With the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War (or the “American War,” as they call it in Vietnam) approaching, it’s likely that many more books about the war and its aftereffects will be published over the next year or two. It’s hard to imagine that many of them will be as thoughtful, personal and probing as Beth Nguyen’s OWNER OF A LONELY HEART.

Nguyen, who previously published novels under the name Bich Minh Nguyen (more on that later), came with her father and older sister to America from Vietnam when she was just a baby. They settled in Grand Rapids, Michigan, as part of a refugee resettlement program. Her mother arrived separately, and somewhat later, settling in the Boston area.

"OWNER OF A LONELY HEART is about a search for answers --- those that will help make sense of Nguyen’s life and the history of her family’s journey, as well as her own identity as a mother and her very different relationship to her own children."

Much of Nguyen’s memoir-in-essays, several of which have been published in other forms elsewhere, is devoted to interrogating her relationship with her mother…or rather, her lack of one. The handful of times Nguyen has met her mother --- for exceedingly short and sometimes unsatisfactory visits --- form the backbone of a multi-part essay, “Apparent,” which plays out throughout the book. Even the opening essay, “Twenty-Four Hours,” begins, “Over the course of my life I have known less than twenty-four hours with my mother.”

Nguyen and her older sister, Anh, find their relationship to both Vietnam and their mother to be perplexing, almost a cipher. They know so little of this woman, and she doesn’t seem to seek to know them either --- appearing, for example, not to care to learn the name of Nguyen’s husband or their children. Equally puzzling, and sometimes troubling, to Nguyen are the ways in which she herself sometimes fails to pursue a richer, more fulfilling relationship with the mother she barely knows. She grows up in conservative, mostly white Grand Rapids with her emotionally distant father, a loving, non-Vietnamese stepmother, Anh, and other step- and half-siblings. It’s probably no wonder that she sometimes goes weeks or months without reaching out to her mother --- or that she then feels guilt for noticing how much time has passed.

Nguyen’s memoir is about more than her relationship with her mother and with the country of her birth, though this undergirds everything else. When she writes about her decision to start using the name “Beth” in “The Story of My Name,” she does so in the context of being a refugee: “This name may not be forever. It just feels like a bit of space, where I can direct how I am seen rather than be directed. I realize that, my whole life, I have been waiting for some kind of permission --- my own permission --- to be here.” And in “White Mothers,” she writes about taking cues from a white boyfriend’s mother as to how to perform a sort of belonging.

OWNER OF A LONELY HEART is about a search for answers --- those that will help make sense of Nguyen’s life and the history of her family’s journey, as well as her own identity as a mother and her very different relationship to her own children. Time and again, she hopes --- and then loses hope --- that her mother will be able to help fill in gaps in her understanding. In the end, she does capture her mother’s story (or at least some small portion of it), but she doesn’t include it here. Instead, she keeps it for herself, for reasons that are in many ways as powerful as if she had chosen to share it.