Writer Ocean Vuong’s Vision of the Future

Since his bestselling novelOn Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/600633/on-earth-were-briefly-gorgeous-by-ocean-vuong/9780525562047/ debuted in 2019, Ocean Vuong has become one of the most beloved writers of his generation. He first sat with Samin 2021 https://talkeasypod.com/ocean-vuong/ amid the pandemic. Today, Vuong returns to discuss the personal history within his latest novel, The Emperor of Gladness https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/752232/the-emperor-of-gladness-oprahs-book-club-by-ocean-vuong/9780593831878/—a piece of fiction that draws from the contours of his own coming-of-age in East Hartford, Connecticut (5:43). We begin with the class dynamics at the heart of the book (9:27), the surrogate family he found working at Boston Market (21:22), and his formative college years in New York City (28:18). On the back half, we walk through how Ocean’s work continues to honor the memory of his late mother (36:48), the devastating impact of the opioid crisis (41:40), and his own journey to sobriety (45:03). To close, Vuong reflects on the childlike wonder behind his poem “Dear Sara” fromTime Is a Mother https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/689930/time-is-a-mother-by-ocean-vuong/ (1:04:52), why he still loves teaching creative writing (1:18:30), and how all of these experiences deliver him back to the page, each and every day (1:26:00). Watch our conversation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZqOGX_kdNo on YouTube. Thoughts or future guest ideas? Email us at [email protected]. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:21Sam Fragoso?

  This is Talk Easy. I'm Sam Fragoso. Welcome to the show.

• 0:38Sam Fragoso?

  Today, writer and professor Ocean Vuong. Vuong first joined us around the publication of his debut novel, On Earth Were Briefly Gorgeous. The book, which was an immediate bestseller, was an excavation of his family's history in Vietnam, which is where Vuong was born and raised until the family immigrated to America when he was just two years old. And it was here, stateside in Connecticut, that Vuong came of age in a one-bedroom apartment with seven relatives: a mother who worked long hours at the local nail salon, and a father who eventually left one day and never came back. By the time Ocean was a teenager, he was the first in his family to read and write proficiently.

• 1:22Sam Fragoso?

  But that's only part of how he became a novelist and poet. The other part is the basis of his latest book, The Emperor of Gladness, a personal history of his years as a wayward teen, bouncing back and forth between East Hartford and New York City, dipping in and out of sobriety. In the opening pages, we find our protagonist, named Hai, on the edge of a bridge, ready to jump. That is, until he's flagged down by Grigina, an elderly Lithuanian immigrant, who happens to see him from her front yard. In a moment of generosity from her and a moment of desperation for him, Hai moves in and effectively becomes her live-in nurse,

• 2:04Sam Fragoso?

  while also balancing a job at a local restaurant called Home Market, which has all the features of a Boston market. As you'll hear, the parallels between Ocean's lived experiences and Hy's fictional ones run pretty deep, including the backdrop of the story, which in the book is a town called East Gladness, but again, bears all the features of East Hartford, namely, a post-2008 community ravaged by the opioid epidemic. And so, we discuss the underpinnings of class at the heart of this story, and how, in many ways, it's a response to all the literature of Connecticut we've grown accustomed to.

• 2:45Sam Fragoso?

  The Cheevers and the Updikes, whose stories were often populated by men courting extramarital affairs with little more than a sweater around their neck. But that wasn't Wong's Connecticut. In fact, he argues, "It's not most people's Connecticut." And so, we talk about what his upbringing actually looked like. The drug use, the fear and desperation that was in the air, the anxiety of not being able to get out, the surrogate family he stumbled upon at Boston Market, and how all of these experiences, in one way or another, have delivered him back to the page, time and time again. At least for four more books. They'll make sense when you get to it.

• 3:29Sam Fragoso?

  If you want to watch this episode, it is in full on YouTube. We have recently launched our page over there. We don't do all the episodes on video, but we're trying to do more and more of them. And so, if you want to watch the two of us in conversation, you can find the link to that in the show notes of this episode. You can also go to YouTube, search Talk Easy, and it will pop right up. And so, with that, here is our return with poet, novelist, and professor, Ocean Wong.

• 4:23Sam Fragoso?

  Ocean.

• 4:24Speaker 01

  Hi again.

• 4:25Sam Fragoso?

  Welcome back to the show.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  Glad to be here. Thank you.

• 4:27Sam Fragoso?

  This is not exactly how it was situated the first time we spoke.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  No, we were in, deep in the pandemic. And we didn't know where the world was going to open up again. So this is kind of a miracle to meet you face to face for the first time.

• 4:43Sam Fragoso?

  And I do like every guest to tell me it's a miracle to meet me face to face.

• 4:49Sam Fragoso?

  Putting a book out on the other side of that, how has it been so far?

• 4:53Speaker 01

  I think it's okay. This one was a little stranger in that it was the first book I wrote from start to finish while my mom being alive. And so it's hard to feel good about that, right? Because like.

• 5:06Sam Fragoso?

  Feel good about that fact?

• 5:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, about, about finishing something when you've been haunted by such loss. And so it feels, is almost like yay, right? That's kind of where I'm at. Yay. With big question mark.

• 5:23Sam Fragoso?

  Your last novel, On Earth Were Briefly Gorgeous.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:26Sam Fragoso?

  You called an artist's statement. What would you call this new one?

• 5:31Speaker 01

  Well, the first novel was my attempt to bring poetry's ethos into the novel form. Because the novel is one of our later, it's the youngest form. So because it's so young, it came, it rose alongside print culture with the Gutenberg printing press. And so it has a very unique position in our history in that it is both a genre and a container. It can hold the romance, it can hold the lyric, it can hold the essay, it can hold even drama, as Melville proved. But the lyric poem can't hold the novel. I like to think of the novel as a bottom.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  It always makes room. And so it is a queer form, ultimately, almost like a container made of water. It's undefined. But again, it comes out of print culture because when you print something, you go from the oral tradition, which is communal, immediate, societal, to a private experience of story. And so I was trying to, I was being a real nerd about that and trying to say, okay, let me try to bring, let me bring poetry's ethos and kind of upset. Because the novel since the 19th century in Europe has been sort of very fixed, right? So if you look at any review in any magazine, they're usually measuring the novel against the 19th century European novel.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  Plot, character development, resolution, climax, three parts or five parts, crescendo, decrescendo, and it's all modeled after the plays, Aristotle's and Shakespeare's.

• 7:12Sam Fragoso?

  I don't remember reading anything about the bottom in those texts.

• 7:17Speaker 01

  That's just my.

• 7:19Sam Fragoso?

  Your contribution.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  My contribution. At the end of the day, yeah, let that be the final Wikipedia note.

• 7:25Sam Fragoso?

  The books were good.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:26Sam Fragoso?

  But I think that description will live on long after.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  You know, the poetry girlies will want the poem to be the bottom. And I, I, I too, I get it.

• 7:36Sam Fragoso?

  You're a teacher now at NYU, right?

• 7:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:38Sam Fragoso?

  And is this the sort of philosophy that you're teaching your young, impressionable students?

• 7:43Speaker 01

  I open with it.

• 7:44Sam Fragoso?

  You open with it?

• 7:44Speaker 01

  I open, I say.

• 7:45Sam Fragoso?

  So opening, first day.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:48Sam Fragoso?

  You immediately talk about bottoms.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  I, I say, look, there's something, there's a lot to say about bottomhood as ethos.

• 7:58Sam Fragoso?

  And I, I thought we were going to get here around minute 20, but I'm glad you just.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  I've learned to open with, with the truth, with the most capacious, rumious, accommodating.

• 8:09Sam Fragoso?

  In this case, literally, yeah.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And, and so I think for me, it's like, all right. Basically, it's a very weird form, but it has been calcified in the 19th century onwards. And so my critique of Western narratology is that it has taken a localized concern and made it universal. And so when you read a review, it's often, does it meet these checkboxes?

• 8:32Sam Fragoso?

  And the boxes are what, as you understand them?

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Plot development. A cohesion, right? Even when we think, in denigrating terms, we'll use the term uneven. And I said, well, why shouldn't something be uneven? Isn't life uneven? It's interesting that we have denigrated that. And then we've prioritized these sort of enlightenment ideals of cohesion, evenness, and also minimalism, at least in the 20th century sentence.

• 9:03Sam Fragoso?

  So you take all of that theory and arrive at the first book. The second one lands where?

• 9:09Speaker 01

  Well, the first book was like this, it was important for the first book to refuse to tell the story because I was very aware that as an Asian American author, I would be expected to perform a kind of tourism of Asian American pain, experience, what have you. And so that book, On Earth, was a kind of defiant disobedience. I found, I think disobedience is very important for Asian American artists because so much of the Asian American body in this country has been trafficked in service of things. We make other people's clothes. We fix people's clothes. We make other people's hands beautiful. We do other people's nails. We wipe other grandmothers' bums.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  We open the door. We cook the food. We deliver the food. And so when it comes, it's often in service of Eurocentric art. The violinist, the pianist is playing Bach, Beethoven. And so for an Asian American to make their own thing, make their own fashion designs, their own stories, it's a little jarring to the culture. And I think America is still not used to it. It's almost like the dishwasher at the five-star restaurant after his shift has come out from the back and sat down at the white cloth dining table. He has every right. There's no rules against it, but it's still jarring. The waiter will still come up, still take his order, but there's now this kind of elephant in the room. He has the money.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  He has the capacity. The Constitution says he should do it. He could do it. And yet, there's that elephant in the room. And I think being an Asian American artist, unbeknownst to me when I first started, is very much like that. And so. Debuting as a novel, I was trying to take poetry's concerns and push it into the novel. I was naive in that I did not realize how conservative novelistic standards were in this country. Because very often, you would hear a very smart, brilliant, respected novelist say something like, that's not a novel. You know, Marguerite Daras' Lover, not a novel. Juno Barnes' Nightwood, not a novel.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  But you rarely, if ever, hear a poet say that's not a poem. I think the tolerance for strangeness amongst poets is much more wider, and I did not know that until I wrote an unorthodox novel. But I actually think On Earth is very conservative compared to Lynn Higginian's My Life, even Maggie Nelson's work, that sort of poet hybrid text, Claudia Rankine's work. In that sort of milieu, On Earth is kind of a very normie work.

• 11:52Sam Fragoso?

  I mean, in thinking about Rankine's book, Citizen.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 11:58Sam Fragoso?

  It felt like your book to be in the spirit of a Terence Malick film, who often receives criticism dating back to Badlands.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, for being too sincere.

• 12:12Sam Fragoso?

  The movie's too sincere, it is too earnest, it's opaque, it's not really a movie, it's more a vignette.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  Tone poem, whatever that means.

• 12:20Sam Fragoso?

  I still don't know what a tone poem is. I've never gone to a reading and thought, there's a tone poem.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  Right. It's elitist policing. This book, we'll go to the second book, that second novel, was deeply inspired by my study of Thorin Wilder's Our Town. But what was interesting about Wilder was one of the most beloved plays in American history, written in 1939, at the beginning of World War II. And that play was inspired by Japanese no opera. And when it came out, the reviews were like, "Using Chinese methods, Wilder has set up some sort of stunt." They couldn't even bring themselves to call it a play.

• 13:06Sam Fragoso?

  But that's a standard upheld by critics. I actually think readers often

• 13:11Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 13:11Sam Fragoso?

  are ahead of

• 13:12Speaker 01

  There you go, Sam.

• 13:13Sam Fragoso?

  critics in many ways.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  There you go, Sam. You're right on it.

• 13:15Sam Fragoso?

  Why don't we talk about the actual text of the book?

• 13:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:17Sam Fragoso?

  Because, growing up, your grandmother and your mother and your aunt would tell stories to, quote, "recalibrate their past, to make sense of their past." Given how much of your life is folded into this new book, and we're gonna get into that, are you trying to do the same as they were? Are you, are you carrying on in some ways in their tradition?

• 13:44Speaker 01

  100%. And it's not just my own tradition. I think it also falls into the tradition of many communities of color. You know, you think of the black tradition of autobiography, from Frederick Douglass to Harriet Jacobs, to Jupiter Hammond and Willis Wheatley, who wrote as enslaved people. That too is an American tradition. It's not just Whitman and Dickinson. That is also, you know, the birth of our inheritance in literary production. And it's interesting because autofiction is often accredited to like, white, early aughts writers, you know, investigating suburban N U A. And so often, it's in, it's, any writer of color

• 14:26Speaker 01

  working in autofiction will be pushed into those white frames. But if you think of like, the blues tradition in black arts, you know, what is the main function of the blues song? It offered the trope of travel. I was in New Orleans, I had the blues. I went up to Hot Spring, Arkansas, I had the blues. In the context of Jim Crow,

• 14:48Speaker 01

  Sun Downtowns, in the context of segregation of the South and the immense danger the black body experiences, those songs then become testimony of survival. It's not just about tourism. It's about, look what I've surpassed. And so, to me, the autobiographical I for a person of color in this country is about a hyper-political testament, rather than just self-absorption, which is like the easy critique. And you see this go all the way to hip-hop. Self-mythologization, self-aggrandizement for a body that in the media has often been

• 15:27Speaker 01

  ridiculed or deemed nefarious, deemed animalistic and full of criminality, to then, you know, re-gloryfy it amongst the community, re-gloryfy the I, reposition it, really crown itself, right? And I think that's why, like, the idea of crowning traffics so often in communities of color, like, who do we crown? What do we crown? And I felt the same alignment because I grew up in a black and brown community in Hartford, and my elders were doing the same thing that all my friends' elders were doing, without knowing those lineages. So it's just a natural method of repositioning power for yourself when you don't have it.

• 16:11Sam Fragoso?

  So, growing up in Hartford, in the context of this book, what were you trying to recalibrate? What part of your past were you trying to make sense of?

• 16:21Speaker 01

  This book is more about my history, which is why it's more humorous. The first book was my elders' history. I don't tell their story. I've never interviewed my family for my work. So I'm inspired by the context of their history that I invent. This one is more about my life, so it's more humorous. But it's about being trapped in this wage work that I experienced. And I felt on a larger scale that the fast-food restaurant was a kind of cage, the shift was a kind of cage.

• 16:57Sam Fragoso?

  You worked at Boston Market at age 19, right?

• 17:01Speaker 01

  In Panera Bread, yeah. 16 to 19, I worked at those places. So you're like a child, you're like, what happened to American upward mobility? What about, don't you want me to like be a doctor or something? And it was interesting that I ran right into Like the cage of American prosperity, or the false narrative of that. Because if I made any more than what I did at McDonald's, we would be kicked out of this HUD housing complex. So we had to strategically go under. And so I end up, I tried, I applied to McDonald's. I got into Boston Market. And I saw that all these containments in American life were really cages. And I thought to feel like, is American life really being trapped in a free country?

• 17:46Speaker 01

  So much of what we do is this restriction. And I thought, but isn't that also the sonnet? The most innovative form in Anglophonic poetry is a cage. Fourteen lines, Volta at line ten or twelve, rhyme scheme or not. And from within that, you have Petrarch, Shakespeare, Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, Ben Lerner. And I thought, gosh, that's what, I don't want an improvement arc. I don't want to escape, you know, narrative. I want everything contained. And the hero's journey for me could also be a journey where you don't go anywhere.

• 18:23Sam Fragoso?

  You said last time we spoke that fiction is strongest when it launches a moral question. For the emperor of gladness, what is that question?

• 18:36Speaker 01

  What is the function, I think, of altruism when there's no way out? What is kindness? What is goodness when it doesn't lead anywhere? It's almost like, does goodness matter in an ant farm? So much of my life growing up in that area was an ant farm. You know, I have so much survivor's guilt.

• 19:02Sam Fragoso?

  What do you mean by that?

• 19:03Speaker 01

  Because an ant farm is just a trap. It's just done, it's finite. Ants think they're in a larger world, but they're actually in a cage. And they're being perceived probably by the, for the entertainment or they're being used by something else.

• 19:16Sam Fragoso?

  But when you're sixteen to nineteen, working these jobs. Primarily at Boston Market because I I grew up going to Boston Market.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:25Sam Fragoso?

  Were you thinking that you were in a kind of cage at that time?

• 19:29Speaker 01

  No, emotionally, I was just trying to make it through the shift. And the elephant in the room was that nobody wants to retire or be retired at retirement age at Boston Market. Everybody had their eyes on the next train. But they also knew the next train, it doesn't come. You know, it's not everybody's gonna get out of there. And so to me, it was sometimes more interesting than what fiction allows. You know, like, there were all these like, hyper dramatic scenes. Like, my my boss, for example, was an evangelical Christian refugee from Pakistan who escaped religious persecution. And so he has a thick accent.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  And meanwhile, he has a tape of evangelical televangelist speeches coming out of his belt. And he's running a shift like that, right? So like, we're like shouting over, he's shouting over these like speeches. And and I'm like, you can't put that in a novel. You know, James Woods would say, this is hysterical fiction and whatever. You know, but I'm like, gosh, sometimes life is crazier and weirder. And so in this book, I've kind of reinvested my interest in cliche and corniness. Like, all the characters say really corny things. Because that's what you hear. And then they know it's not enough. Like, they know, like, oh, don't worry, time heals all wounds. And you want to throw up as you say it. But then you're like, well, what else can I, what else do I have?

• 20:59Speaker 01

  And I find that really, really touching.

• 21:02Sam Fragoso?

  The moral question guiding the book.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:04Sam Fragoso?

  How and where did you see that working these jobs?

• 21:08Speaker 01

  There's one anecdote that really sums up this for me. So we were hit with the opioid epidemic before anybody knew what it was. Purdue Pharma is some Stanford Connecticut, the Sackler family. And so when it started to reverberate, it was like a bubonic plague. Like, it was just, people were just dropping. And we're like. It was really, there was so much shame because we're like, oh my gosh, was the lunch lady a junkie this whole time? Like, this was kind of like the vibe. And what age were you when you started noticing that? Fourteen, fifteen. Just like two thousand two, two thousand three. So it was not in the media. So what happened was, um, one night at Boston Market, we were closing up about thirty minutes.

• 21:52Speaker 01

  And there was this woman in her thirties. She gets the worst call, you know, on the landline right to the, the office. Someone asked for her and it was her aunt saying her brother's overdose.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  He's in the hospital. He's, he's okay. He's like, he's not gone. Um, but her aunt was her ride. So she's probably calling her just to tell her this. And then she's, I'm going to the, to Hartford Hospital. You know, just wait for me or whatever. And at that time, it was a really wild, it's like the wild, wild west of opioid medicine. Because in two thousand fourteen, I believe the FDA approved Narcan as a nasal spray. But Narcan was available as a medicine since the seventies in hospital use. But because we were the first to get hit, depending on which first responder crew you had, they were already putting like MacGyver-ing Narcan into aerosol sprays.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  Right? They were literally making this called off-label use. And so you could live or die depending on who comes for you in the ambulance. And so it was really like Russian roulette. And something happened that night when we closed. You know, she kind of like, she, we said, you can just stop. But she, I remember she's, I'm just gonna do my job. We closed, we clocked out. And there was just one fluorescent light lit. The whole thing was dark. And it was completely unspoken, which is really, to me, I still don't understand it. Nobody said it, but we, we all decided that we're not gonna leave.

• 23:28Speaker 01

  So we're sitting in the front of the dining room, just waiting. And luckily, her brother made it that night. But it was just, I'm like, where does that? You know, we're not getting paid. Everything in this culture in America tells us that it's about Machiavellian. It's about grabbing your own. And yeah, I'm like, why don't I see that? And it really puzzled me, you know, but it made sense to me. And I'm starting to realize that it has a lot to do with class. In that, I didn't know that then, but what I'm realizing now is that, oh,

• 24:06Speaker 01

  I was the youngest in that group. There were people in their 40s and 50s and they, we all, I followed their lead and their life.

• 24:12Sam Fragoso?

  But you had also had experience with drug use by that point, right?

• 24:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that's what I mean. So I'm saying the class proximity to that. The reason why it was unspoken and so natural was that we knew we were just one step away from it. Some of us already seen it. Some of us knew it could be us.

• 24:35Sam Fragoso?

  Had it been you?

• 24:36Speaker 01

  Not with me, not with me, no. My high school class is just riddled with holes. But at that point, I just, I just want to realize that now that I'm a writer, I'm professor, I'm in all these spaces. And one thing that I've tracked was that you don't always see that, that kind of like impulsive generosity. You'd see more performative, like philanthropists, you know, it's always like speeches. I'm always in this, like these fundraisers and everybody makes a big, you know, if you have a lot, giving doesn't affect your life that much. And I think what I realized was that they all knew the cost of where she was sitting.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  And they also knew that they could be where she's at next week. And that kind of close empathy was why kindness was so easily spread. Because we were all in the same boat, heading in towards that one direction.

• 25:38Sam Fragoso?

  After the break, more from my conversation with Ocean Bong, which, by the way, if you have time during the ad break, you can find on YouTube in full if you're interested in watching. All right, we'll be right back.

• 25:52Sam Fragoso?

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• 27:23Sam Fragoso?

  By the time you're 19 or 20, there's a part of you that wants or needs to leave that boat, like to get out and to go from Connecticut to New York.

• 27:33Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah. And you, like the main character, enroll at Pace University. I think in real life, you were going to business school.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:44Sam Fragoso?

  And in the book, it said that he's gonna go to medical school.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 27:48Sam Fragoso?

  It doesn't take like an episode of Columbo to figure out the parallels between the two of you.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 27:55Sam Fragoso?

  So in the book, there is a grandmother, a Lithuanian woman.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:00Sam Fragoso?

  Who is based on your partner's grandmother.

• 28:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 28:04Sam Fragoso?

  Who you moved in with, I think, around age 20, is that right?

• 28:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 28:08Sam Fragoso?

  At that time, how did she find you?

• 28:13Speaker 01

  She was relieved to have somebody. She was also pretty deeply in dementia. She was 84. And I didn't know how lonely being elderly was. Because my grandmother lived with us until she died. We were always around her. But I enter a different, a different kind of America. Grina's an immigrant too, but, you know, from a different generation. All her kids had their lives. And she also refused. She was very proud. You know, she outlived Hitler and Stalin. Why would she go into a home? But we really hit it off, you know? I think I was, I was raised by my grandmother. So we would watch The Office, which she kept thinking was the news.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Because they had those little like suits and, you know, she'd say, when is the weather? You know, I didn't know how, I thought I was the one getting help. Because I was getting a place to stay to go to school at Brooklyn College when I dropped out of Pace. And right away, I was like, oh, she, I'm, I'm doing a major service here for somebody who is so, so alone. You know, and the house was like a time warp and.

• 29:27Sam Fragoso?

  I'm curious, like this, when I read that, I thought, my God, like. In some ways, you were entering a relationship with two people at once. What was that like?

• 29:37Speaker 01

  It felt kind of really natural, you know? I mean, she had her rhythms and I was just in her rhythm. My only rhythm was school. I think it was harder than I thought it was in retrospect, but at the time, it felt like a gift. I was like, oh, my God, I was gonna, because I was on the cusp of just losing, just going, going home to Connecticut empty handed and really failing. Like, because I got a scholarship at Brooklyn College for my, my poems. Crazy to think, but it still didn't cover rent in the most expensive city in the world. So I got a roof over my head and so I just surrendered to her rhythm. And Peter would start visiting, you know?

• 30:21Speaker 01

  We were kind of, I was trying to normalize my life by dating. While I was at Pace, I was very not sober. I was dealing with a lot and losing my housing, dropping out. It was like catastrophe. And I thought, what, what other thing to normalize my life? Let me just go on OkCupid, right? Because it was free and try to date. It was like the most psychotic thing you could do.

• 30:50Sam Fragoso?

  I also love that your idea of normalizing your life is going on OkCupid, finding someone, then going, I know we just met, but what if I moved into your grandmother's home, who may or may not need medical assistance?

• 31:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, well, when you're-

• 31:10Sam Fragoso?

  Would you call yourself a romantic?

• 31:12Speaker 01

  I think that's why. Well, you have to understand the queer angle.

• 31:16Sam Fragoso?

  I've been trying to this whole time, from bottoms upward.

• 31:18Speaker 01

  Bottoms onward. So for me, I was like, as soon as I get out of Hartford, I'm gonna go on a date. You know, like, I'm gonna go to the city and be a normal gay kid.

• 31:30Sam Fragoso?

  Okay.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  You know, because prior to that, it was like, meeting in parks at night, you know? So it was, you know, most kids know that rite of passage.

• 31:40Sam Fragoso?

  You know, straight kids also meet up at parks at night.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  I wonder what they do.

• 31:46Sam Fragoso?

  I could tell you.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  Do they meet up with weathermen in their cars?

• 31:54Speaker 01

  That was, that was one of my first encounters.

• 31:55Sam Fragoso?

  You know, I can't speak for the whole straight community.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  That was, that was a wild moment. I met up, one of my first encounters, I was 17, legal in Connecticut. And I met this guy in the park and we're talking, I'm so nervous. And luckily he looks like he, like his photos, not always the case.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  And handsome. And then we're just getting to know each other. Then he says, in my 17 year old brain, I couldn't receive it. He's like, I'm a weatherman.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  And any erotic possibility just zapped, just, just vanished into thin air. I was just like, it was not on my bingo card to do anything, not even to see or meet a weatherman in person. Like, I was like, I am so sorry, I cannot do this.

• 32:47Sam Fragoso?

  Okay. So you, so you move from the strangest of weathermen in the park, which is a sentence I've been waiting to say on this podcast, to going to New York. In school, you meet Peter. Emotionally, how did it feel to be navigating, going to school, taking care of someone and falling in love? Do you remember that period now?

• 33:12Speaker 01

  A lot of it is a blur. You know, when you have to do so much for yourself. I was studying full class. I was taking care of someone who was, in retrospect, severely ill. You, you don't get to really process it, you know, you go home, you check on the pills. And then once in a while, Peter would visit, you know, because he would just visit his grandma. And then I'm like, oh, are we doing this? Are we, is this our life? Is this our weird family? And then one day, like seven months in, we're just like, I think, let's just try it. You're already here. You're already sleeping over with me and your grandmother.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  But you know what it was? What I realized there was that, oh, we have vast differences. Two different races, two different areas of the country, vastly different cultures. But then we really got along because we were both refugees. Our families both survived war. Grigina's nightmares were very similar to my grandmother's. I'm like, oh, yeah, the bombs look pretty much the same in the 20th century, whether they're dropped in Lithuania or Saigon. And we came from families that didn't have generational wealth. Right? So we were kind of, the bonds were really unexpected. And I was like, wow, why did, I've never had a white person

• 34:39Speaker 01

  understand my context. And I was like, oh, it's because of war. And I'm like, oh, yeah, that's the most quintessentially American thing. Two people from two continents, from wars that were 30 years apart, could then meet in Brooklyn and it would kind of all make sense. That was a big surprise. And that's when I really felt I feel kind of safe with these people.

• 35:03Sam Fragoso?

  When your mother called, how would you describe what was happening?

• 35:08Speaker 01

  I was just like, I'm living in school, you know? I didn't even to this, even to the end of her life, I never, I never told her that I got an English degree. When she went to my graduation at Brooklyn College, I said, here it is, Mom. It's a marketing degree. She couldn't read it anyway. No harm, no foul. You know, what else can you do? And that's what I mean, where like a lot of this, these decisions, it's just the ease.

• 35:26Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  It's like the Chinese would call it the Wu Way. It's just where the river flows, right? I'm like, so when she called, I'm like, I'm still at Pace, not that it would even matter. And I have, you know, school, I live in a dorm, whatever. And then when she came, it all checked out. I got my little, you know, a maroon cap and gown from Brooklyn College. And I said, I'm a business major. She's like, great, proud of you.

• 35:54Sam Fragoso?

  You know, you mentioned when you're at Pace, you were not sober. You were thinking about, oh, God, if I have to go back home. I don't know what I'm gonna do.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:10Sam Fragoso?

  And it reminded me of a passage that I just have been replaying in my head.

• 36:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:16Sam Fragoso?

  Ever since I read it in the new book. And I thought perhaps you'd wanna read it for me.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's see. Oh, yeah. This is his return to his, um, his mother's house. He crossed a little league ball field, his boots sucking mud, and made his way back to the street. Nearing Ma's duplex, he noticed the living room light was still on and crouched under the window. The lace curtains were drawn, but through the diaphanous fabric, he managed to peer into the room. His mother was on the couch, her head bent over her phone in her usual spot. Her body was more upright than before, her shoulders jerking as she texted. Next to her on the side table was a lit candle, the expensive kind that cost $26 from Yankee

• 37:05Speaker 01

  Candle, the one you could only get at the mall. Her hair was tied back and clipped with something shiny. Her face touched with rouge. She was in an elegant blue linen dress that hugged her length. None of this she'd ever done when he was home. "You don't need to be beautiful to make other people beautiful," she once told him, sucking on a cigarette and sweating in the back room on her break at the nail salon, her tiny frame engulfed in sweatpants and a Red Sox hoodie. Now she looked healthy, content even, her gold loop earrings catching the candlelight as she beamed into her phone. A breeze shifted the curtain and he glimpsed her through the opening.

• 37:46Speaker 01

  How rare to see one's mother lost in such unfixed and unknowable contentment, so privately realized through a scarce snatched freedom. He felt like a voyeur and yet like a voyeur could not look away. How could he do this now? How could he go to the back door and knock, only to have her see him like this? How could he put an end in a few short steps to this version of his mother he'd never seen and yet had wanted his whole life to witness? And perhaps most sickening, how could he do it a second time?

• 38:23Speaker 01

  What?

• 38:26Speaker 01

  I don't know, this, the heartbreak of, of that. And, and it's almost like a simulation of what would happen. But in my life, that never happened. That's what fiction, that's why I mean fiction launches a moral question. It's like, how culpable is a son who, who fails after lying to his mother? You know? So I'm gonna wipe my eyes. But I don't know why I'm emotional about it because like,

• 38:55Speaker 01

  I didn't live that. But then I wrote it and now it feels real.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  You know, like to, to face my mother and tell her I,

• 39:05Speaker 01

  that all of it was for nothing. You know? I'm thinking of like the time when I usually come home from college. She would take my hands. And we would have friends come over for dinner and stuff. She'd take my hands, she'd say. It was very embarrassing for me at the time. She would grab my hand, she says, hey, to one of her friends, come feel my son's hands. Look how soft they are. And I, I realized that everyone's hands is battered. And she's just, she's holding it and she's, and I think what I realize now, because in writing, we have context and subtext. And I realized the subtext was that she was trying to say, look what I prevented.

• 39:46Sam Fragoso?

  These are the hands that didn't have to do manual labor.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. And she's, she would go on, she said, he, you know what he does? He only holds a pen. That's how it's not soft. And I, to me, you know, as an American kid, like, to me, I'm just going to school. It's the most normal thing. But coming back to that, I realized, oh, gosh, like, you're helping me think through this because sometimes, you know, I tell this story and people say, wow, it's so miraculous. It's so fascinating. And to me, it was like, There was no thought in it. Like, I was, I was going to get a degree. It took me six years, longer than most, but, but I have to because I can't go home and say, I failed.

• 40:31Speaker 01

  And I think that scene was me doing that, right? And I think in many ways, this book is the book of the parallel universe of my life. It's like if I, if it didn't work out, this, this would be the story.

• 40:48Sam Fragoso?

  If you were the kid on the other side of that phone call at Pasta Market with your colleague?

• 40:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes, I think about that so much. You know, on, on my phone, on my, my homepage is a photograph of my, one of my best friends. And he's missing. I can't, I don't know where he is. I've been trying to, to get in touch with him. And he was one of those kids. He was so beautiful, so bright. And the drug just snatched him from a life that he really deserved, you know? And there's so many of them like that. And the only photo, that photo on my phone, I'll show you after, is a mugshot. Because I grew up at a time where you didn't, you had like a flip phone.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  You didn't really took photo. You could, but it would look like a Loch Ness monster or something. And I'm no smarter, or brighter, or more creative than the kids that I grew up with. And it's just a total fluke that I'm sitting here with, talking to you. That, like, there's nothing earned, I don't feel. Because they all tried. Everybody tried hard. I can't sit here and say, oh, I, I became an author because I tried hard. And they all were beautiful, creative, passionate, but they got lost in this pharmaceutical slaughter.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  And in many ways, like, I have like the survivor's guilt where I'm like, I think I got here because my drug of choice was not heroin, which is much harder to kick. You know, I prefer the uppers that brought me more. I wanted to live more. And my friends were, they wanted to get out. And when fentanyl came, it became impossible for them to kick it. And I think that's it, that there's no like rhyme or reason. Like, I tried it and it's like, it lasts too long. I feel like I'm drowning. It's woozy. I don't like it, you know? I get why, I get why they liked it, but that's it. There's no,

• 42:58Speaker 01

  it's weird because, you know, like, I get introduced as a MacArthur genius and I'm like, I don't feel any of that. I'm proud of it. I accept it. It's not something you apply for. I appreciate it, but I'm like, they were as, just as lively, like, they deserved to have a fair shot at this thing we call life. And there's no legitimate reason why they don't. And that's really, that's really, that haunts me always. And I'll never, I'll never be able to come to terms with it. You know, people love asking, how do you come to terms? And I was like, we don't.

• 43:40Speaker 01

  You know, we should be asking the people who made these drugs. We should ask people who make bombs, how do you come to terms? We should ask the board of Raytheon, how they come to terms. But we always ask, you know, people who go through it. And I'm like, I, it's important for me to say, I don't, I don't come to terms. But that scene, I think, I guess that scene was like, oh,

• 44:00Speaker 01

  like, that's the alternative, I think, for me. I was trying to imagine that through this book.

• 44:07Sam Fragoso?

  What could have been?

• 44:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 44:10Sam Fragoso?

  You know, you're saying like, a lot of your friends did fall victim and you didn't. Do you think in some ways, writing played a part? And you getting out of whatever addiction you had at the time?

• 44:24Speaker 01

  I think so. I don't, um, I'm very careful not to position myself as a sobriety guru. Because I didn't do 12-step, you know, I was drying out at Grigina's house. I mean, I did some rehab. Um, that gave me a toolkit, but it wasn't enough. Relapsed three times after that. But that was a very valuable, like, set of tools, because I didn't even know there was, like, triggers. Like, I didn't know those languages. But,

• 44:54Speaker 01

  yeah, I, I think I started to fill my life with something else.

• 44:58Sam Fragoso?

  And what did that look like?

• 45:00Speaker 01

  It looked like obsession. And I think Buddhist psychology has this interesting concept where there is no simultaneity. So we often say, oh, I'm sad and happy. Well, Buddhist psychology would say you're not. You're flickering. You're sad, then happy. It's almost like you can only hold one ball at a time. And so if you're feening, that's one ball. But if you're doing something, that's another ball. So it's about holding, the consciousness holds something else. But you're, it's harder than just meditation, because you're working against a biological addiction. Um, it's physiological, you know, so it's really uphill. But I think that, uh, I kind of like, uh, also MacGyvered my own sobriety. Like, I don't drive for that reason.

• 45:45Speaker 01

  I do not have a bank account. I don't have access to my bank account for that reason. Um, it just works for me. I'm not, I would, I would never sit here and say, that's a model. I, I don't think it should be. I think people should go through legitimate channels. But it works for me and my setup, and my life is very small for that rea-. And then that has coasted me since 2016, clean since 2016, coming up on 10 years. So it, it, it works, but it, there's a poem in Time as a Mother, um, called Kunslar Roman. And it depicts a protagonist walking backwards, walking from a car crash. And I think to me, that's my sort of definition of my sobriety.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  Is that the person who shows up at a podcast, who shows up on stage, who shows up to their classroom, that person has just walked from a car crash. And I've been crawling from that car crash ever since. The car crashed in a ditch, I crawled out, I never looked back. And then I walked into a store, put on clothes, walked out and kept walking. I'm, I'm still coming from that car crash. And I think that's the best definition of my sobriety. Like, it's not a threshold. It's not like, oh, I was an addict. It's like, no, I'm, there are days when it's so bad that I'm like, if it's in front of me, no holes barred.

• 47:12Speaker 01

  Like, it's, like, there are days where I'm like, I, if I had it, you won't even, it's like, you can feel it, right? So that's, I mean, do you want to call that sobriety? I, I don't know, right? I don't have a, I don't give myself a grade. I'm just like, the writing thing, the teaching thing is a kind of fruitful obsession. I have replaced my obsessions with other things. It's a place to work through and work in. And so much of life is like that, you know? People skydive, right? Looking for those things or climb mountains. I write sentences and teach, and that does enough for me.

• 47:52Sam Fragoso?

  As someone who is also an obsessive person and pours a lot of that, most of it, into this podcast, I don't know if it's an answer.

• 48:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:06Sam Fragoso?

  And I have a lot of friends who've

• 48:10Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 48:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think it's, a lot of the world is designed for us to be hooked. I, I, I think we are in an on, a linguistic onslaught of coercion and seduction in this country, which is why cynicism tracks so easily. Because we are constantly inundated by advertising language of seduction. Everywhere you look, you're told you're not good enough. You need to buy something else to be good enough. You're not happy enough, so you need to sign up for this class, do more yoga. The, the goalpost keeps moving. And it's a kind of tyrannical manipulation linguistically. Which is why humiliation also tracks so powerfully in this country.

• 48:55Speaker 01

  And I saw this as a teacher. When I first started teaching, I realized that my students would haze each other to get their points across. And it worked amongst their peers. So you'll say, oh, this line is so sentimental. I can hear the tiny violins. And everyone would giggle and nod. And I would say, but you didn't defend the point. But it was interesting to see that humiliation landed. That as long as you can humiliate someone, the critique has substance.

• 49:29Sam Fragoso?

  Or to stand in for substance.

• 49:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So it just, it just was legitimized. And I said, oh, where else does this function? The talking head shows. You know, anything from SNL News Report on one side, to the Jon Stewarts, to the Tuckers, Tucker Carlsons, the Joe Rogans, right? Within those two, there's a rhetorical device. You know, and I'm not judging, that, that's just their job. It's gonna be filled. But I'm trying to see how humiliation functions in this culture. And so in those shows, what you realize is that you take a populace that has been deemed inferior, self-conscious, and beaten down by ad culture.

• 50:12Speaker 01

  Like bullied in a sense. Then you give them the show and that show builds a rapport between the host and the viewer, which is basically a wink. David Foster Wallace talks about this in this beautiful essay, E Onibus Plurum, where he talks about irony, how TV has created a vapid, empty irony. And so the host looks at the viewer and says, "You're smart because you know these people are idiots, both on the right and on the left, they do the same thing. Can you believe these idiots? You're not like them, are you? So then there's this kind of rapport. It's a linguistic abuse, right? It's an abusive relationship. The ads tell you, "You're horrible, you're not enough, you'll never make it unless you buy this object."

• 50:55Speaker 01

  And then the TV says, "Come on, you're smarter than them." It's so intoxicating. And it functions on, you know, the irony and also cynicism. To be cynical, to not believe is the most powerful position because it does mean you're duped. The worst thing, the greatest fear, I think, for an American, particularly an American intellectual, is to be an idiot, to be fooled.

• 51:22Sam Fragoso?

  Or to be sincere.

• 51:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. Because sincere means that you bought in. And only an idiot goes all in because they haven't thought clearly about it.

• 51:30Sam Fragoso?

  Only an idiot would name their show Talk Easy.

• 51:35Speaker 01

  So beautifully sincere. You went all in, clearly.

• 51:38Sam Fragoso?

  Yes, and we're nine years all in.

• 51:41Speaker 01

  Look at that.

• 51:41Sam Fragoso?

  This is what's left of me.

• 51:43Speaker 01

  But I'll say this, I'll say this. I think we are embarrassed of sincerity when it's in the room, but we actually hunger for it.

• 51:55Sam Fragoso?

  When we return, the final act of my conversation with Ocean Bong.

• 52:25Sam Fragoso?

  So I want to sincerely ask you, in thinking about where your writing began and your Buddhist practices, my understanding is that we would have to go back to the summer 2003, when you're working at a tobacco farm.

• 52:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:45Sam Fragoso?

  And it is in that summer that you find both Buddhism and a rhyme and reason for writing. Is that right?

• 52:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:54Sam Fragoso?

  What happens?

• 52:56Speaker 01

  Well, I talked about this. I unexpectedly talked about this. This, that moment where, as a very angry teenager of wanting to shoot somebody. And I haven't really processed this yet. You know, the only person I ever told was my close friends and my therapist. And when I said that, I got these beautiful letters. And one of them was from a public defender advocacy group, this woman. And she really, really helped me reframe that scene.

• 53:39Sam Fragoso?

  Now, do you want me to explain the scene? Or would that help you?

• 53:43Speaker 01

  Well, you know, it was, somebody stole my bike. And then I went to my friend's window and asked for a gun. And it sounds insane, you know?

• 53:58Sam Fragoso?

  Can I pause here on this? I don't think that sounds insane.

• 54:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:04Sam Fragoso?

  Well, I don't think that sounds insane. In fact, if if I brought my father in here, who who's, you know, our family had come from Mexico and we grew up, you know, he grew up in Chicago. I can give you three other stories like that.

• 54:20Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 54:21Sam Fragoso?

  Where someone stole the only thing they had.

• 54:24Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 54:24Sam Fragoso?

  The thing they had saved money up for. And I will tell you that those stories would not end, did not end as peacefully as yours did.

• 54:37Speaker 01

  Thank you for saying that. I think that's what the public defender said.

• 54:40Sam Fragoso?

  So the local drug dealer stole your bike?

• 54:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:42Sam Fragoso?

  And you went to your friend?

• 54:43Speaker 01

  And it was like a stealing is all strange because it was more like he assumed that what you possessed was his. When he needed to do a run, he would just grab a kid's bike, use it and then just drop it. And sometimes you get it back, sometimes you don't. Sometimes a friend would ride it back or someone say, hey, your bike's in the woods. But for me, it was going to stop me from getting my bonus. I was working at this tobacco farm. If you work there every day, at the end of the season, you get a thousand dollars, which was life changing, life changing for me. And I knew I'm not gonna, I'm gonna lose it. I'm not gonna get it back. It's like six in the evening. I'm not gonna, it's done. And thank you so much for saying that.

• 55:28Speaker 01

  You know, I think I was editing myself because I've been used to editing myself for the upper middle class space. Who would say, that's crazy? That's insane, right? Because when the public defender wrote to me, she said, you know, thank you so much for saying that because that's exactly, people think it's about gang bangers. People think these tragedies happen when people put on black gloves and go out and execute people. No, it's somebody stepping on someone's shoe. It's somebody saying something someone thought somebody said. It's somebody flicking someone's hat off their head.

• 56:02Sam Fragoso?

  It's a teenager working on a tobacco farm for two months straight, working every day towards a bonus.

• 56:09Speaker 01

  It's a powder kick.

• 56:12Speaker 01

  And I was so ashamed of that, that I never allowed myself to see.

• 56:22Speaker 01

  To see myself with compassion, even now, I'm like, I feel so weird about saying that, but I know it's true.

• 56:31Sam Fragoso?

  Why do you feel weird about that?

• 56:33Speaker 01

  Because it wasn't up to me that it didn't happen.

• 56:37Sam Fragoso?

  Who was it up to?

• 56:38Speaker 01

  My friend. My friend, Joe. I had the vision in my head. I made the decision. I I I have to be honest with myself. I wake up every day saying, I made the decision to

• 56:52Speaker 01

  potentially, you know, I mean, in my head, I was like, I'm gonna grab grab the nine millimeter. Shoot him. It was clear in that fit of rage of having my bike stolen, because I knew that the the money would be gone. And he was the one that stopped. It was not mine.

• 57:14Speaker 01

  And that's really strange to think about. But that email I got was so beautiful because she's like, people need to know this, that it's it's it's the powder keg of poverty, systemic racism, lack of opportunity and the stress. And I didn't allow myself to see that. I just thought, thank God for Joe. I'm here. I'm just gonna white knuckle it and not look back. But what you said about your family's history and what the public defender wrote to me, it was like a a weight lifted because I'm like, yes, I did feel that. I did feel I saw that. I saw luckily, I didn't see anything that tragic, but I seen like that trigger.

• 58:00Speaker 01

  I've seen people fight knives come out from those triggers. And I think there's a lot of um trepidation about how much of that is legible to people outside of those communities. You know, in in spaces like academia or literary festivals where it's like, you know, somebody's you're surrounded by like a bunch of grandmas in Nantucket or something. And I'm just like, do like, do I do they even do I even do I can I even begin to explain this, you know, and I I always just assume that I can. So thank you for saying that.

• 58:34Sam Fragoso?

  You said from that, writing became a medium for me to try to understand what goodness is. That that moment was actually the real answer to. Why and how you became a writer?

• 58:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:46Sam Fragoso?

  Do you believe that to be true?

• 58:48Speaker 01

  A hundred percent, a hundred percent. Well, that was the trigger, but I think I was in a bad place already. I've already seen just this, I'm like, there's no way out. You know, it's weird to be fifteen, but I think maybe also it is makes sense because you're angsty. And you, you, you, you get to ask the absurd questions that I think adulthood often curbs. And I wanted to be a monk. That was my first ambition. I said, my mother was listening to Tit Nut Hun. I said, what is that? I looked at it and said, oh, there's a plum village. It's a place. I can do this.

• 59:27Speaker 01

  And it was my high school counselor who told me you, you can't be, you can be a monk, but if you're going to go to college, just get an actual degree and you could be a monk later. And it was in community college that I realized the sentence was what I was after, because it was a conductor of energy. It would be like a little shovel. The sentence is my shovel to dig myself out of this and understand what this was. But at the time, that incident with, with Big Joe, I was like in buried, I was kind of buried in quicksand. And the sentence became a, a method.

• 1:00:05Sam Fragoso?

  You emerge out of that in time. And, and you mentioned that childlike wonder. It reminds me of a poem from Time is Mother.

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:15Sam Fragoso?

  With your cousin, I think it's cousin Sarah.

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:19Sam Fragoso?

  That I thought maybe you want to read.

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  Thank you. Oh, this is so, so my cousin is so, she gives me so much hope. She's so smart. I think she's going to be like a senator one day. She's just, but I was trying to get her to write as a good older cousin. I'm more like an uncle. We are cousins, but I like, I function as an uncle. And because she's so smart, she's like, well, why should we write when we're just forcing ants to cross a white desert?

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  And I was like, uh, for someone full of words, I was like, all right, let's just get ice cream.

• 1:00:59Speaker 01

  But me being the person that, my best retorts come weeks later when I'm laying in beds at two in the morning. So this poem was my response to her years later.

• 1:01:09Sam Fragoso?

  Okay.

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  When she gave me this absolute touche. This is the epigraph of Dear Sarah. What's the point of writing if you're just gonna force a bunch of ants to cross a white desert? Cousin Sarah, age seven. This is my response to her. And if you follow these ants, they'll lead you back to stone tablets. In older desert where black bones once buried are now words where I waved to you at two thirty-four a.m. They survive the blast by becoming shrapnel embedded in my brain, which is called learning. But maybe I shouldn't talk like this. Maybe I should start over, Sarah. I messed up.

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  I'm trying to stay clean, but my hands are monsters who believe in magic, Sarah. The throat is also an inkwell. Black oil wrung through your father's fingers after a day beneath the Buick. Say, heartbreak and nothing will shatter. Say, Stonehenge and watch the elephant sleep like boulders blurred in Serengeti rain. It doesn't have to make sense to be real. Your aunt Rose, gone two years now, like a trick they forgot to finish. And the air holds your voice as it holds its own vanishing. Maybe you are the true soldier ant hoarder of what's so massive.

• 1:02:38Speaker 01

  It could crush you into a twitching comma. Sarah, your name sharpens daily against the marble of your mother's teeth. There are sparks in every calling and called. We press our faces to the womb till we're jokes on our way to cracking up. And maybe you're right, little ant queen. With your shoes the shade of dirty paper, white desert, your pink and blue pens untouched. After all, who can stare at so many ruins and call it reading? This family of ants fossilized on the page. You slam the book shut. Look out at the leafless trees doused in red April rain,

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  where none of us are children long enough to love it.

• 1:03:28Sam Fragoso?

  Has she read that?

• 1:03:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, she didn't tell me what she thinks. She's very coy. Yeah.

• 1:03:35Sam Fragoso?

  Maybe she's crafting her response.

• 1:03:37Speaker 01

  I think.

• 1:03:38Sam Fragoso?

  You know, part of the reason you wrote The Emperor of Gladness is because, quote, "History is filled with people who don't get out. But history books are filled with people who overthrow, start revolutions and move from rags to riches. Books often note the exceptional mythological occurrences. But for the majority of people, it's not about changing anything, but making the best they can with what they have. And that is so thick in the air at a fast food restaurant."

• 1:04:11Sam Fragoso?

  I read that and I wonder how you're squaring that away with the fact that you are very much one of those people in history that did get out.

• 1:04:24Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:04:25Sam Fragoso?

  That you are, by all accounts, an exceptional mythological occurrence.

• 1:04:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:32Sam Fragoso?

  How do you hold those two realities?

• 1:04:35Speaker 01

  Well, on one hand, I reject that I'm exceptional.

• 1:04:39Sam Fragoso?

  Okay.

• 1:04:40Speaker 01

  In the sense that, you know, if you think about it, I mostly write and read books and teach. It's mostly very normal. But it's exceptional to the art world, the literary world, because it's very titillating, that rags to riches. But my members in my family have much more interesting lives. Ever talk to a cab driver, dishwasher? I mean, it's like a Marquez novel. And so I think what happens often in media is that I...

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  I'm seen as exceptional because I'm exceptional at the podium. Right? It's like, oh, there are stories like mine, but through a lot of error, mistakes, hard work, a lot of generosity by folks, this voice or this context has arrived in the publishing world. But in fact, the context of my life is very common. Geopolitical violence, if you go back to the Iliad, Gilgamesh, our species is a species of war and stories come out of that. But it is mythological to the upper middle class where most publishing dominates. So we think of like a normal story.

• 1:05:58Speaker 01

  We think of John Cheever, Updike, Connecticut writers, and it's always about affairs and sleepy towns and wonderful works. I love them as much as anyone else. But most of the human history is not that story, but it's been normalized because so many writers that come from my history don't make it here. So the exception is the kind of occurrence, but I don't, I truly don't believe the exception is me in myself. It's just that I washed ashore to this setting. But I think your question is still valid in how I feel about that, right?

• 1:06:41Speaker 01

  Because I'm exceptional in this frame, right? Because

• 1:06:47Sam Fragoso?

  But you're also, you're exceptional enough to support nine family members.

• 1:06:51Speaker 01

  Well, that's what I'm getting at. You know, I now have a salary that I never imagined. I have an upper middle class salary, but I don't have the upper middle class gaze. And that's important. That's something I actively have to resist.

• 1:07:07Sam Fragoso?

  And work against.

• 1:07:08Speaker 01

  And work against because I've seen folks who do co-opt that gaze very willingly, very happily, as a kind of triumph. It's like they really believe in it. And I think for me, the ethos is one that I'm very skeptical of, right? Because I try to resist co-opting that gaze.

• 1:07:29Sam Fragoso?

  So some part of you is always trying to remain. As the writer who posted up at the Popeyes on 14th Street in Manhattan.

• 1:07:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:39Sam Fragoso?

  The one who would go to the food court in the New World Mall in Flushing. I suspect you're not writing in those places anymore.

• 1:07:49Speaker 01

  No, um, you know, that I have other, I mean, I went there because I was left alone. But now there's, I have an apartment. I didn't have an apartment. I was living with, um, you know, a dementia patient. But I think for me, it's, it's my family. You know, you, you can have a lot of success, but if you don't have generational wealth, like we don't, I don't have enough success to get to retire my aunt. She still works at FedEx.

• 1:08:15Sam Fragoso?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:08:15Speaker 01

  My brother works at Dick's Sporting Goods. My stepdad is still at Standard Bank. So I don't have a choice. Like, a few years ago, I was offered to teach at Stanford. Sounds like a dream, right? Stanford said, come on, you want to come? Let's talk. And right away, I said, can't. I would love to, but there's no way I can leave my family.

• 1:08:39Speaker 01

  That would cut everything off. And so in that sense, I don't, it's not, it's not, um, I resist that gaze, but it's also, there's forces pulling me away from that gaze too. Where I'm like, oh, I, I can never leave them until they're gone or I'm gone. So the context is always grounded in their needs. And also like, they don't have any interest in what I do in a very beautiful way. Why should they? Right? Just because The New Yorker or Time Magazine says what I do is important. Why should they? It's never a part of their life.

• 1:09:15Sam Fragoso?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:09:16Speaker 01

  And so it's very humbling. I, I, because a lot of writers don't have that. A lot of writers, they bring their persona home or their persona is just so attached to them.

• 1:09:27Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  That their family can't see anything else but, right? And my family can't see this. They're proud. They know that there is some sort of significance.

• 1:09:38Sam Fragoso?

  Oh, there's nothing more humbling than going back home to a family gathering.

• 1:09:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:43Sam Fragoso?

  And then I, they could care less.

• 1:09:45Speaker 01

  Less.

• 1:09:46Sam Fragoso?

  And no matter what I do, there's some folks I know, and I can see who they are in my head. It just doesn't matter. It has no bearing.

• 1:09:55Speaker 01

  No bearing.

• 1:09:56Sam Fragoso?

  It's not that they're not proud. It's not that they're not supportive. It's just not that important. And it is a humbling.

• 1:10:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:04Sam Fragoso?

  It's a humbling experience.

• 1:10:05Speaker 01

  None of my cousins have read my work. My brother is dyslexic, can't read my work. My aunt can't, no, then I'm like, thank God, you don't need to.

• 1:10:13Sam Fragoso?

  You've been saying in the press that you have eight books that you want to write.

• 1:10:18Speaker 01

  I hope.

• 1:10:19Sam Fragoso?

  You've written four.

• 1:10:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:20Sam Fragoso?

  You have four more.

• 1:10:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:22Sam Fragoso?

  Now, this strikes me as a very, like, male impulse. Only men talk about like how many movies they're gonna make.

• 1:10:31Speaker 01

  Right, I didn't, yeah, I didn't know.

• 1:10:32Sam Fragoso?

  This is something Quentin Tarantino has done.

• 1:10:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:10:35Sam Fragoso?

  Or men announce like when they're gonna retire.

• 1:10:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:10:37Sam Fragoso?

  I've never heard a woman talk about, okay, I have this many books and this many movies.

• 1:10:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:43Sam Fragoso?

  And I'm not criticizing you, I'm more, I'm genuinely curious. Why eight? And, and, and why do you, why do you want to put a number on that or a finite amount?

• 1:10:54Speaker 01

  Well, when I was a young writer, I think twenty-one or twenty-two, I came home one day and I heard on the NPR, my favorite, my hero, Annie Dillard. And it was a really monumental interview because she rarely gives them. And then she says to the interviewer, I'm here to announce my retirement. And right away, the interview, there was an un-ease in the air where the interviewer was like, okay, are you ill? She said, why? What's wrong with you? She said, nothing. I approached, I have all my faculties. I approached the desk and I realized that everything I said, I've already said. And I've satisfied my desire as a writer.

• 1:11:38Speaker 01

  And I want to use the rest of my life to live. I'm not marked by this identity. And it just altered. I haven't written a single book by then. But I thought, gosh, isn't that because by then I was a hardcore Buddhist already. I said, that's it. What if the idea is not to make a body of work? That the body of work, the books, the archive, is the byproduct of what you get when you make the work, which is a more capacious vision. And that became clearer when I wrote my first two books. I was talking to Anne Patchett about this. And she said the same. She said, you know, every book you have a different.

• 1:12:23Speaker 01

  It's like something sharpens. Right? It's like you're something has altered in you, your capacity to look, to be an artist. And I thought, yeah, that's right. After those first books, a tree doesn't look the same anymore. There's more to it. People, language. Something has altered in me. I realized that, oh, the book is the practice. The book is the laboratory. It's the training ground for a more capacious vision. So what if I could use the books? Because you do have to earnestly, sincerely write them to sharpen the vision.

• 1:13:07Speaker 01

  And that's the goal. And the book will be the byproduct, reversing that. To me, it's like, what if one day, hopefully after eight books, if I make it that long, what if one day I could arrive at the end of that and look at the world with such clarity without turning it into a product? So to me, it's less of a male libidinal impulse and more of a Buddhist practice of emptiness.

• 1:13:39Sam Fragoso?

  But do you think it's also informed by? What your mother said to you at the end of her life?

• 1:13:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:48Sam Fragoso?

  She said, I want to be a professor like you in the next life. She also said, you have to go and help people.

• 1:13:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:57Sam Fragoso?

  She said, now that you know what this is like, you have to go out and help people. And in that capacious vision that you're talking about, away from the page.

• 1:14:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:07Sam Fragoso?

  Do you see her in that?

• 1:14:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, 100% because it's all one work to me. The book, the book at its best is porous. The covers are porous, the ideas should leach through. And I, I balk at this sort of, this privileged sense that I'll make art for art's sake. You know, and I think for me, I'm always, which is fair. I'm not against it, but I'm not interested in it. I'm interested in how does something function in the world?

• 1:14:39Sam Fragoso?

  How do you think about helping?

• 1:14:41Speaker 01

  The most evident one is probably the only one that is most perennial is the classroom. You know, because you can sit here and have a abstract thought about it. And it gets more and more murky the more you think about it. But you realize that you got to do a lot of help when you have 15 students

• 1:15:01Speaker 01

  who want so much and who are also so, they're so hopeful. You, you sit there and you're like, gosh, the world is in, in the shape it is. And you have 15 people in their twenties who have this insurmountable faith in breaking the line after five or six words and using a form that fractures itself towards completion. Even on my worst days, I show up to that and I'm like, okay, I, I'm restored. Your faith in this restores me because I'm doing this for 15 years. You can get jaded. And I talked to my colleagues too, you know, and, and they say the same thing.

• 1:15:43Speaker 01

  It's like, no matter how, how long you've been doing it, the students refresh every year. And they have that and they actually, the concept is often me giving things to them. But they give me just as much. And I don't even mean that in like a, you know, glib way. It's like, I've been, there, there are days where I'm so depressed and I show up to class and I work on their poems. And then it's just progress. That's all it is. It's not like we do anything revolutionary. It's not like we're like, not, no, no drastic growth happens in one class. But it's just like, you can just, everyone is seeing the poem clicking into place. And they're like, wow, within 20 minutes, we've done, this poem has taken on a different shape.

• 1:16:27Speaker 01

  That joy, the greatest cure for depression is teaching. The greatest inducer of it is also teaching. That's just another side of it.

• 1:16:37Sam Fragoso?

  You know, my last question, like anyone at the beginning of a craft, classmates and teachers recommend books to each other. But there was one that you started reading early on called Writing Fiction, A Guide to Narrative Craft, which you said put you into a week's long depression.

• 1:16:59Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. I remember that.

• 1:17:01Sam Fragoso?

  And I wonder why it depressed you so? And how you went about imagining another path forward?

• 1:17:11Speaker 01

  Wow, no one's ever talked, no one's ever asked about that. Thank you. I was so, well, okay, I was reading, I was trying to, I was learning how to write fiction. So I picked up that book. It was, it happened to be at NYU when I was a student. And I was, it was just like in the, in the basement. I said, all right, that's, this looks helpful.

• 1:17:33Sam Fragoso?

  This is really full circle then.

• 1:17:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it was, it was, it was, it was a textbook. And the more I read, like, the more angry I got. Like, I really get angry. But I just felt like, cause you know why? I think we talked about this earlier, where I think like, there's more dogma in, in 21st century novel terms than there are in poetry. The, the novel, for the most part, is paragraphs. But the poem.

• 1:18:06Speaker 01

  It's so, already in our species, the poem has already upended itself on its own terms. Right? George Oppen's field poems, Charles Olson, Claudia Rankine's work, right? Because Rankine's is interesting, because when people ask her, what is it? She said, well, I'm a poet, so it's a poem. It's an incredible kind of refutation of the preciousness of genre, the rigidity of genre, right? One of probably the greatest answers to hybridity. And so, but I, but the rigidity of what a novel is, is often very conservative. And it was saying things like, you know, your characters need to change.

• 1:18:46Speaker 01

  And at one point, I stopped reading when I got to this page where they showed me a visual image of what a good story should be, and it was an inverted checkmark. And then it went up, like this phallic, like, it was just like a, an erection. And why I was so angry was that, I was like, inside, I knew there had to be another way, but I didn't know that way.

• 1:19:08Sam Fragoso?

  You didn't know the way of the bottom.

• 1:19:09Speaker 01

  I didn't know, well, I probably knew more than I thought I did. But I, I, I think you're right. I didn't know that I could apply it as a literary ethos. And I think ultimately, I'm interested not in the phallic eruption, but more so in the literary edging, which is what poetry often is, right? It's like you just enough, and then you turn the page, it starts over.

• 1:19:40Sam Fragoso?

  Have we reached the climax of this conversation?

• 1:19:44Speaker 01

  We suppose so.

• 1:19:45Sam Fragoso?

  It's supposed to be the dismount right here, actually.

• 1:19:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I think that's right. I think I was so, but then it made me a better teacher. Because I was like, oh, my God, this is what we're giving them. And I was so fortunate, maybe for better, for worse, it's hard to say, that I never took in a fiction workshop. Because I was also the kind of student that was very easily intimidated. It takes me like years to work against my teacher's ideas. And if I had, if I would entered a fiction workshop, I think I would have just folded and get crushed, right? But I never did, I was always in the poetry. And everything was open and weird. It's like, the poets never say no to each other.

• 1:20:29Speaker 01

  Whereas the fiction writers tend to be like, well, should we do that?

• 1:20:35Speaker 01

  Do we do that? Can it be done there? They're a little more like, you know, they're also very open. You know, I gotta give credit to my students, but the poets are, it's just like, yes, first, and let's see.

• 1:20:48Sam Fragoso?

  You said, once all students eventually arrive at this cliff, where they realize what they've been dreaming to make doesn't exist in the models placed before them.

• 1:20:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's it. And that's when true innovation happens because it's terrifying. Every step that feels right to you, everyone says is wrong. And there's one thing that I am really proud of in my very short career. And if it goes well, I'm halfway through it. I always wrote what I wanted. And I think it's really important to say that as an Asian American writer. I wrote in the style that I wanted. I wrote in a style that's not exactly trendy.

• 1:21:36Speaker 01

  You know, long sentences, deep metaphors, more like a 19th century style than a 20th century. And that's often frowned upon as unrestrained, overwritten. But to me, it's more like literary drag, where drag is often offensive to heteronormative gaze because it's too much. How dare it have that many sequences? How dare the lashes be that long? So it leans towards what literary critic Michael Bakhtin calls the grotesque. So I think why some critics balk at my style

• 1:22:19Speaker 01

  is that it's too grotesque in the 21st century. In the same way, drag is, it's too much. And too much is cheap. You know, my favorite quote by Dolly Parton, she says, "It takes a lot of money to look this cheap."

• 1:22:36Speaker 01

  And I think my model, literary model, might be drag queens and Dolly Parton. But on a more like, serious note, like I think literary criticism or art criticism, you notice that like, there's these kind of dogmatic values about clean lines, minimalism, restraint, control, rigor. And my sense of that is that these are the privileges of the wealthy. When you have enough space, because I'm now been, you know, I do fundraisers and I've been invited to places. You enter like a few mansions in my time. And then you're like, oh, that's the major distinction of the wealthy is that

• 1:23:22Speaker 01

  the way they live denies the corporeal reality of the body. There's no vitamin containers on the counters. There are servants who give little hors d'oeuvres. You don't even see the kitchen. There's an entertaining room. There's no brooms. There's no detritus of the corporeal. The bathroom is hidden deep in a hallway. And so, but that aligns with aesthetic values. Like a lot of what tracks and prevails in our culture is elitist aesthetic values. And I think the anxiety, the obsession with minimalism and restraint is that the anxiety is that it's aspirational.

• 1:24:06Speaker 01

  It's showing an aesthetic control that society cannot replicate. You can't have income equality. You can't have social justice. So why not have it in interior design? Where it looks, everything is balanced, palatable. And so there's a pleasing effect to that style. That I'm, I haven't thought through it all yet. It's a new thought for me. Because my work is mostly informed by the communities I lived in. And you know, like if you go, my mother would serve a black and brown community at the nail salon. And you look at the nails, these women are so proud and sincere and earnest about their beauty.

• 1:24:48Speaker 01

  The nails would be extravagant, the church outfits, the hats, overblown sequins, right? It's about showing with pride what you can support for yourself and your family and your communities. And that is my model for the sentence. I don't see that as too much. I see that as power, extravagance, and possibility.

• 1:25:14Sam Fragoso?

  Well, I so appreciate you walking towards the thing that terrifies you day after day, whether it's at the Popeyes on 14th, or the food court in Flushing, or in the apartment you now have. Thank you for everything and thank you for the time.

• 1:25:32Speaker 01

  Thank you so much, Sam. And congrats on this beautiful podcast, shooting, shooting higher and higher. We're all rooting for you.

• 1:25:40Sam Fragoso?

  Who's "we"?

• 1:25:41Speaker 01

  I'd like to speak on behalf of all interested, sincere, earnest artists amongst us, which I think there are many, and they'll come out of the woodwork soon enough.

• 1:25:55Sam Fragoso?

  You know what? I'll take your word for it. Ocean Von, thank you, sir.

• 1:25:59Speaker 01

  Thank you, Sam.

• 1:26:51Sam Fragoso?

  And that's our show. If you enjoyed today's episode with Ocean and want to continue hearing conversations like this one, the best thing you can do, and it's simple, share the program on social media. If you want to go above and beyond, you can also give us five stars on Spotify, review the show on Apple. All of this really does help us make Talk Easy every week. I want to give a special thanks to Julie Keon at Penguin Press, Peter Binkowski, Mickey Collins, and of course, our guest today, Ocean Baum. His new novel, The Emperor of Gladness, is now available wherever you do your reading. To learn more about him and

• 1:27:31Sam Fragoso?

  his work, visit our website at talkeasypod.com. For more episodes with other great writers, I'd recommend Jhumpa Lahiri, George Saunders, and Elizabeth Gilbert. To hear those and more Lemonada podcasts, listen on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen. You can also subscribe to Lemonada Premium for bonus content. Just hit the subscribe button on Apple or head to lemonadapremium.com. If you want to watch this show on YouTube, we don't put every episode out on video, but we're putting more and more of them out. If you like to watch us, you can visit YouTube, type in Talk Easy. We've also included a link to our new page in the description of this episode. As always, you can follow

• 1:28:12Sam Fragoso?

  us at Talk Easy Pod. If you want to buy one of our mugs that come in cream or navy, go to talkeasypod.com/shop. Talk Easy, as always, is produced by Caroline Reebok. Our executive producer is Janix Bravo. Today's talk was edited by Jason Goudas and Lindsay Ellis and mixed by Andrew Vastola. It was recorded at Aura House in Los Angeles and engineered by Adrian Mayweather. Our music is by Dylan Peck. Our illustrations, Krish Shanley. Photographs today come from Sarah Schneider. Research assistance comes from Ben Eisen. This episode was made in partnership with the good people at Lemonada Media, and I'm Sam Fragoso. Thank you again for listening to Talk Easy. I'll see you back here next Sunday with Japanese Breakfast. Until then, stay safe, and so long.

• 1:29:16Speaker 03

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  I mean, how many rats would you guess were back there?

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  There were 32,000 pounds of them.

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  32,000 pounds of frozen dead rats.

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  Find out what it's like to be a long haul trucker, a couples therapist, or an FBI agent, all on the podcast What It's Like to Be.

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