Poet and novelist Ocean Vuong joins us to discuss his new novel, The Emperor of Gladness. Set in a fictional small town in Connecticut, it follows a 19-year-old grappling with addiction and despair, who forms an unexpected bond with an 82-year-old widow living with dementia. Together, they navigate memory and survival. He also talks about teaching and why he's put an end date on the number of books he'll write in his lifetime.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. And today, a conversation with writer and poet Ocean Vuong. His new novel, The Emperor of Gladness, is an exploration of working class life and the quiet joys and devastations of caregiving and survival. It's set in the fictional post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, and follows a 19-year-old Vietnamese American named Hai.
who contemplates taking his own life before meeting an 82-year-old widow with dementia who persuades him to step back from the ledge and ultimately become her caregiver. Bong is the author of the best-selling novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, and the poetry collection Time is a Mother.
He's received a MacArthur Genius Grant and has become one of the most celebrated literary authors of his generation. The conversation you're about to hear is in two parts. First, the two of us in studio in Los Angeles.
And then later that night, we spoke again in front of an audience of nearly a thousand at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center in partnership with the Library Foundation of Los Angeles. Here's our conversation. Ocean Fong, welcome back to Fresh Air. Thank you so much, Tanya.
It's a pleasure to be here.
You were nervous about this next book coming out, and I wonder why.
I imagine every author is nervous because you put so much care and work into something, but I... I never expected to write on my own terms so soon in my life. Everything I did was for my family, and I got really comfortable with that. It was never a burden. But then when my mother passed, I inherited my brother. My brother moved in, so my family got bigger.
We moved, and I started writing this book January 18, 2020. And it was my way out of grief. I thought, okay, I'm fully an orphan now. You know, I said, goodbye, mom. I'm going to write this without you. It's my first book from start to finish without her.
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