84.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
Yeah. It's a long, convoluted story. But Grazina is the grandmother of my partner. And when I was in college, I dropped out of business school. I lost my housing, lost my tuition. And I was casually dating my partner, Peter. And he was in law school. And we were kids. And I said, I'm kind of homeless, but I want to go to school and study English. And he said, one day he called me.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
I talked to my mom. My grandma lives alone. She's very independent. She wants to stay in the house that she lived in after fleeing Stalin, fleeing World War II. She's a self-made person, a refugee like myself. And you can live with her and go to school. And so I lived with her for three years.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
And we had this incredible bond that then led to my partner and I's relationship blooming because it's this kind of strange quintessential American family. He would visit from school, but I would live with her every day. And here we are, two refugees from two different wars, two different continents, 20 years apart. And we are in Brooklyn. living probably the most American life I can think of.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
It's not the white picket fence American life, but it's still true. And that reciprocal care, I had to care for her as she looked out for me. And I was so inspired by this because I think Both the very young and the very old are on the margins of society. They're no longer in the center. The young are said, oh, you don't know enough. You don't have enough. You don't own enough to contribute.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
You don't have a degree. You don't have the credentials. In the old, you're defunct. You're out of the market. You're in the retirement. Push yourself away. And so both the young and the very old, in my observation in this country... live in a perennial loneliness.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
And when they get together, you realize there's actually a lot of common ground when people have been pushed to the center. I wanted to write a book where the people who were pushed to the absolute fringes of society get to occupy the center and the camera would just not pan away. I did not want a plot that solved them. I did not want anyone to get a better job. to have a better home.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
There's no improvement. It's just life and it's kindness without hope, which is kindness at the highest cost. And yet we all know people every day who are kind and gracious and good to each other despite all of that. Kindness without any hope of return. That's just something I'm so fascinated in.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
Sometimes it's just us three. Me, you and her. On slow days, I would answer the phone at the nail salon and, you know, she would be there working. And what's so interesting was that when you called me. This is Oprah. How are you? What? This is Oprah. How are you? I recognized the voice right away. I just didn't believe that you were talking to me for any real reason.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
Well, in a sense, you know, the idea of YOLO, you only live once, has been really destructive to our world. You know, corporations think they only have one life to harvest. the most profit out of the environment and therefore harm the environment. You know, we're told again and again, no regrets, just seize the day. And it's very self-centered in a way.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
But I think another way to think about you only live once is what if you only have one chance to live with care? consideration, a sense of obligation to each other. And it's not even like this, you know, goodie, woo-woo selflessness, but it actually makes your life much better when you live with the obligation that you owe each other everything.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
both strangers and family and your environment and your community. And so I wanted to just change the meaning of YOLO. And as a poet, I love that one phrase could have double meaning. You can approach it that if you only have one life, what if you didn't just grab everything you can in the candy store, leaving it a total catastrophe in your wake?
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
But what if you did it so that other people can also inhabit that space and you can improve it? And, you know, our culture often thinks that's silly, that's childish, right? It's too wholesome and earnest. But I think earnestness is an incredible, courageous thing. I respect it immensely in the people I meet and the students I have. If you're earnest and sincere...
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
It's the most greatest truth because it means that you're willing to risk vulnerability and ridicule. You're willing to be wrong and come off silly because you believe in everything. I think it's okay to believe in everything. It's okay to believe that. If you have this one life, you should try to make it better for other people. Children just have that. It's not a question to them.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
But as you get older, we start to be more fearful of that because we think that if I believe in goodness too much, then I've fallen for something. I've been duped. I've been stymied into believing goodness. And sometimes it's really hard. There are days where I can't do it. But that's my North Star.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
And that's why I started the book with that North Star is that the hardest thing is to live only once. So make it count and make it count for others as well.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
But when I heard your voice, I said, this is the voice I heard all my life at four o'clock when I answered the phone. And, you know, I wanted to tell you this, that your voice was a kind of Mediation for all of these women in the nail salon, both the workers and the people who went there to get their nails done.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
It started with the town. I write by hand. So I wrote this the day after the election in 2020. When the results were coming in, it was kind of chaotic. No one knew what was the results were. And I said, all right, I'm going to rent a room. I live in Western Massachusetts. I'm going to rent a little cabin and just go away. And when I come back, hopefully we'll know what's happening.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
But it got more and more convoluted, as you remember, from that election.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
And no one knew where the country was going to be headed, who was going to head it. And I turned off all the radios and TV. I went to this cabin. I start writing by hand. And I spent nine pages writing about the towns in the Connecticut River Valley that sustained me, that I grew up in, because I wanted to really think, like, what is my America? What is America?
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
And I want to really sink in to the town as a character, as description. I wanted to really love it in all of its difficulty to just present it and not go on with a plot. So it started with space. It started with land and the history of land because land is tied to history. And at the end of the day, I think I write historical fiction, not in the sense of of, you know, a period piece.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
But I write fiction that has history involved in it. And land is a part of history.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
disperse right well the sentence is a linear technology so it's a kind of a track and what you do as an author is that you're asking a reader for their trust to say just stay with me in this track because it's a it's a big leap of faith it's almost like when you're riding on a roller coaster it's like we're it's one track
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
And as an author, you have to say, well, let's just come with me and we're going to zoom in on something that people often drive past and don't think about. And so the book is a wonderful opportunity to recalibrate value systems, to create a different hierarchy of values. Let's just stay on these starlings and love this landscape.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
Because it's so brutal, because it's so fruitful to the communities that live it. And also, what is America? You know, I was haunted by that. I don't know what next week is going to look like. But I know that this landscape in all of its paradoxes has sustained my imagination. And I want it to be true to its history.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
Because I saw them when they came in with their husbands and the husband will wait for a while and then they will leave. And after a while, it will just be all women. And I found that their voices changed. with your voice among them. And as a child, it was so interesting to hear speech. Everyone talking differently. They were more vulnerable. They were more open with each other.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
I grew up in Hartford and Hartford is interesting because if you drive, you're in the middle of the city and it's the city that's often been forgotten. We often have a saying that all the good things are sucked up by Boston and New York. And so it is a place where when you come to it, the people there are the people who can't get out, right? They're what's left over. We have that mentality.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
And Hartford's interesting. You drive 20 minutes and you'll be in a cornfield. You could be in the middle of skyscrapers, drive 20 minutes in any direction, you'll be in a smack dab in a cornfield.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
Yeah, it's right across the river and a lot of people work in the fields and then live in the city and vice versa. And I realized that when you live in a small town, in a small community, you owe respect to everybody because you can't be... Pardon my French, an asshole. If you are, people know your name and they know your family and they know your grandmother.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
And I felt like there's an incredible obligation that you have by offering each other dignity because there's nowhere to hide. You can be a jerk in New York and you just fade into the subway and then that's it. But there's no anonymity. You have to stand by what you believe. You have to defend and argue yourself. And then you have to face each other when you don't agree.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
You might have to work side by side. And so I wanted to see that that's actually not a place left behind. That's an advantageous, even innovative way to relate to people. When you cannot hide behind anything, you have to face each other with respect, dignity, and a kind of proximity that so much of America really is.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
If you talk to people, everybody kind of wants the same thing, even though we have vastly different
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
chaotic and disparate political beliefs at the end of the day we want to live with dignity and respect for each other and living in a small town forces you to do that and it allows you dexterity with the language you know how to talk about something without offending each other right you talk so that you can you can see each other again at the laundromat because you will because you will everybody knows your business yeah you do but you have a question what is it
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
And I got to see my mother kind of use the show as a way to open up for herself and to learn the language. She would not always understand what was happening, but she would have this little trick where every time there was like an inflected moment in the show with your voice, my mother would...
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
It was all her, you know. I used to be really annoyed before I wrote a novel when authors say, oh, I don't know, the characters told me what to do, you know. I just follow them along. And I said, oh, come on, you wrote the whole thing. You know what it is. But when I started writing a novel, I think what happens is that you create a character and you give them parameters, right?
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
of things that they would or wouldn't do. And you have to be faithful to that and not betray that. And even though they'll say things and do things that I personally would never say and do, it's still true to them. And when those parameters are so narrow and they're so realized, you really sit down and say, what would they say?
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
And they would only say the things if you're faithful to those parameters. And sometimes you can force it and it gets creaky and bad. But if you're faithful, they'll keep revealing something so idiosyncratic. And when I was writing that scene by hand, writing by scene by hand is really helpful for me because I stay in the scene longer. If I write on the computer, it's too quick.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
I stay and I said, how is she going to respond to this question? I literally was like, come on, you know, and I'm in her world and she's leading me forward. So you don't get writer's block? I don't. I don't. I don't believe in that because writer's block is in relation to productivity. Because then you have to ask, well, block according to whom?
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
block according to what measure of production um so for me it's like if if if i can't write which happens i think and that's productive it's a it's not about just creating quantifiable that's why you got the macarthur's genius
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
work on a client she'd go oh boy and then the client would it always works you could any given time you could just say oh boy and then the client would say hey isn't that right and then she would learn what was happening from them because her voice her head is down she couldn't hear it
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
Oh, God, it's like choosing the favorites among your children, although people do. Yes, as I told you, he only loved one son. But I think I would learn a lot from Maureen. because I feel like there's more to her and I feel like I can get more out of her. You know, there's so much life there. There's so much hurt. And yet she's always around for everybody because she has nothing at home.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
You know, she lives in a A kitchen to, you know, she's running out of money to heat her house. So she lives in a sleeping bag. Her sons died. And so she's very cranky. But that's just the facade to make it through the world as a woman.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
I wanted to do the hero's journey without the payoff. So then it's just the love. That pushed them forward, not the diamond. You don't get the ring. There's there's no like final gift. This is what's so beautiful about the book, don't you think?
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
I worked on a tobacco farm illegally as a child. I got paid under the table. I was 15. It was for 9.50, which was back in 2002, was a whole load of money. The minimum wage was 7.15. So you get 9.50 picking tobacco. It meant the world. But some of the workers there They were all older. They also, they said, hey, there's a, you want to come to this, you know, slaughterhouse, you make $20 an hour.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
Okay. So it was $20 at this slaughterhouse in Connecticut. And I thought, you know, I didn't really, I thought in my head, in my 15-year-old head, it was like just packaging meat, you know? Like I thought, oh, yeah, just put it in a little tray and then it goes off to the supermarket. Yeah. And I followed these guys in the pickup truck one day. They drove us there. And it was my trial.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
I lasted just 30 minutes. I went in, I looked, I said, it was like war. And I was so interested in that because I think often we say, There's humanity, and then there's animalistic tendencies. But when I look at our history as a species, it's the humans that are the most animalistic. And the way that these hogs were butchered was so cruel, so bloody.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
And I wanted to parallel that as an allegory with how labor is in this country. You know, people work day in and night out, and they're just thrown to the wolves. And when their bodies break, as many of my relatives' bodies stop working, my mother's breast cancer, which ultimately killed her, was most likely breathing all the chemicals in factories and nail salons. You're just thrown out.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
But I saw this kind of town square that your voice created and the themes and what was really touching for me, and I didn't understand at that time, for a community that I grew up in, working poor, immigrants, Reading was very intimidating. We didn't step into bookstores or libraries. It felt like an impenetrable world that was not for us.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
And the slaughter of human beings, both in the opioid epidemic and the labor system, is very parallel to the slaughter of animals. And I've learned that if we want to really know how brutal we can be as a species, we have to look at what we've done to animals. And that becomes the foreshadow of what we will do to each other.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
I'm going to sit with that a second.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
Oh, very good. Very good reader. The professor in me gives you an A+. So there are many allusions to this. And it starts with the Hamlet quote, right? We fat all creatures else to fat us. We fat ourselves for maggots. And so it's a lovely quote because in that is this anxiety of the Anthropocene. All our dreams and wishes for what? to give a nice buffet to the maggots, right?
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
And it's a wonderful way. It sounds morbid, but it's actually a wonderful way to live life, to say that all the petty arguments, for what? We're going to all end up in the same place. If we're lucky, we'll get a deathbed, right? We get to meet the people that raised us and supported us before we become food for maggots. And so the emperor, the ultimate emperor for Shakespeare was the maggot.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
The smallest thing is the ruler of us all. But I like the title as a poet because there's always double meanings, right? So it feels very triumphant when you see it like in a bookstore. The Emperor of Gladness. I'm going to read it and feel all the good things. Yes. But as you see it in the first chapter, Gladness as a town doesn't exist. It's been renamed to Millsap.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
And so to be the emperor of gladness is to be the emperor of nothing, of emptiness. And when the emperor hogs, naming is also a kind of warping of meaning. They're called emperor hogs not because they rule over anything, but because they historically have been used to feed the emperor. And it's such a cruel part of naming.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
And so I hope that when readers get to that revelation, the title starts to change tone. And as a poet, I just love it when the same words change. start to get warped. I think ultimately that's what I'm interested in is warping what was once stable towards something much more malleable. It's not about making something concrete, but dissolving it towards the end of the book. That's my hope.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
And emperor is a wonderful word that has multiple meanings in that sense.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
Well, I think it's important to destigmatize sadness and depression. I think if anyone's paying attention in the 21st century, they should be sad. But it doesn't mean that they're condemned to sadness. And this is what your show did. When I was in the nail salon as an eight-year-old, what you see is a bunch of strangers come together. And you talked about sadness.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
You talked about families falling apart. You talked about people surviving sexual assault on your show. And all of a sudden, these women, all of whom are strangers, now have permission to share their stories. And suddenly I saw... Language, you know, because that's what your show was. It's talking.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
Language suddenly became this permission for everyone to bypass the small talk, bypass talking about the weather or where I'm from, the patriots.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
And it was aligned with elitism and power and institutions and higher learning that we thought that ship has sailed for us. But when you held up the books in your show, my mother recognized that and says, This is accessible. You're making the act of reading both accessibly dignified, but also fruitful for people who are outside of these realms of institutional elitism.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
And talk about our moments that keep us up at night and destigmatize vulnerability. And everyone in the nail salon just lit up and they were all in the same shared moment. And there was an incredible moment. Another moment for me, there's these two moments that stuck with me in the nail salon. where my mother was not working on this woman, but she was next to the same desk.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
And your show was talking about estranged families, parents not being able to talk, something like that. And we were all kind of wrapped and chit-chatting. And this woman getting her nail done, she stopped and she just says, well, some days I wish I didn't have any parents. And everyone was just kind of like, what do we do? There was a moment, to me as a child, it felt endless.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
Because I knew enough to think that's a crazy thing to say. Because that means you wouldn't be alive. Yeah. And all of a sudden, another woman down the aisle just started comforting her. And before you know it, everyone... I said, you know what, I feel the same way too, but there's other ways. You don't have to feel that way.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
And then the person working on her nail, my mom's friend, said, well, I'm glad you're here because I wouldn't get to make your hand so beautiful. And all of a sudden, here we are in an afternoon in Connecticut surrounding a woman who maybe wished she wasn't born and trying to convince her that she should have been here. And then that revealed this kind of doubt in ourselves.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
And then she, you know, it's interesting, she just started laughing. And we laugh because it's a relief of tension. And we all kind of start, that session just ended with everyone laughing. I don't know why these things happen, but language creates more language. And when we pay attention to it, the way you've done your whole career, you open up these little chasms. That woman said what she said.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
We met her where she was. And it was because this.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
There's just the yesterday when she was here. And then there's the today when she's not. I know there's been many years since that. I can't, I can't, it's only one threshold. Mom and no mom. I was raised by a single mother. And, you know, when I was at her deathbed, I couldn't say what I wanted to say.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
As much as I just talked about how language makes more language, sometimes when you're kneeling at your mom's deathbed and she's hallucinating, you can't say the conversations. You have to meet them where they are. And I didn't get to say what I wanted to say to her which is why I wrote that in the last page of this book. The last page of this book is what I wanted to say to my mother.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
And I think that's the most powerful thing about fiction is that you give yourself a second chance. You create a scenario where these characters can play it out for you. And Hai and his mother has this conversation that I wish I had with my mom. But I had no right to bring that on to her when she's taking her last breaths. And so...
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
You write fiction to create something that's shareable for people. And in a way, it's a fantasy. It's what I hoped I could say, but I didn't get to say it to the real person. And so I create a dreamland where everyone gets to say what they need to say.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
And I saw the women talk about books in your show. And then they would walk across the Barnes & Noble, across the mall, and they would have language. And they would come in and they would say, this is the book I want. I know how to talk about it. And there's a kind of dignified confidence to literacy. Oh.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
And I don't know if anyone has talked about that, but I think that was the major byproduct that your show did is that it made working class people who don't have access to centers of knowledge. They don't get to be in a classroom and have high philosophy around craft or what have you. They get to participate in the vehicle of culture and you make culture legible to them.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
who often don't have that chance. So I just want to say thank you so much for that.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
And we came up in Vietnam as rice farmers.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
I was the first to go to college, the first to read. And we've been rice farmers very happily for hundreds of years. It was the war that ejected us from that idyllic world into this one. And so by geopolitical violence and accident, I'm now a professor in a way. But she knew that in this country, the sentence will be the medium that can make us change and change our lives.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
She didn't understand it, but she knew it was powerful. So she would drop me off before her shift at the nail salon, at the public library. And she gave me this mandate. And she said, you go in there and you read everything, especially what you don't understand. Wow. And it's so interesting because that's what I give my students now. I said, you have to move towards the unknown, the mystery.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
The condition of not knowing is the first step of knowledge.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
Don't be afraid of not knowing. You owe it to yourself to go to the root of the mystery. And that is to work not only a pedagogy of an education, but also of life. It goes beyond books.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
Yeah. You know, America has often been founded on the idea of the nuclear family. And one antidote to that might be the found family. But I actually think when we look at the history of our culture, it's the circumstantial family. founded around labor.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
And so when I worked at Boston Market as a teenager, I found that it was actually the relationships that you had with people you don't choose, people who are cobbled together, working through a shift, and you start to know their footsteps. you start to feel the cologne they wear, the gum, and when that gum will expire. You can hear how they cough, how they talk.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
And the intimacy that comes from the circumstantial labor cobbled together is actually the foundation of so much of our country. So much of it is founded on labor, loneliness, and love in the midst of all that.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
Well, I think when I was a fiction student, we were told, going back to Aristotle, that the greatest work of fiction usually has a reversal of fate. You have to change at the end to bring the audience a kind of catharsis. Rags to riches. He gets the girl. The girl gets the guy. You're going to find the body. You'll find the murderer.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
So it works in a very commercial way that there's a promise of catharsis. There's a kind of deliverable.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
And it works in the same way when you buy a car or a home or a washing machine. And I thought, and yet... American life as I saw it growing up as an immigrant in this country didn't work like that. My aunt works at FedEx for almost 40 years. My brother works at Dick's Sporting Goods for 15 years. The people who I love, they work the same jobs. They drive the same car.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
They live in the same homes for 20, 30 years. Some of them don't get raises. Some of them don't move up. And yet their lives are not worthless. It's not like their lives are not... Meaningful. Meaningful. Yeah. You know, and there was this... When I was trying to learn how to be a writer, everyone said, you have to change, you have to improve.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
And meanwhile, American life, as I saw it, wasn't improving. But it doesn't mean that these people didn't have lives full of dignity.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
Yeah, yeah. I hope I changed it just enough not to have to hire a lawyer. But I worked there for two years. I worked at Panera Bread as well. And what I found was that It's easy to be kind when you have so much to give, when you have so much means, you have so much wealth. It's easy to give when your life doesn't change, when you can give so much. And it's a beautiful thing.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
That's right. That's right. And what is it? Kindness without hope. When you don't have hope that the kindness will drastically change anyone's life and yet you still give it. That has always fascinated me, even as a child. You know, we are a culture that fetishizes talent. Athletic talent, musical talent, writing talent.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
But I wonder what would happen if we had prodigies of kindness, if we can celebrate children when we tap into this innate kindness. And I saw that at the home market, at the Boston markets, at the Panera Breads, where people are always... When there's so little they can do to affect change, they still go out of their way. They don't get paid extra. They don't get anything extra.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
And yet it's the moments after the shifts, having the cigarettes, after being slammed, people being diagnosed with cancer in the middle of the shifts, getting on the phone calls.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
In my time at Boston Market, that I'll still, I think I'll, it's been almost 20 years and it's still in my head. And it'll probably be in my head until I die. I didn't put it in the book because it's too dramatic. You know, sometimes as an author, you said life is more dramatic than fiction can allow, you know, be too, too pressurized. But I was being trained early on. by this man named Ruben.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
He was in his 50s and he was training me. And the first thing he taught me was how to eat a spinach croissant in under 30 seconds. He says, if you're hungry, you don't have to take a break. You can slip two croissants in your apron and then you can go into the freezer because nobody goes into the freezer. You can't go into the bathroom because a customer might see you.
The Oprah Podcast
Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club
That's really odd to see someone eating a croissant. And then the next hour later, we're cleaning out the freezer. And there's something that's so peculiar with what I was talking about with circumstantial family. We have our backs to each other. I'm 19 years old. We're cleaning the freezer. And we're talking about family. We're talking, oh, you have a brother, what have you.