On Monday, the A24 podcast revealed a new project for you to fantasize about one day seeing in theaters: a movie adaptation of author Ocean Vuong’s 2019 book On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. The news arrived at the start of this week’s episode, a conversation between Vuong and fellow writer Bryan Washington, whose own debut novel, Memorial, was picked up by A24 for development into a limited television series this October.
“Now seems like as good a time as any to announce that we’re also busy working on the film adaptation of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,†their episode’s introduction reveals, before the pair dig into publishing during the coronavirus pandemic, how queerness affects writing relationships and conflict, and (of course!) the experience of having your book adapted into a different storytelling form altogether.
Vuong’s novel, published June 4, 2019, the same year the author won the MacArthur Genius Grant, explores the life of Little Dog, a first-generation Vietnamese-American immigrant, as well as the lives of his mother and grandmother, the legacy of the Vietnam War, and his romance with a white man in Hartford, Connecticut.