"Achingly beautiful... told with wrenching emotion and exquisite controlled prose. A soon-to-be classic with implications about immigration in any era."
–Oprah Daily "
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."
–BookPage "Nguyen grapples with vital questions of family, loss, and memory, giving voice to the oft overlooked contours of grief - and encouraging readers to reflect on their own relationships."
–Christian Science Monitor "A portrait of things left unsaid ... this is a memoir for those late-night moments."
–New York Times Book Review "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."
–Washington Post "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."
–Brooklyn Rail "Affecting ... The book is filled with honest and sometimes painful insights that Nguyen discovers in her search for truths about the past."
–New York Journal of Books "The author–whose father fled with her from Saigon in 1975–considers her fraught, scant relationship with her biological mother, other formative maternal connections, and her own role as a mom to her sons in this thoughtful excavation."
–Vanity Fair "A baby when brought to the U.S. from Vietnam, her mother left behind, Nguyen ponders the meaning of 'refugee, ' and 'mother, ' in this unforgettable memoir."
–People Magazine "A deep dive into the void of a mother's absence and the silence surrounding it...Nguyen reevaluates what we call brokenness and creates hope that broken bonds can have meaning even if they are never mended to our satisfaction."
–The Christian Century
