On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, written as a letter from a son to his immigrant mother who cannot read, aims “to speak to a rich American tradition of autobiography,” its author says.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read.

The mother has come to Hartford, Conn. after living through a hellscape of war in Vietnam. She goes to work at a nail salon, smokes Marlboro Reds, and more than once — more than 20 times — beats her son. But she tells herself, “I’m not a monster. I’m a mother.”

The son, known as Little Dog, bears some resemblance to his author, Ocean Vuong.

“What I wanted, what I hoped to do was to speak to a rich American tradition of autobiography, all the way down to Herman Melville and Moby Dick,” Vuong says in an interview. “And so for myself, I always saw the self in the American space as a potent moment of fiction. And I wanted to start with truth and end with art, as a writer. That was very important to me.”

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is the highly-anticipated novel from Vuong, who immigrated to the U.S. from Vietnam when he was 2 years old. Though he’s won awards for his poetry, this is his first novel. More at NPR.com