‘Buddhism and Björk help me handle fame’: novelist Ocean Vuong
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous made him a literary superstar. Now the Vietnamese American author is exploring his working-class roots in an ambitious follow‑up
There are three kinds of family, muses the novelist and poet Ocean Vuong. There’s the nuclear family, “which often we talk about as the central tenet of American life”. There’s the chosen family, “the pushback”, the community and friendships built by people who have been rejected by their parents, often because of their sexuality or gender identity. And then there’s the family we talk about much less frequently, but spend most of our waking hours within – our colleagues, or what Vuong describes as “the circumstantial family around labour”.