Ocean Vuong’s “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” is the greatest memoir I’ve ever read. Every word costs a billion, and every sentence makes a difference in the perspective of our world.

The entire book is a letter unsent, to Vuong’s mother who can’t read or write in English. He starts off with intense imagery of his early days with his mother and grandmother: the good, the bad, the hitting, the teaching his mom English he’d learnt in school, all of it.

His push to communicate with his mother despite a language barrier as he grows up in the U.S. is drawn in all throughout the letter. His ability to amplify the relationship between his mother and himself is impeccable, as though we’re there in those moments with him.

His fragility is depicted early on through his sharing of the name his grandmother calls him: “Little Dog”. The name is given to him following a Vietnamese tradition in which ‘you name the things you don’t want to lose ugly names, so they are not taken”.

His mother and grandmothers’ relationship is affected fundamentally by war trauma from Vietnam; their characters constantly shape Vuong throughout his story. The constant flashbacks or mentions of his mother’s life, the sorrow and sometimes misunderstanding he feels towards it, shows the haziness in the connection between them.

He transitions from how his mother and grandmother having shaped him, to his first love and discovering himself within it. Vuong depicts the challenge of being queer, growing up not sure if he’ll be accepted, which may sometimes leads to harsher ways of dealing with disappointment, in his case, opioid addiction. He does an amazing job at explaining how those experiences have brought him greater understanding of love as an emotion and a tool to grieve loss.

The book ends with a deeper exploration of his family and himself. He concludes with a realization that beauty is found even in the deepest cuts of our worlds.