Q [Library Journal]: Compared to your process for writing fiction and nonfiction, what was different writing the memoir?
A [Viet Thanh Nguyen]: My nonfiction has been scholarly, and there is little benefit to being vulnerable, emotional, or subjective in scholarship. To survive in the academy, I had to tamp down any signs of vulnerability or emotion and to present myself purely as a rational, objective, theoretical intellect. No body, no feeling, only highly controlled thought. For a woman, or a person of color, to do any less is to open oneself to the colonizing, racist, sexist assumption that feeling is less than thought, body is less than mind, spirit is less than intellect. So I had to undo a lifetime of Westernized education to allow myself to write a memoir.
A [Viet Thanh Nguyen]: My nonfiction has been scholarly, and there is little benefit to being vulnerable, emotional, or subjective in scholarship. To survive in the academy, I had to tamp down any signs of vulnerability or emotion and to present myself purely as a rational, objective, theoretical intellect. No body, no feeling, only highly controlled thought. For a woman, or a person of color, to do any less is to open oneself to the colonizing, racist, sexist assumption that feeling is less than thought, body is less than mind, spirit is less than intellect. So I had to undo a lifetime of Westernized education to allow myself to write a memoir.
--In an interview about the author's forthcoming book A Man of Two Faces, due for publication in October 2023.