On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, the searing debut novel by 30-year-old Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong, unfolds in lightning flashes of language and memory. Inspired by his own life, the novel follows Little Dog, who came to America as a child in 1990, and is now a 20-something writer grappling with the fraught relationships of his past—with his illiterate mother, who scrapes by at a nail salon; his adopted country, with its legacy of the war in Vietnam; and a rebellious teenager named Trevor, whom he collides with one summer while working on a tobacco farm in Hartford, Connecticut. I spoke with Vuong by phone about exploring American identity and masculinity from new points of view.

Vanity Fair: In your acknowledgments you mention that you began writing the book during a blackout in Italy, and it certainly has the feeling of an exorcism. Why did you decide to structure the book around Little Dog’s unsent letter to his mother?

Ocean Vuong: I wanted to write a book that allowed for tangents and detours, but we’re told in writing workshops that you need a strong plot and conflicts. Since I’m teaching at UMass, I made a pilgrimage to Herman Melville’s house, not far from here, and I reread Moby Dick. I still think it holds up as an American masterpiece because here’s a writer who decided not to compromise anything. It’s a thriller, a theological exploration, and a meditation on the politics of whiteness—in relation to the whale and whiteness in America.

I thought, What would happen if an Asian American writer decided not to compromise? So the letter was the perfect medium because the plot was the letter itself. When I got a writing residency in Italy, I brought my laptop and was all ready to start. Four days into it there were power cuts. And with no hope of anyone coming to help soon, I thought, I better get to work. I took out my notebook and started to write by hand. And something miraculous happened: When you write by hand, you have to sit with the sentence longer than you do with a computer, so I found myself seeing more of the world that I was writing about.

You knew you wanted to focus on the complicated, at times abusive, dynamic between Little Dog and his mother?

Yes, it was informed a lot by Roland Barthes—a queer literary theorist—and his writing about his mother, about negotiating love and distance with a mother. It was also important to me to have a novel where one yellow body speaks to another yellow body, so that for anyone to read it they had to eavesdrop on that central dialogue.

Little Dog’s mother and grandmother are both haunted by their experiences during the Vietnam War. But the men in the book seem to be even more defined by violence.

I wanted to write a book that was centered around these women, but in doing so throw into relief the men who create and participate in war. Often it’s the women who clean up, psychologically, emotionally, physically. Particularly in the American context, there are certain rules for men and to lose your manhood is to lose your sense of self. In a way it’s inevitable that we arrive at toxic masculinity when so much of masculinity has stripped the humanness from the men and boys who grow up in this country.

Meanwhile, Trevor, despite his explosive, “knuckled American rage,” is very tender with Little Dog—almost merciful in one powerful scene.

I think that moment between the two of them is so pivotal for me because when I set out to write this novel, I didn’t want to have any victims or villains. And what you see in Trevor is this 15-year-old at a fork in the road, where he has to make these decisions about how he’s going to move forward in his body and whether he can turn his position of privilege and power into one of care. And he does.