Review: "Owner of a Lonely Heart" by Beth Nguyen

Owner of a Lonely Heart by Beth Nguyen
Published July 2023 via Scribner
★★★★

3.5 stars, or 4 stars and a caveat, depending on how you want to look at it.

Over the course of my life I have spent less than twenty-four hours with my mother, writes Nguyen. Here is how those hours came to be, and what happened in them (loc. 51*).

Nguyen's upbringing was not motherless—she and her sister had their stepmother, the woman they called Mom. Nor was her childhood terribly different from the lives of her classmates. But her knowledge, growing up, that her experience was outside the norm (refugee, first mother somewhere else, name unfamiliar to most American ears), shaped the way she approached her life, first in youth and then as an adult.

I was ten years old when I learned that my mother had come to the United States as a refugee, too. I was nineteen when I finally met her. (loc. 66)

Part of Owner of a Lonely Heart is, of course, about those few hours with her mother: an hour here, a few hours there, a minute or two squeezed in here. Nguyen circles in on these hours, revisits them, examines them from new angles. (I recommend getting comfortable with some repetition before reading the book, because the story does loop in on itself at times.) She's on a quest for memories, for pieces of her mother's life and of her own—sometimes what was, and sometimes what could have been.

That caveat: I'm intrigued by the questions Nguyen doesn't ask in the book. She openly makes the choice to omit some things from the writing of the book (as a reader I'm disappointed, but as someone who believes staunchly in the right of the memoirist to keep some things private, I applaud the choice), and I wonder whether there are other things she opted out of sharing. She asks her mother Big Questions, but I wonder also about the smaller ones. I guess I'm left with questions about the unasked questions, and about more possible interpretations of her mother's non-answers.

One thing that does very much intrigue me is Nguyen's discussion of her name. She has previously published under her Vietnamese name, Bich Minh Nguyen, and this is her first book under the name Beth Nguyen. I won't get too much into her decision to make the shift (it's not a long section, but it's worth reading in full), but there's some very interesting commentary on who is most likely to criticise the choice (white people with names that are rarely mispronounced in the US) versus who is less likely to criticise. But here is the thing: I am not Beth to make life easier for everyone else; I am Beth to make life easier for me (loc. 1826).

I'm curious now about Nguyen's earlier memoir, Stealing Buddha's Dinner, and what parts of the picture that might fill in.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

*I read an ARC, and quotes may not be final.