Ocean Vuong on The Emperor of Gladness

Why It Matters

Vuong’s narrative spotlights the human cost of the opioid crisis and challenges the pharmaceutical‑centric approach to grief, urging a shift toward community‑based care and honest reckoning with America’s nostalgic myths.

Key Takeaways

• The novel portrays 2009 opioid crisis through vivid, personal narratives.
• Grief is depicted as an industrial complex fueling addiction and trauma.
• Vuong critiques Western reliance on pharmaceuticals over communal healing.
• The story explores care industry’s cost and moral dilemmas.
• Political nostalgia manipulates collective memory, shaping American identity.

Summary

Ocean Vuong joins a London audience to discuss his debut novel, The Emperor of Gladness, a lyrical chronicle set in 2009 that captures the early, unlabelled wave of the opioid epidemic. He frames the book as a personal memoir of a generation watching friends and family disappear into overdose, describing the stark moments of a teenager’s first heroin experience and the bleak, bureaucratic world of rehab. The conversation delves into the novel’s central thesis: grief has become an industrial complex that fuels addiction, with Western societies leaning on pharmaceuticals rather than communal rituals of mourning. Vuong links this to a broader cultural failure, noting how the American Dream is sustained by nostalgic amnesia, while political rhetoric weaponizes collective memory to mask systemic trauma. Memorable lines punctuate the dialogue—Vuong calls the overdose scene "a pause at the peak of the greatest joke" and labels the care system "an industry that monetises suffering." He also observes that every generation tells itself it is unique, yet the opioid crisis reveals a recurring pattern of ignored pain and institutional neglect. The implications are two‑fold: literary, as Vuong transforms a regional tragedy into universal art; and societal, as his critique urges policymakers to reconsider the over‑medicalisation of grief and to invest in community‑based care. The novel’s stark portrait of loss and its call for a more compassionate, less profit‑driven health system resonate amid ongoing debates about addiction, mental health, and the politics of nostalgia.

Original Description

Watch writer Ocean Vuong discuss his second novel The Emperor of Gladness with novelist and critic Mendez in this in-person conversation recorded live here at the Southbank Centre.

Vuong begins with a reading from his second novel, a story about chosen family, unexpected friendship and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive, which takes place in 2009 in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut.

In conversation about The Emperor of Gladness Vuong and Mendez discuss history being a fiction through its omissions; making literature from the American dream of restoring the promise of youth; the haunting presence of war and the importance of underpinning work with theory.

Vuong also answers questions from the auditorium audience on drawing on spirituality in his work, and his belief that literature can’t exist of itself alone; on being aware of the need to balance a freedom to write anything with a restraint that allows you to keep writing, and how poetry offered him a ‘great laboratory’ for ideas and concepts that ultimately inform his novels.

Ocean Vuong and Mendez were speaking on stage at the Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall in September 2025

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