In 1975, at the age of six, Truong and her mother left Vietnam for the United States as refugees of the Vietnam War. Her father, an executive for an international oil company, initially stayed behind for work but left the country after the fall of Saigon. The family lived in North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas. Truong completed her undergraduate studies at Yale University, graduating in 1990 with a B.A. in Literature. She earned a J.D. from Columbia University School of Law and went on to specialize in intellectual property law.
Career
Truong co-edited the anthology Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose with Barbara Tran and Khoi Truong Luu. Truong's first novel, The Book of Salt, published in 2003 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, takes place in post-World War I Paris, and tells the story of Binh, a Vietnamese cook who works for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. The inspiration for the novel came from reading in The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook that Toklas and Stein had employed "Indo-Chinese" cooks. The novel explores themes of sexuality, diaspora, race, and national identity. The Book of Salt won numerous literary awards, including the New York Public LibraryYoung Lions Award, the Bard Fiction Prize, and a Stonewall Book Award. Her second novel, Bitter in the Mouth, published by Random House in 2010, tells the story of a Vietnamese-American adoptee growing up in the American South. Diane Leach wrote in The Los Angeles Times: "Monique Truong’s bone is the outsider’s plight, and her pen is a scalpel, laying perfect words down along that nerve until even the happiest reader understands what it means to forever stand apart from your family and the larger society you inhabit." Truong's third novel The Sweetest Fruits is a fictionalized recreation of the life of the Greek-Anglo Irish-Japanese writer Lafcadio Hearn, as told through the voices of three women in his life. It was named a best fiction book of 2019 by Publisher's Weekly, Mental Floss, and PopMatters. Her novels have been translated into fourteen languages to date. From 2011 to 2012, Truong wrote the food column, Ravenous, in . She also received two James Beard Award nominations for contributing to Gourmet. Her essays on a variety of topics, including food, racism, the Vietnam War, and the American South, have appeared in The Wall Street Journal,O, The Oprah Magazine,The Washington Post, and The New York Times. In collaboration with the composer/performer/sound artist Joan La Barbara, Truong has written the lyrics for a choral work and a song cycle, and is at work on a libretto for an opera inspired by Joseph Cornell and Virginia Woolf. Truong currently serves as vice president of The Authors Guild.
Books
Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose, co-edited with Barbara Tran and Khoi Truong Luu
