03 Aug / Sigh, Gone: A Misfit’s Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and the Fight to Fit In by Phuc Tran [in Booklist]
*STARRED REVIEW
What you might miss if you opt for the audiobook is a rather unexpected table of contents page, on which every chapter title is a (western) literary classic, from The Picture of Dorian Gray to The Iliad. Books, indeed, guide debut author Phuc Tran’s life, especially as a Vietnamese American teenager desperate to feel he belongs.
Great works aside, going aural is your recommended medium because Tran also makes his narrating debut – prefaced by an actual drumroll, yes! – with energy, empathy, and plenty of curse words, as he shares his no-holds-barred coming-of-age journey in small-town Carlisle, Pennsylvania: “Poorly read. Very white. Collar blue.”
Arriving as a 2-year-old refugee in 1975 with his parents, grandparents, and other extended family – his younger brother Louis would be born a year later – Tran grew into an awkward child, realizing early “[w]e weren’t like everybody else.” He spent 11 years “clawing [his] way to acceptance,” enduring bullying at school, emotional and physical abuse at home. To survive, he “tried to erase [his] otherness, [his] Asianness, with an assimilation – an Americanization” that flaunted academic excellence and “Operation Look Punk” (“one way to show you fit in? By not fitting in”). Immersing himself in great literature in high school provides a “connective and humanizing resonance” … something his own first book manages to achieve here.
Review: “Media,” Booklist, July 2020
Readers: Young Adult, Adult
Published: 2020