Nora Ellis: You came to fiction from poetry. What did the novel demand that the poems didn't?
Ocean Vuong: Time. A poem can stand in a single moment and hold it up to the light. A novel has to survive Tuesday — it has to move people through years, through boredom, through a mother going to work. I had to learn how to write a scene where nothing beautiful happens and it still matters.
Nora Ellis: The book is a letter to a mother who can't read it. Why that frame?
Ocean Vuong: Because it's honest about the gap. My mother worked in a nail salon and couldn't read English, so any book I wrote was already addressed to someone it couldn't reach. Once I admitted that, the form made itself: you write towards the person anyway. That impossibility is the engine, not the obstacle.
Nora Ellis: You've said you compose very slowly — sometimes a few words in a morning.
Ocean Vuong: I do. I write on a laptop but I lay the sentence out like a line of poetry, and I won't leave it until the sound is right. It's inefficient and I've stopped apologising for it. The pace is the price of the music.
Nora Ellis: What is writing for?
Ocean Vuong: To make a place where the people I come from are permanent. I grew up around bodies that the country treated as temporary — refugees, factory workers, my grandmother. A book is one of the few structures we're allowed to build with nothing but language, and it lasts longer than a lease.
Nora Ellis: One thing to a young writer?
Ocean Vuong: Read your work aloud to someone who loves you. You'll hear every false note in about ninety seconds.