Beth Nguyen, OWNER OF A LONELY HEART: A Memoir
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[1:03]Beth Noguyin is the author of Owner of a Lonely Heart, a memoir.
[1:07]Beth is the author of three previous books, the memoir Stealing Buddha's Dinner and the
[1:11]novels Short Girls and Pioneer Girl.
[1:14]Her awards and honors include an American Book Award and a Penn Gerard Award from the Penn
[1:18]America Center.
[1:20]Her work has also appeared in numerous anthologies and publications, including The New Yorker,
[1:24]The Paris Review, The New York Times, and Best American Essays.
[1:28]She teaches creative writing at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
[1:31]Welcome, Beth.
[1:32]Thank you so much for coming on momstone of time to read books to discuss owner of a
[1:36]Lonely Heart.
[1:37]Thank you.
[1:38]Thank you so much for having me here.
[1:40]Okay.
[1:41]Can you please tell listeners what this book is about?
[1:44]And that was telling you I read it several weeks ago.
[1:46]I couldn't actually wait to dive in.
[1:48]I've been so excited about it.
[1:49]So anyway, tell everybody all about the book and what made you even write a memoir?
[1:54]This book is about a realization I had that I realized that over the course of my adult
[2:00]life, I had spent less than 24 hours with my mother.
[2:04]And that realization made me think about what it meant to have a relationship with my
[2:12]mother.
[2:13]I didn't know her when I was growing up, but I only met her when I was 19 and I decided
[2:19]that I needed to trace the hours that I had spent with her.
[2:23]And all this happened because my family, we were refugees from Vietnam.
[2:29]And when most of us came to the United States after the end of the war on Vietnam, my mother
[2:36]did not.
[2:37]She stayed in Vietnam.
[2:38]And so there was this huge separation.
[2:41]And so I grew up, my sister and I grew up not knowing her, not knowing anything about
[2:46]her.
[2:47]And she was this huge silence.
[2:49]And it wasn't until we met her when we were grown up.
[2:52]And we started talking to each other about it that, you know, I realized that this book
[2:58]had to be a memoir and it had to be a way of looking back on the past in order to try
[3:03]to understand who my mother was, you know, what my own relationship with her was all
[3:09]about.
[3:10]And what's my own relationship with being a mother too?
[3:14]Is that in the book that you had never really felt like a refugee until you became a mother?
[3:19]Right.
[3:20]Yeah.
[3:21]That was also a weird realization.
[3:23]I had a lot of realizations while trying to write this book, which did a lot of time to
[3:28]write.
[3:29]Yeah.
[3:30]I, when I was growing up, it's probably because I grew up in the 1980s.
[3:34]It was a very different time when people just did not talk about refugees in the same way
[3:40]we talked about them now exactly.
[3:42]And so I felt a great deal of shame about being a refugee and I tried not to talk about it.
[3:48]I tried to sort of avoid that sense of identity.
[3:51]But when I had children, I realized that I slowly realized that, you know, the identity
[3:56]you have is just, it shifts all the time.
[3:59]And so my concept of motherhood was so abstract until I became a mother and then it made
[4:04]me think about mothers in general and my stepmother and my grandmother and all the mothers
[4:10]that I've known in various ways and various capacities.
[4:13]And that maybe think about concepts of refugee mess.
[4:17]What it means to be a refugee, that status was very connected to me in terms of what it
[4:22]means to be a mother and to just sort of inhabit a role for myself.
[4:27]That is, you know, that can be somehow separated from what everyone else thinks it looks
[4:33]like or should be.
[4:34]Well, in the book you detailed how your family got to the United States to begin with, what
[4:39]that must have been like, even for your dad and you put yourself sort of in the shoes
[4:43]of everybody before you so that we as the reader kind of understood what that transition
[4:48]was like and all of that and how you didn't even question that your mom wasn't there
[4:54]until you it was later in life.
[4:56]It's just like, okay, so she stayed back and this is what happened.
[4:59]When you first reunited with your mom and I know you identify your stepmom as your mom,
[5:06]you called her like biological mother or some other word that I'm forgetting.
[5:09]Tell me what it was like, and I know you wrote about it, but seeing her again and and
[5:14]realizing like this woman, like what had her life been like and just all of that stuff.
[5:19]Yes, the story of how my family got here is so dramatic and strange, it's I am in all of
[5:26]it actually because I didn't experience it myself because I was a baby.
[5:31]But the fact that we literally fled a country and know where we were going to end up and
[5:36]were refugee camps and were resettled in Michigan where I grew up and I had a stepmom
[5:41]and I didn't meet my biological mother until I was 19 and she had come to the United States
[5:47]on her own as a refugee and she was a huge source of the unknown when I was growing up
[5:54]because nobody talked about her and we didn't talk about her because we didn't talk
[5:58]about difficult subjects back then, we didn't talk about the war, we didn't talk about sex,
[6:03]we didn't talk about anything that might be controversial or have make people have feelings.
[6:10]So when I finally met her, I was in college and it was not a dramatic story and that's
[6:17]something I write about in terms of how we have expectations for things like motherhood,
[6:23]unions and what we're supposed to feel like or what it's supposed to be like but when
[6:28]I met her it was just sort of ordinary and I kind of realized that I just I don't actually
[6:34]know this person like I know that we're related, I know that she gave birth to me, I know
[6:38]that she's my mother, I'm her daughter, what does that mean, what does that feel like?
[6:42]I had no, I had no road map for that and so writing kind of helped me figure out what
[6:48]it all meant.
[6:50]You had this one like very stirring moment where like you and your sister were like
[6:56]in bed together or like cuddling one night or something and like quietly saying like well do
[7:00]you ever think about her right wasn't there something that yeah you barely wanted to even go
[7:05]there but like in the quiet in the dark of night every so often you would think about it.
[7:11]Yeah when we were really little my sister is a couple years older than me, we would sometimes
[7:16]sleep in the same bed and every once in a while I'm very very rarely we would ask each other
[7:20]like you know do you think that she's alive you know to you what do you think she is but it was
[7:27]a whispered conversation. We knew even as children that we really shouldn't be talking about this
[7:33]and that the grown-ups around us had told us it was an off-limits subject.
[7:38]Wow I mean it is so interesting what you said even a minute ago about this meeting being ordinary
[7:43]and all of the pressure that we put on certain relationships and it doesn't always show up I mean
[7:50]this happens also when you have children right there is this notion that you will immediately fall
[7:55]in love with children and that we will be overcome with feeling just the way you should feel about
[8:00]your mother but it doesn't always happen like that for kids either right there are all these
[8:05]things we're supposed to feel as mothers and daughters and what if we don't in any of those realms.
[8:11]Exactly you know I was so not prepared for the amount of anxiety I was going to feel
[8:19]as a mother about every single thing and constantly thinking about mortality and just
[8:26]I know when people started talking about the concept of postpartum anxiety I was like okay I have
[8:30]16-year-old twins and this is like am I still postpartum you know I'm still
[8:36]oh it was a postpartum anxiety in this light but it's like never let go of my breath
[8:41]oh I guess it's permanent yeah I'm like my mother can't be walking around with me at age 46
[8:49]holding her breath I'll tell you that yeah anyway your family's journey here was unlikely and
[8:57]harrowing and and all of that and yet here you go living this like sort of ordinary life right
[9:03]regular life and transplanted in a way and and then you have to like make sense of it all now
[9:09]so when you decided to write this book tell me what that feeling was like and and even why
[9:14]why at this point in your life you decided to write this book you know having this story
[9:22]felt like a secret that wasn't a secret and I think in a way that that's what writing is like
[9:28]you writing is about secrets is about figuring out our secrets it's about dealing with the
[9:35]that which is concealed and bringing it forward and you really have to personally ask me
[9:40]ready to write all this stuff yeah it's maybe not great or healthy to to force it and
[9:47]or what you can't force it you know you have to emotionally ready and who knows when that happens
[9:51]I had written a memoir almost 15 years ago now it's still in Buddhist dinner that was about
[9:57]you know growing up in Michigan and my mom
[10:00]There was a little bit in it, but not really.
[10:02]She was a kind of an ancillary subject in that book.
[10:06]And it really just took me all these years
[10:09]to figure out how I was going to write about her
[10:11]and was ready to do it.
[10:13]And what was the narrative path forward?
[10:16]And that's it only happened when I had this understanding
[10:19]that I've spent so few hours with her in my life.
[10:23]And then I decided to, I had to narrate those hours.
[10:25]Like this is when I visited her and Boston.
[10:28]This is what I saw her next.
[10:29]And it was difficult.
[10:30]It was really hard to recognize my own,
[10:34]I guess, my own silence, my own culpability.
[10:37]And then just feeling a lot of sort of a sense of guilt
[10:42]and failure, which is something we feel all the time,
[10:47]I think is mothers.
[10:48]But that sense of like, oh, I just, I'm doing things wrong
[10:51]all the time, I'm not.
[10:53]I didn't maintain this relationship.
[10:55]I didn't say the right thing.
[10:56]I'm not being a good enough mother, daughter, refugee,
[11:01]anything.
[11:02]And I think writing was the only way that I've ever
[11:05]known how to make sense of those feelings.
[11:09]Tell me about your non-writing life and how you got here
[11:15]and what you do when you're not writing.
[11:16]And between your memoirs, essentially, and all of that.
[11:21]So in my non-writing life, I'm teaching writing.
[11:25]so far removed.
[11:28]Which I really love doing.
[11:30]I teach career writing at University of Wisconsin
[11:33]Madison, and I love it.
[11:36]And I've always loved talking about writing.
[11:38]I love reading other people's books.
[11:41]I love that whole engagement.
[11:43]It's a very different process from being a writer
[11:46]because you get to focus on other people's work.
[11:48]And that's so much more fun and doing a research
[11:50]and thinking about other people's lives.
[11:54]I love reading fiction, probably more than any other genre.
[11:57]And it's been my biggest influence.
[11:59]But yeah, the first time I was pretty much focused around
[12:04]books reading, teaching my children, and baking.
[12:10]I do a lot of baking as a therapeutic hobby.
[12:13]What do you like to bake?
[12:15]I like to bake as sort of the most elaborate thing
[12:17]I could think of.
[12:18]Oh, you got to get a attempt.
[12:20]Really fussy things.
[12:22]Layer cakes with a lot of decoration,
[12:25]tarts with, like, or pies with a elaborate kind of crust.
[12:29]Yeah, but the fussy art is like homemade gingerbread houses
[12:32]that I have to design and then make the gingerbread and everything.
[12:34]The fussy art is the more comforting it is for me.
[12:38]And I am not exactly sure why, but probably probably a trauma
[12:44]response.
[12:46]I have that same feeling with websites.
[12:49]I love the speaker around with websites, moving along.
[12:53]Building them.
[12:54]Now I want to just start making them for other people,
[12:56]even though my own website is terrible.
[12:58]I just go in and mess around with individual pages.
[13:02]And I don't know.
[13:03]There's the time kind of stops.
[13:06]And I just move things around and focus.
[13:08]And I'm totally in control of it.
[13:10]I think it's that type of thing.
[13:13]That's it.
[13:13]There's a lot of specific focus.
[13:16]Yeah.
[13:17]Anyway, my maladaptive thing.
[13:21]But Ms. Wisconsin is enormous.
[13:23]So are your class sizes huge or how does it work?
[13:25]Or do you have small seminars?
[13:27]Or what is the teaching like?
[13:28]Oh, the creative writing classes are small.
[13:31]And I'm most of the teach grad students,
[13:32]which is really except six grad students.
[13:35]I'm a face students a year.
[13:37]So we have a very small focus program.
[13:40]It's wonderful.
[13:42]I love my colleagues and I love the students.
[13:44]So it's been good.
[13:46]I didn't know that I was going to live in the Midwest again,
[13:47]because I was in California before this.
[13:50]And that was weird because usually people
[13:53]who grew up in the Midwest, a lot of times,
[13:55]you're like, I want to leave and see a different landscape.
[13:58]And I did.
[13:59]And but when I visited Wisconsin,
[14:01]I was like, oh, this is so strange.
[14:03]It feels like home.
[14:04]And how could that possibly be the Midwest feels like home?
[14:07]But it just reminds me that you know what?
[14:09]We're actually always changing.
[14:11]And it's good to allow ourselves to do that.
[14:14]And it's good to admit that we can change our minds.
[14:18]Yeah, I love that.
[14:20]I've been biting my tongue trying to not ask you why
[14:22]you have a giant can of roofs pillow behind you.
[14:24]But I have to ask now.
[14:28]OK, my zoom background.
[14:30]It is governed by this can of roofs pillow
[14:33]that my friend, the writer, Amy Fan,
[14:35]sent me right before lockdown started.
[14:38]And it's sequined.
[14:39]And it was such a fun, wonderful get everyone loves
[14:42]Seattle, right?
[14:43]So I thought I would just put them there
[14:44]as my zoom background.
[14:46]And I decided that he should never leave,
[14:48]because everyone loves piano.
[14:50]Unless something bad happens and he gets canceled, you know?
[14:52]But he's just going to be there as a lovely, you know,
[14:56]generous, a kind figure, you know, looking over us.
[15:01]And yeah, he gets me comfort.
[15:03]I like to look in.
[15:04]Instead of looking at myself, I don't want to look at myself
[15:06]and say, no, I want to look at a can of who doesn't know.
[15:09]Yeah, you have to find a way to get in touch with him
[15:12]and tell him about all this extra publicity
[15:13]and giving him to the entire writing community.
[15:17]You know, who knew?
[15:19]That would be so great.
[15:20]That is how this whole thing has to end.
[15:21]You have to have him on your zoom.
[15:24]Oh, my goodness.
[15:25]That would be one of the greatest things
[15:27]ever to happen in my life.
[15:29]Oh, my, there's got to be a way.
[15:30]There's got to be a way.
[15:31]Can I know?
[15:32]Are you out there?
[15:32]Come to my zoom.
[15:35]It's on my personal zoom room.
[15:37]That was somebody listening might have a friend,
[15:40]who knows a friend, who has an agent, blah, blah, blah.
[15:42]I think all the actors are striking anyway, aren't they?
[15:45]They'll have lots of free time.
[15:46]So anyway, that's so funny.
[15:48]So when you are busy teaching and then you turn to your own work,
[15:52]can you suspend a critical eye long enough
[15:55]to get the words out?
[15:56]Or are you always going over each sentence to perfect it?
[16:00]Or do you get it all out?
[16:02]I mean, given that it took what 10 or 15 years, maybe
[16:05]it's the latter, but let me know.
[16:08]I'm not usually a slow write-up,
[16:09]but I think the reason why it took so long for me
[16:11]to write this book was because I wasn't ready.
[16:14]And I was really trying to find my way through.
[16:16]But when I had the narrative realization,
[16:18]then the book came together pretty quickly.
[16:20]It just took me years to get to that realization.
[16:24]OK.
[16:25]And I think that's just sometimes a book happens that way.
[16:28]Sometimes we do not actually have control over how a book
[16:32]is going to come forward.
[16:33]And I would rather be patient and wait for that
[16:36]than just force an narrative that doesn't actually work.
[16:41]So that's what I was kind of doing for years.
[16:42]I was trying to make a narrative that didn't actually,
[16:45]it wasn't good.
[16:46]There was nothing to it.
[16:47]It was just sort of all over the place.
[16:50]So it took a while to be ready.
[16:52]But I work in a very undisciplined way.
[16:57]I work when I have time.
[16:59]I work around my kids.
[17:01]Got really used to that.
[17:02]I work really well on airplanes.
[17:04]We do.
[17:05]So it's like a nice four-hour flight.
[17:08]I am.
[17:09]Like a mini writing residency.
[17:10]It's perfect.
[17:11]I love flying to California.
[17:13]It's the best.
[17:14]I've gotten so much done on those legs.
[17:16]Yes.
[17:16]So much done.
[17:18]And I try to be as harsh with myself
[17:20]as possible when I'm writing.
[17:22]I don't write in a pretty fine.
[17:24]I'm a Times New Roman kind of writer.
[17:27]So I'm not fooling myself too much.
[17:29]And I try to write as much as I can just going forward.
[17:32]If I don't know something,
[17:34]I use a method that I call the TK method.
[17:36]Or I just say, you know, TK, you know,
[17:39]more information here because we're just trying to get somewhere.
[17:44]Otherwise, I'll just stop myself and go over the sentence
[17:48]so many times.
[17:48]And that's, you know, that's better done later on in revision.
[17:52]Interesting.
[17:53]I love it.
[17:54]Are you reading anything right now?
[17:55]I'm reading, actually, the three books I'm reading right now.
[18:00]One of them is a nonfiction book called
[18:02]to name the bigger lie by Sarah Viren.
[18:04]It's such a good book.
[18:05]Thanks so much.
[18:07]And that's a nonfiction book.
[18:08]And then holding pattern by Jenny Shay and the apartment
[18:12]by Anna Menendez.
[18:13]Those are the three books I'm reading right now.
[18:15]Amazing.
[18:16]So you like having a few going at the same time?
[18:18]I do.
[18:18]Yeah, for different modes.
[18:19]Yeah, you do.
[18:21]Like to have a lot going on.
[18:22]Amazing.
[18:24]And are you going to work on another book?
[18:25]Do you have another book coming?
[18:26]I'm actually, you know what?
[18:28]I was working on a novel this past year.
[18:32]But I suddenly started working on another nonfiction book.
[18:37]You know, I don't know how that happened.
[18:41]Oh, wait a minute.
[18:41]I do know how that happened.
[18:43]I haven't because I got divorced.
[18:46]That's all that happened.
[18:47]And so I started thinking about it.
[18:49]Sort of definitive relationships in my life.
[18:53]And yeah, so then I was like, oh, no.
[18:56]I'm writing another nonfiction book.
[18:59]So yeah, writing an nonfiction book,
[19:01]writing a novel, we'll see what gets finished first.
[19:05]Maybe it's some sort of blend.
[19:08]Auto fiction, auto fiction.
[19:11]I'm also divorced.
[19:13]Can talk about that offline.
[19:16]Now, many kids do you have two boys in the hell, do they?
[19:20]They are 14 and almost 12.
[19:24]They say, yes, it's fun.
[19:29]I say that with some apprehension.
[19:31]Because everyone else tells me, oh boy, there's a lot.
[19:35]There's a lot coming.
[19:36]I know I always used to freak out about the teenage years,
[19:41]but they don't just happen out of the blue.
[19:45]You don't go from like, I have an eight-year-old still.
[19:47]And I'm like, oh my gosh, it's gonna be a teenager.
[19:49]He's never gonna touch me again, it's gonna be a whole thing.
[19:51]But it'll be a teenager, and it'll be just one day
[19:53]after he was the age he was the day before,
[19:55]which is one day after that age.
[19:57]Like it never happens that fast.
[19:59]And right now, like...
[20:00]can't spiral out of control. It's just one day. So it sounds like good attitude. I like that.
[20:05]Otherwise, I get too anxious. But oh, yeah. Yeah. Anyway, all right. Well, maybe one of these days,
[20:12]we can, you know, clink glasses of Zoloft or something. And, uh,
[20:18]Chad, relax about our kids and tours.
[20:22]All the rest. What it means to be a mom. I don't know. All of it. Anyway, oh, wow.
[20:27]Will you say it all like that? Yeah. Okay. I think glasses of something. That's for sure.
[20:34]All right. Well, thank you so much. Thanks. It was so nice to meet you and so fun to Chad.
[20:39]And congratulations, your book is absolutely beautiful.
[20:41]Thank you. Thank you so much. Okay. Take care and buy a can of mine. Okay.
[20:49]Thanks for listening to this episode of moms. Don't have time to read books.
[20:52]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at zibi Owens and at moms. Don't have time to read books.
[20:57]Also sign up for my newsletter at zibiowans.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots
[21:02]of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan. In fact, texture sound for
[21:07]the sound editing. And thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and
[21:12]now trim music.