This is a decent enough memoir. However, there are an awful lot of memoirs out there and this one fails to set itself apart. I also feel that there was a lot of repetition that really did not make for a book I was excited to dive back in to once I put it down.

OWNER OF A LONELY HEART by award-winning author Beth Nguyen (Stealing Buddha's Dinner) is a new memoir that contains parts I found painful to read as it seemed obvious that Nguyen (who as an infant left her biological mother behind in Vietnam) seems to struggle with abandonment issues for herself and her mother. Nguyen teaches creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and this memoir is extremely well-written. Reflecting about belonging, she writes that "refugees don't fit the romantic immigrant narrative that's so dominant in America. They are a more obvious, uncomfortable reminder of war and loss;" noting that "part of my own refugee condition is realizing that I have participated in this kind of rhetoric and erasure." There is an entire chapter devoted to names and racism where she says that names "are markers of respect. What we call someone, what we are allowed to call someone, what we insist on calling someone - all of these indicate relationships having to do with levels of understanding, familiarity, or power." A thought-provoking work to be read in small doses, OWNER OF A LONELY HEART received a starred review from Library Journal ("Nguyen's honesty and vulnerability will captivate readers instantly.").

Definitely worth a look are two other highly recommended memoirs about mother-daughter relationships: A Living Memory and A Season with Mom. Or, reflect further on family dynamics and immigration through reading fictional works like Infinite Country and Where We Came From.

This was a powerful memoir. It was really interesting to learn about Beth's experiences as a refugee. I related to many insights she revealed about growing up and trying to conform to American white ideals, and I was heartbroken to hear about her guilt around her mother's story. I do think that the pacing was sometimes off - in my opinion, the memoir could have been shorter -- but I do appreciate the various insights Beth revealed and think that there was a lot of thought and rawness to her narrative.

Received a free copy from Netgalley.

This is a story of a woman trying to make sense of herself and her family identity. The shortened version, (as there is no satisfying way to encapsulate a memoir other than reading it); as a child, Nguyen left Vietnam and ended up in Michigan with her father and sister. Her mother was left behind in Vietnam but she also eventually immigrated to the US. Nguyen grew up largely without her biological mother while also having to navigate what it is to be a refugee and assimilate into another culture.
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I found myself wondering right along with Nguyen, often asking the same questions as she went back into her memories and explored. There are some achingly beautiful moments she paints as an adult. She shows us a perspective of grace, experience, and compassion, rather than the egocentrism of a child. Poetic and poignant.
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By the end, I found the work of someone healing by the act of exploration. Great read and grateful she shared her work and her life with the world.
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Do you want to cry? Do you want to hurt? Do you want to empathize with a main character so bad you wish you could be next to them to hug them and talk with them further? This is the book for you. 5 stars.

Owner of a Lonely Heart is a stunning memoir-in-essays, and one of my favorite books of nonfiction. I was blown away by Beth's writing when I read essays in The New Yorker, Time, and The Paris Review, and this entire collection reflects an author who is at the top of her game, and consistently capable of publishing top-tier work. I am also an Asian American who grew up in the Midwest, and Beth's memoir offered a voice I have been searching for all of my life. But you don't have to be Asian American to appreciate her reflections on motherhood and time, or on familial estrangement and difficult relationships. Reading her book, I felt like I'd been given the key into the mind of someone far deeper and more insightful than myself.

I interviewed Beth for Lunch Ticket, and that interview can be found here:
https://nextissue.wpengine.com/whats-ours-to-tell-an-interview-with-beth-nguyen/

In Owner of A Lonely Heart, author Beth Nguyen writes about her life.
When Beth was just eight months old, her father took her sister, uncles and grandmother on a flee out of Saigon to the USA, after the Vietnam war ended. Beth's mother stayed behind in Vietnam, and the family would not see of speak with her for untl Beth was nineteen years old. She would not spend more then 24 hours together with her mom in her life. Many attempts to meet up with her mom, who lived at the other side of the USA from Beth, ended up in dissapointment, when she would not show up because she had to go to the casino, instead of meeting Beth and her one year old son for the first time. But Beth refuses to be angry at her, because for her family wasn’t angry. After all, “family meant my dad, uncles, grandmother, sister, and me.” Further on, the memoir describes Beth's vision on being a mother, refugee and American and on being seen as an outsider, and why she changed her name from Bich to Beth.

I found this a good and interesting read, and as I have read previous books by Beth Nguyen, I was very curious for this read. Did it live up my expectations? Yes and no. Her story about her mother is not an easy one, but i loved how Beth wrote about it so honestly and openly, even when things in her life wheren't pretty. But at sometimes I found that she was a bit too negative on how she thinks about how ''white'' people treat her. Ofcourse racism is not good, never, but you have to be carefull not to polarize, and see that not every white person thinks the same and is racist. This also comes to light in the book when she visits the musical Miss Saigon with her white boyfriend. When I read this part, It made me feel like the author thinks every white person thinks in a bad way about Vietnamese people, especially the creators of the musical.(For me personally Miss Saigon did the opposite; it triggered a lifelong interest in Vietnam) So I found it not my favorite part, but I have respect for Beth's vision on the musical and I can also understand why she sees it this way.

It is not my most favorite read, but it is a good and well written memoir.

A poignant memoir that is honest about the complexities of family. Also loved the authors narrative about refugee and what it means for growing up in America. There were a lot of moments I resonated with what the author wrote about like having different birthdays, watching movies with my dad, or the ups and downs of trying to reconnect with family. An important read that can be sobering

Unfortunately I DNFed this book at 50%. I will not be writing a review on Goodreads or any other platform.

This book tells a very sad story about having a mother, who is not really your mother and how the author stayed in contact with her mother over many years.
This is a very important topic and I wish I had enjoyed the book more, because I am really interested in the subject matter. Unfortunately the "story" didn't really move forward and I felt like I did know enough new information/development at 50%. It was a little repetitive and therefore I didn't have enough interest to continue.

Big thank you to Negalley, Scribner and the author for the eARC anyway.

Deep, heartbreaking and a perspective that is so rare in modern literature.

Thanks to the publishers and Beth Nguyen for the opportunity to read and review this wonderful memoir.

This book is about refugee identity and coming-of-age in America story while understanding a fragmented mother-daughter relationship.

Overall, I found this memoir to be average but I appreciated what was shared. It's a narrative which has a lot of subtle reflection on the psychology of loneliness (or feeling abandoned) and there's a lot to unpack with what has been written.

Thank you to NetGalley and Scriber for a copy of Beth Nguyen’s memoir, Owner of a Lonely Heart.

At less than a year old, Beth Nguyen left Vietnam with her father’s family to begin a new life in Michigan. In the tumult of fleeing at the end of the Vietnam War, Nguyen’s mother was left behind. Nguyen was raised in a new country with a completely different culture, not meeting her mom until she turned nineteen. Her mother also immigrated to America, but was living in a different state with a new family.

When Nguyen and her sister finally met their mother, the reunion was not as they had anticipated. Their mother was distant and seemed flighty, often abruptly cutting their meetings short or canceling all together.

Nguyen estimates that in her adult life, she has spent less than twenty-four hours with her mom, time spent during those shortened visits. Now, a mother herself, Nguyen reflects on this fraught relationship with her mother and the pain that her mother must have felt at being separated from her daughters.

Owner of a Lonely Heart is a force of a memoir. It’s an emotional, difficult read, but also so very beautiful. The beauty comes from the ultimate kindness and understanding that Nguyen affords her mom. Initially, Nguyen is hurt and struggles to understand why her mom keeps her distance. I don’t think the hurt disappears, however, when Nguyen has her son, she can understand that it’s not because her mom doesn’t love her, it is because the hurt is too great. Her mom is protecting herself from further pain and they might be able to have a deeper relationship, but it will take time.

Nguyen also acknowledges the relationship with her stepmother, who has been part of her life from a young age. This is the woman who mothered her and there is so much love in their family. However, Nguyen has curiosity about her birth mother and their life in Vietnam.

Owner of a Lonely Heart is about exploring unanswered parts of your family and past. I connected with this theme. My father died when I was four and due to the sensitive circumstances, it was not discussed. I’ve always felt there were things unanswered that I want to know. I can fit the things I know about my dad on two hands, so I can understand Nguyen’s jumping at the opportunity to meet with her mom and try to understand her, even though her mom is reluctant.

A truly gut wrenching memoir, Owner of a Lonely Heart is a must-read. One of the best non-fiction books I’ve read in 2023.

Beth (formerly published as Bich Minh) Nguyen’s latest memoir is a slim volume, told in relatively short essays. The jacket copy bills it as focused on Nguyen’s relationship to her birth mother, whom the rest of the family left in Vietnam and with whom she only reconnected as an adult. To date, they have spent less than twenty-four hours together. This is actually only one of many threads in this memoir—Nguyen also considers growing up in Grand Rapids, becoming a parent, her friendship with her high school boyfriend’s mother, changing her name to Beth (I disagreed with her reasoning but found it very compelling to read—people are different!).

This memoir shared the understated sensibility of Nguyen’s earlier memoir, Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, and at times retreaded similar topics around growing up in Michigan with her stepmother. In some ways, this book could be a much later draft of the first. And it was also sometimes clear that the essays had been previously published individually—I would have liked a little more of a throughline to this book, a clearer progression.

Nguyen’s writing is strongest when she directly addresses race, immigration, and assimilation. The affects of being a refugee, her complicated feelings about her name, moments of discomfort as a teenager—these things all come through so clearly, and I found myself underlining. Nguyen’s writing is rich, yet I also found myself wanting more.

I thought again of how war separates families in strange and devastating ways, resulting in fractured relationships. Beth Nguyen was eight months old in April 1975 when she and her sister fled with their father and his relatives on a naval ship to the U.S. , leaving behind Beth's mother, who lived in another town. Years later, in 1985, the mother and her family arrived in Boston as immigrants.

Beth met her birth mother only after finishing her second year of college, but she had grown up with no curiousity about Vietnam, the past, or her birth mother. As Beth wrote," Our histories had separated long ago and had never truly met again."

However, Beth soon began to imagine and wonder about the grief her birth mother must have felt on finding her daughters gone when she went to visit them in the city back in Vietnam. Beth finally learns from what happened when her mother found an empty house, no note, and only news that their father had fled Vietnam with the girls those long years ago.

The novel becomes emotional for me, as the reader, towards the second half of the memoir, when Beth presses her birth mother for more honest answers about the past - how her mother felt and reacted to losing her daughters so suddenly. Though both her parents now have new families of their own, Beth seems haunted by what her mother must have felt and what she might feel still.

I felt that there was a breakthrough and that after her mother admitted she "cried and cried", Beth came to terms with the wholesome life she had had with her father and stepmother, and the new relationship she has with her birth mother and her family.

I feel I have not done justice to this very interesting and moving memoir of war and the aftermath of war on two families. This is a very worthwhile memoir for those interested in the Vietnam War, in refugees, and in the complex backgrounds and experiences of many immigrants.

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 staunchy 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.

I'm a huge Beth Nguyen fan, have been ever since reading Stealing Buddha's Dinner, so when I heard Beth was working on a new book, a memoir spanning years after Stealing Buddha's Dinner, I couldn't get my hands on a copy fast enough. Owner of a Lonely Heart is a beautiful, often painful, exploration of motherhood, refugeehood, identity, absence, longing, and the sense of belonging, that is an important and necessary read. Fleeing Vietnam as a baby with her father, her sister, and her father's family, leaving her mother behind, sets the stage for Beth's new memoir, yet the story begins years before, and continues years after. As Beth says, over the course of her entire life, she has spent less than 24 hours with her mother, and this book is about how this both came to be, and what happened within those hours. Beth's prose is piercing, insightful, deep, and her words will linger long after finishing the last line. Much thanks to NetGalley and Scribner for allowing me to read an eARC of this wonderful book.

This is a thoughtful, searching, and moving memoir. Nguyen and her family fled Vietnam for the US at the end of the war there, leaving her mother behind. In this book, she teases out this complex event and how it has affected her. When she finally reconnects with her mother, she is a young adult--to whom she is very generous in her writing from a later point in life--and the relationship is elusive. But the memoir also focuses on Nguyen's life and her own role as a mother, and how motherhood influences her thinking about her own mother and her step-mother. This is an open, honest book, and should be on every book club's list.

This heartfelt and compelling memoir is a bookseller's dream as you can easily hand sell it to a lover of fiction as well as non fiction enthusiasts!
The author came to this country with her family from Vietnam as a young child. She is a master of relating her innermost feelings about growing up as an Asian American in a family where relationships were often fraught and problematical. Ms. Nguyen's use of language presents a a literary banquet There is hardly a line without shades of meaning. She explores the use and essence of how we use our words, the concepts of belonging and loneliness and parenthood. She does this all in her unique and honest style that propels us forward and makes us miss her when the memoir has ended. There is plenty of food for thought here and I look forward to selling this book and rereading it myself!

Thank you to NetGalley and the amazing publisher for the ARC of this title! I am so grateful to be auto-approved for this title!
I look forward to reading and reviewing. More to come!

Wow this was such an amazing memoir. I love how vulnerable the author was in the telling of her story. The rawness of her thoughts and feelings that you feel. It is an emotional book. Thank you for writing your memoir. This was from a NetGalley copy.