>>25209628
How bad is the prose? All of the reviews seem to make heavy emphasis on Vuong's background as a poet rather than a traditional fiction writer. Anything particularly egregious? The title sounds like the gayest thing about the book next to the fact the main character is literally a gay man.

>>25209659
I wouldn't say the prose is bad, but it's very straightforward. The book in general is just very whiney and melancholic. It doesn't stand out from the other books about persecuted minorities I've read in college (Funny Boy, Americanah, The Book of Form and Emptiness).

Here's an excerpt:
>The first time you hit me, I must have been four. A hand, a flash, a reckoning. My mouth a blaze of touch. The time I tried to teach you to read the way Mrs. Callahan taught me, my lips to your ear, my hand on yours, the words moving underneath the shadows we made. But that act (a son teaching his mother) reversed our hierarchies, and with it our identities, which, in this country, were already tenuous and tethered.

>>25209673
>After the stutters and false starts, the sentences warped or locked in your throat, after the embarrassment of failure, you slammed the book shut. “I don’t need to read,” you said, your expression crunched, and pushed away from the table. “I can see—it’s gotten me this far, hasn’t it?” Then the time with the remote control. A bruised welt on my forearm I would lie about to my teachers. “I fell playing tag.”
The time, at forty-six, when you had a sudden desire to color. “Let’s go to Walmart,” you said one morning. “I need coloring books.” For months, you filled the space between your arms with all the shades you couldn’t pronounce. Magenta, vermilion, marigold, pewter, juniper, cinnamon. Each day, for hours, you slumped over landscapes of farms, pastures, Paris, two horses on a windswept plain, the face of a girl with black hair and skin you left blank, left white. You hung them all over the house, which started to resemble an elementary school classroom. When I asked you, “Why coloring, why now?” you put down the sapphire pencil and stared, dreamlike, at a half-finished garden. “I just go away in it for a while,” you said, “but I feel everything. Like I’m still here, in this room.” The time you threw the box of Legos at my head. The hardwood dotted with blood. “Have you ever made a scene,” you said, filling in a Thomas Kinkade house, “and then put yourself inside it? Have you ever watched yourself from behind, going further and deeper into that landscape, away from you?” How could I tell you that what you were describing was writing? How could I say that we, after all, are so close, the shadows of our hands, on two different pages, merging?

>>25209673
>>25209688
I can't imagine reading 200+ pages of this.

>>25209628
I’m a homosexual man but this title is viscerally repulsive to me. I can’t articulate why exactly. It’s just grotesquely feminine.

>>25209673
This prose is actually terrible

I wonder if these migrant authors are writing persecution stories because they genuinely want to share their trauma or if they're doing it because they think it's expected of them?

>>25209694
Ok yes, me too. But I'm thinking... what if it's kind of cool that he had the courage to write like this? In my mind he's gotten into this Meryl Streep type character and just sent it. So he got to enjoy the process of writing 200 pages in this boring soulless style but actually he was full of soul while writing it and now he gets to reap the rewards of his efforts. Even though it's pure garbage to me, I wish I could just complete something heartfelt and have the courage to not be anonymous.

>>25209673
That sounds like an undergraduate writing project someone does on the side and then eventually abandons because they realise it isn't their true calling. But in this case it seems that they were encouraged to continue because the publishing world uplifts minority voices as an ostensible gesture of transformative justice.

>>25209847
Start small, learn what to cut, learn what to polish.
You can figure out if you can too, but that means you have to attempt it.
You'll probably have to write a lot to get there, but that's the bitch of being a writer:
Doing it.