What’s Ours to Tell: An interview with Beth Nguyen

Beth Nguyen, also known as Bich Minh Nguyen, is the author of the memoirs Stealing Buddha’s Dinner and Owner of a Lonely Heart, and the novels Short Girls and Pioneer Girl. She is a recipient of the American Book Award, the PEN/Jerard Award, and a Bread Loaf fellowship. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times, Time Magazine, The Best American Essays, and elsewhere.

She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Previously, she served as the Academic Director of the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco. It was a joy to connect with Beth over Zoom and talk about her new memoir Owner of a Lonely Heart, the anxiety of motherhood, and which stories are ours to tell.

Liz Iversen: The opening lines of your new memoir gutted me: “Over the course of my life I have known less than twenty-four hours with my mother. Here is how those hours came to be, and what happened in them.” How did those opening lines come to you?

Beth Nguyen: That realization that over the course of my conscious, known life, I had spent less than 24 hours with my mother, did not occur to me until very late in the writing and editing process. That realization changed the writing of the book, it changed the arc of the book, it made the book what it is. Which is wild, because it’s a very simple thing: how much time have I actually spent with her? It was startling to add up those hours. For me, the book is so much about the passage of time and trying to understand what that feels like.

LI: When did you start writing the book? Did you know you were writing a book at first, or did it start as one essay and then grow into more?

BN: The book has been underway for 10 years or so. For a long time, I wasn’t sure what it was going to be. I didn’t have a clear sense of what the through-line might look like. When you write, sometimes you don’t know why or where you’re going. It can be a really dreadful feeling. But I decided that there is a reason why my writing thoughts keep turning to this subject. So I just went with the process.

During that time I was raising my children. It was really hard to write, hard to focus, hard to keep sustained blocks of time for writing, so my thoughts were a little bit here, a little bit there. Sometimes the most time I had to write was when I was on a 4-hour airplane ride. Those are glorious mini-writing residences! Just trying to put together my thoughts in a cohesive way was very difficult because I didn’t know if they would become anything, and also because I kept shifting my perspective. As my children grew and changed, so did I. And therefore so did my writing of the book.

I think that process is something that all writers worry about. We all want to know, how do we do this better? How can we make it easier? I wish I had a clear answer. But we all have a different process, and maybe each book demands a different process. I think acquiescing to that is not easy.

LI: While writing this book, you were juggling so many other things in your life. You’re a mother of two, a professor, a university administrator. Anything else I’m missing in that list?

I think for me, the anxiety of motherhood is knowing that everything is shifting in the very moment that you’re doing it. You can’t keep anything. They’re a baby, and then suddenly they’re not. Everyone says about parenting, “Oh, it goes so fast!” Everyone says you blink and then they’re grown up.

BN: I moved during that time from California to Wisconsin, and there was the pandemic. There was a lot of upheaval in my life, and some of it was in the background informing this book. For example, I went through separation and divorce toward the end of writing and editing . But that’s not in the book because it’s not at all what the book is about, and I didn’t want it to take over. Maybe my next book, ha.

LI: The themes of motherhood in your book felt so true. You wrote that to be a mother is to be in a vague, permanent state of loss. Could you talk more about that feeling of loss?

BN: I think for me, the anxiety of motherhood is knowing that everything is shifting in the very moment that you’re doing it. You can’t keep anything. They’re a baby, and then suddenly they’re not. Everyone says about parenting, “Oh, it goes so fast!” Everyone says you blink and then they’re grown up. So you know these things. But you have to experience them in order to understand how shocking that is. It just leaves me feeling at a loss all the time. I do want to keep these things—that’s why we take so many pictures. We want to keep everything, we want to keep that feeling, we want to keep that moment, to be able to remember exactly. But we can’t. And we know it. We know we can’t keep something, even while we’re trying to do it. And I think that space is the space of loss.

LI: So much went unspoken in your family when you were a child. You wrote, “Long before I knew what trauma or therapy or stigma were, I learned that not talking was the way we were supposed to deal with things. Better not to ask and not to know.” I’m wondering, to what extent does that still hold true for you?

BN: When I was growing up, that was very much a time of cultural quiet around issues that we would now refer to as traumatic. It’s hard to break that habit. It becomes ingrained—not just culturally, but within the identity of a whole family. But I think writing and publishing has helped me a lot in this way, because once it’s out there, it’s out there. One big fear that everybody who writes memoir has is, “What are people going to think? Are they going to be mad at me? What are they going to say?” I think those are good, fair questions we need to think about at some point when we’re writing, without allowing them to stop ourselves from writing. We do have to be accountable to ourselves, to understand: Why am I doing this? Why am I writing this? I feel like that whole process of writing and telling my family that I was writing, and their knowing about my writing life has definitely helped me be a little bit more courageous in broaching topics that, in the past, I would never have dared to bring up.

You can ask questions, but people don’t have to answer them. Sometimes even asking a question at all can be a rupture of a necessary boundary.

At the same time, there are boundaries that I also need to honor. You can ask questions, but people don’t have to answer them. Sometimes even asking a question at all can be a rupture of a necessary boundary. That’s something that I was figuring out in my conversations with my mother. My process of getting to know her was understanding which questions she did not want to hear, and which topics she did not want to talk about–and respecting that.

LI: You grew up in Michigan and you talked about the tension of belonging or not belonging, of being stared at and overlooked. How did that tension contribute to your writing?

BN: I saw somebody retweeting or quoting somebody on Twitter recently, saying that obsessive rereading is a trauma response. I thought about my childhood self obsessively reading everything from library books to cereal boxes. I would read the same books over and over obsessively. Looking back, I see that it was a trauma response to deal, to contain, to be in a safe space. Much of my childhood and much of my growing up was defined by this need to be somebody else, so I learned how to have multiple personas. Who I was at school was not who I was at home, and I kind of developed my own secret self through books.

LI: You wrote that your stepmom was influential in your development because she took you to the library as a kid, and that you didn’t know or appreciate it at the time, but your stepmom was saving your life. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

BN: I call her mom in real life. In the book it has to be “stepmom” for purposes of clarity, but I think of her as my mom. I came to the realization that she had saved our lives because I understood how much she was doing for our survival in terms of necessities, doctor’s appointments, and things like that. There was no Internet back then. Documents and signs were not printed in multiple languages. Without her, I think we would have been lost. We would not have known where to go, what to do, how to get resources. So there was that basic level of logistical living that I recognize more and more as I look back. But also, the emotional component in my stepmother. She really wanted us to get well-educated. She wasn’t pressuring us to get straight A’s. She just wanted us to learn and do well and figure out what we wanted to do for ourselves. When I look back I see her taking me to the library and letting me check out all those books even though she would roll her eyes and just be like, “There’s no way you’re going to read all those books.” She would let me do it, even when she complained. I realized that she was looking out for me in the ways that she could.

LI: The idea of shame recurs throughout your book. Can you talk a little bit about the sense of shame you carried as a refugee?

BN: I think shame is one of the most powerful, scary feelings, and it’s usually incredibly private. That was something that I always had a hard time talking about or acknowledging with other people. I would say that shame, which is also connected to a sense of secrecy, defined my entire upbringing and growing up. Just the way my family was perceived in terms of being outsiders and being refugees, being people who are here because of a terrible war, and all of the many misconceptions that are connected to that war—it felt like everywhere I went, I had to justify why I was there, or pretend like I wasn’t there so that other people wouldn’t be uncomfortable. I think that a lot of us learn really early on that everyone else’s comfort is more important than our own. I definitely did. I still think that, actually. So the feeling of  shame was a huge part of my sense of identity. Every time I would deliberately not tell somebody something about myself, I would know why. Sometimes it was self-preservation and sometimes it was making somebody else comfortable. But I had this really close relationship with the feeling of shame, and I needed to write about it and write toward it as a way of undoing.

LI: In addition to being a writer, you edited a great anthology of essays, Contemporary Creative Nonfiction, I & Eye. I was wondering if there are other books that you would recommend as creative nonfiction resources?

I think shame is one of the most powerful, scary feelings, and it’s usually incredibly private. That was something that I always had a hard time talking about or acknowledging with other people. I would say that shame, which is also connected to a sense of secrecy, defined my entire upbringing and growing up.

BN: Anthologies, textbooks, and guides, like all forms of writing, are subject to being contextualized and dated. So I think it’s really wonderful and important that there are a lot of great online resources that can be continually updated and added to, like Brevity and Assay journal,which covers many different aspects of nonfiction craft. I also really like the New Yorker archives, The Sun, The The Best American Essays anthologies, just to name a few.

LI: You also write fiction. How do you approach writing fiction versus writing nonfiction?

BN:  Fiction and nonfiction go really well together because one can fulfill what the other can’t. Whenever I’m writing nonfiction I long to write fiction—the glorious feeling of making up stuff. But whenever I’m writing fiction, I long to write nonfiction so I don’t have to make anything up. I think it’s really useful emotionally to write in more than one genre because we’re always learning new ways to apply what we know about language and structure and perspective and all those things that we think about. They’re different from genre to genre. I have been working on a novel, and it’s been actually fun to give myself that permission to make up what is going to happen next. I love that. It is so fun, until it isn’t. Then you’re stuck and it’s like, “I wrote myself into a corner. Damn, it’s so much easier when reality would just show me the path.”

LI: Toward the end of your memoir you wrote, “I find that I am a writer, writing nonfiction, trying to keep some things for myself. Trying to figure out what is mine, what is time, what is mine to say, what are we doing with words when they begin with someone else?” What have you decided about what stories you can tell?

BN: I think there was an era of memoir/nonfiction writing where the mandate was to be as open as possible, confessional even—just say absolutely everything and go with this idea that anything you saw or anything you observed could be yours to write about. That often-cited quip that  if people didn’t want to be in your book, they should have behaved better. Basically the idea that anything is yours for the taking. That was really a prevailing idea for a while. But in the past ten years or so, I think that has changed and I think it’s a good, necessary change. Not everything should be in one’s book. Not everything has to be written about. I was thinking too, when I was writing this book, about the tension involved in writing about another person in your life. A memoir is just one person’s version of events. It’s incredibly subjective, it’s extremely perspective driven. I wanted to acknowledge and really think about what it means to write about somebody else. What I realized is, just because it happened to me doesn’t mean I have to tell everybody. There’s a lot of information that is not in the book. The act of memoir is figuring out the story, not saying everything. What do we as writers and readers get to know? We don’t get a right to everything. I think these were questions I wanted to pursue. What do we have to know? What do we have a right to know? What do we have a right to write about?