A portrait of things left unsaid ... Nguyen seems aware that her anxieties are small in comparison to the existential sacrifice her family made. But this is a memoir for those late-night moments: deeply ruminative and therapeutically self-indulgent.
Nguyen puts these experiences into writing, a healing recognition occurs, most movingly through her children, who are able to see and validate things she cannot.
Nguyen is a confident and reliable protagonist even when running up against painful memories, providing readers with enough distance as to almost be objective ... Nguyen has made a journey of facing her origins and contending with the limitations of American narratives, and we are lucky to be invited along the way.
...a quietly affecting memoir about family connection and disconnection. From the haunting opening line, the memoir is tinged with yearning and sorrow: 'Over the course of my life I have known less than twenty-four hours with my mother' ... The book is filled with honest and sometimes painful insights that Nguyen discovers in her search for truths about the past.
Powerful, searching ... It is Nguyen’s cautious and halting connection to the woman she calls her "Boston mother" that gives this aching memoir its shape.
The author shares her difficulties in fitting into the white world as she searches for her roots. Beautifully written and painfully honest, Nguyen’s memoir reveals the struggles and prejudices refugees face and the importance of knowing your life story.
Owner of a Lonely Heart is not a chronological memoir. It circulates among memories, embellishing and deepening the reader’s and Nguyen’s understanding of them ... A superb writer, Nguyen gives readers a tactile sense of her childhood home life and the love and anguish she felt there.
Nguyen candidly discusses the fear and hardship that refugees face ... Her own experiences as a “once-refugee” growing up in Michigan are also explored, sometimes in heartbreaking detail ... Nguyen’s honesty and vulnerability will captivate readers instantly.
Ruminative ... In plainspoken prose, she grapples with what she and her mother owe each other in terms of time and emotional investment ... The portrait that emerges of this mother-daughter relationship is fascinating yet somewhat blurry, as Nguyen works through what little information she has about her mother on the page. She’s at her sharpest in several essaylike chapters that turn elsewhere, offering observations about race and class born of her immigrant experience. This shines as a multilayered look at the ways absence can shape one’s sense of self.
