In 1968, Tim O'Brien was drafted into the Army at
the age of 21. In February 1969, he arrived in Vietnam. After returning home, O'Brien
became a reporter for The Washington Post
and in 1973, he published his debut novel If I Die in a Combat Zone,
Box Me Up and Ship Me Home.
This American novelist continued depictions of the
Vietnam War era both through fiction and nonfiction. His books include the
National Book Award-winning "Going After Cacciato" (1978), the
Pulitzer Prize finalist "The Things They Carried" (1990), his more recent
novel, "July, July" (2002).
His books appear on numerous high school and college
reading lists. Critics have hailed him as the author of rare works that have
helped to define Vietnam and the experiences of war.
Tim O’Brien continues his contributions to military
personnel, their families, and students through his writing and in traveling to
speak with them when possible.
Here is a portion of that 2013 interview:
How
many of your books have been related to Vietnam? Three
were related directly, but all of them contain something about that era of a
country divided, riots in the street, great contention among families, the
whole musical revolution, women’s revolution, and civil rights revolution… an
era.
You
wrote some of these works 10 and even 20 years after your own experience. Did
it take you that long to deal with what you saw before you could share? I
think distance and objectivity was necessary, in my case, to write a book that
would last. I needed to distance myself, to allow my imagination to reorganize
and reinterpret material that was so close to me that it was difficult to
separate what would be important for the story, what a reader would need and
what they would not. In the end, stories have to be about squeezing the heart.
How
do you think your books are beneficial to people who had no personal or “hands
on experience” such as students in school today who are reading one of your
works? I always try to tell a good story. A book is a
unified thing, a work of art, shape, harmony, pace, and it’s entertaining, with
swells of emotion, happiness, laughter, sadness, meaningfulness. That’s how
life is. It’s not all one thing, and that means finding the right proportions
for a book and trying to make it feel unified like a single artistic whole such
as with a finished painting. By telling a story, you have this magical thing
that happens. Some readers may be lying in bed at night, and the story just grips
them. It’s not just something foreign or distant, removed from their experience.
It becomes very personal, almost like dreaming. The real magic in getting
someone to identify with something as foreign as a war might be is through a
story of human beings, idiosyncratic, different voices struggling with a common
problem like how to survive.
What
do you hope is the most important quality or lesson that people take from your
work? Story. It’s one thing to watch a newscast, or read a
newspaper or a magazine article, where things are fairly abstract. In fact, the
word war itself has a kind of abstraction to it that conjures up visions of bombs
and bullets and so on. My goal is to try to capture the heart, stomach, and
back of the throat readers who can participate in the story. They are not just
observing it. The comments that mean the most to me are basically when people
tell my own story back to me. That means they remembered it, it’s become part
of who they are, and the detail of recollections is often astonishing. They often
remember details I’ve forgotten. That’s what matters to me in the end. Whether
it’s some high school kid, housewife, or even an executive in New York lying in
bed at night, they are all in my story and if they finish, that means they
liked it enough to keep going.
Where
is the best place for people to find out more about you? I
would think the library or internet, is the easiest place to learn more. I
don’t have a website. A woman runs one on me, but I don’t think it’s very up to
date. Every now and then she writes me and asks questions. But, someone told me
that if you google my name and write novel, you’ll get ten thousand things you
can look up. I would never do that. It would be too embarrassing. It’s like listening
to yourself on a tape. It gives me the willies.