Beth Nguyen

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A close-up of Beth Nguyen.

Beth Nguyen

Beth Nguyen, a creative writing instructor at UW-Madison, wrote what USA Today and NPR both deemed one of the most anticipated books of the year. Owner of a Lonely Heart is a memoir about family, connection and belonging. A refugee from post-war Vietnam, Nguyen was 8 months old when she and her father fled the country with her sister and other relatives for Michigan, leaving Nguyen’s mom behind. Over the course of her adult life, mother and daughter have spent fewer than 24 hours together, and the book recounts those handful of visits while also exploring the roles various mothers have played in Nguyen’s life. This event will include a reading and discussion.

media release: A Room of One's Own is thrilled to welcome local author Beth Nguyen for a reading and discussion on her newest book Owner of Lonely Heart.

This is an in person event at A Room of One's Own.

About the Book

Beth Nguyen was eight months old when she, her father, her sister, and her grandmother came to America from Vietnam as refugees, while her mother remained in Saigon. Beth next saw her birth mother when she was 20, and in the years since they have spent a sum total of less than 24 hours together. In this powerful, contemplative memoir, Beth explores how she has come to think about motherhood, through stories of the infrequent, often disappointing visits she has had with her birth mother, stories about her own experience as a mother, and stories about the other women who have played the role of mother in her life – her grandmother, her stepmother, her high school boyfriend’s mother. She also explores her experience growing up as a refugee in Midwestern America, part of a blended and fractured family that did not look like the white families around her, and how her perspective on her childhood changed as she learned more about her parents and they choices they made.

An elegantly written coming-of-age story about belonging and alienation, displacement and homecoming, and mothers and daughters, Owner of a Lonely Heart is a powerful memoir about how we become who we are.

Beth Nguyen, who has also written under the name Bich Minh Nguyen, is the author of three previous books: the memoir Stealing Buddha’s Dinner and the novels Short Girls and Pioneer Girl. Her awards and honors include an American Book Award and a PEN/Jerard Award from the PEN American Center. Nguyen’s work has also appeared in numerous anthologies and publications including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times, and Best American Essays. Nguyen teaches creative writing at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Yalitza Ferreras is the 2022-2023 Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Creative Writing in Madison, WI. She is the recipient of a 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and a recent Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Best American Short Stories, Kenyon Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Aster(ix), The Southern Review, Colorado Review, and elsewhere.