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Online Event: AAPI Montclair Book Club: Pride Month: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

Events. At Out Montclair , City Hall, Montclair, NJ. United states.

Thursday June 30 2022, 7:30pm

Online Event: AAPI Montclair Book Club: Pride Month: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

Thursday, June 30, 2022 - 7:30PM to 8:30PM EST

In celebration of Pride Month, join us for a discussion of Ocean Vuong's "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous." This virtual book club is co-sponsored by Out Montclair and Make Us Visible NJ.
 
Please RSVP if you plan to attend. On the day of the event, a Google Meet Link will be sent to attendees. *If you do not have a Facebook account, you can email michelle.anh.germinario@aapimontclair.org to RSVP!*
 
From NPR - "Ocean Vuong's devastatingly beautiful first novel, as evocative as its title, is a painful but extraordinary coming-of-age story about surviving the aftermath of trauma. It takes the form of a young Vietnamese American writer's letter to his illiterate mother — her education having ended at seven when her school in Vietnam collapsed after an American napalm raid.
 
The son knows that chances are slim that his mother, whose grasp of English is limited, will actually read his confessional missive. "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous" is more about processing and articulating difficult memories than about direct communication.
 
The result is a fractured narrative of a fractured family, torn by harrowing experiences — those of the mother and grandmother in Vietnam, and of the boy they raised together in Hartford, Conn., in the 1990s. Abused by his loving but mentally ill mother and tormented by schoolmates, the narrator, Little Dog, eventually finds solace in his first love affair, a tragic relationship with a rough American teenager ravaged by drugs. His true salvation, however, comes mostly in reading and writing, which cracks open his understanding of his family's history."
 
Bing Liu, director of the Oscar-nominated documentary "Minding the Gap," will be adapting the novel into a feature film with A24.
TW: bullying, abuse, drug addiction, homophobia, mental illness, and animal violence.