Ocean Vuong

speaker

1,158 appearances 4 recordings 4 series first heard May 2025 last heard 26 Jan

Ocean Vuong’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.

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The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · 13 May 2025 podcast

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?

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.

But I write fiction that has history involved in it. And land is a part of history.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If you talk to people, everybody kind of wants the same thing, even though we have vastly different

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

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?

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?

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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