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Episode 185: Tim O’Brien on Memory, Failure and his ‘Maybe Book’
133 Plays5 years ago
Tim O'Brien, author of Dad's Maybe Book, talks all things writing, reading and turning a maybe something into an actual something.
Bay Path University's MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing made this show possible.
As did my monthly newsletter. Go get it.
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Transcript
The Writing Journey: Pleasure, Failure, and Persistence
00:00:00
Speaker
And so one has to find the pleasure and the doing of it and the sitting down and the doing of it, even knowing that most often the consequence is going to be failure and then trying again.
00:00:20
Speaker
Are you ever in for retreat CNF-ers? That's the voice of an American treasure.
Introduction of 'Dad's Maybe Book'
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Speaker
Tim O'Brien. Don't tell him I said that. He probably punched me in the throat. His latest book, his dad's maybe book, is published by Houghton Mifflin. Ha caught.
00:00:36
Speaker
2019. And this is CNF, the creative non-fiction podcast, greatest podcast in the world, and I'm Brendan Romero. Hey, hey. But first, discover your story, man. But Bay Path University fully online MFA in creative non-fiction writing. Faculty have a true passion and love for their work. Wouldn't have it any other way. It shines through with every comment, edit, and reading assignment. Instructors are available to answer all your questions in their years of experience, as writers and teachers have made
00:01:04
Speaker
for an unbeatable experience. Apply now at baypat.edu slash MFA. Classes begin January 21st, so get on it. What do you say? You know the drill, and if you don't, OGCNFers, show them the way.
00:01:30
Speaker
Bet you didn't know that's how we start this thing.
Themes in 'Dad's Maybe Book': Fatherhood and Personal Struggles
00:01:33
Speaker
We've got Tim O'Brien here, and it's something special to talk to this guy about his work and his latest book, Dad's Maybe Book. He's best known for the things they carried, and he won the National Book Award, that little thing, for going after Cassiato. I got the memoir in the mail out of the blue, and I was like, oh, cool, a memoir about being a dad. I'm no dad, nor will I ever be one, but I'm a son.
00:02:00
Speaker
So this will be cool, and I'd read about Bricklang if Tim O'Brien's name is attached to it. This book is so expansive and tender and prescriptive without being didactic. It's about reading and writing and fatherhood and sonhood and marriage and struggle and triumph and demons. It's about Tim. So you have that to look forward to.
00:02:24
Speaker
In other news, I've been listening to a lot of Seether lately.
Admiration for Sean Morgan
00:02:30
Speaker
Gotta diversify that rock portfolio. And man, I love that lead singer, Sean Morgan. And there's this great picture of the band, and Morgan just looks so damn cool.
00:02:42
Speaker
I don't know how to explain it. I'll be sure to link up to it, or maybe I will, maybe I won't. He's this embodiment of cooling, and it's just something I want to inhabit. I wish I could draw that cool out and hook it to my veins, you know what I mean? He's sitting at this table, his bandmates, he's smoking a cig, and he's blowing smoke in the air, and he's looking up into the air, into the smoke cloud, not even looking at the camera. His hair is off to the side. He's got these sweet tattoos.
00:03:08
Speaker
I don't know. The guy just looks like the grunge man I am underneath it all. Instead, I look like Charlie Brown with a beard. Morgan's voice is incredible, too. I mean, he can scream it out like he's singing from his descending colon. I saw them as part of the Rise Above Festival in 2015 in Banger, Maine, and they blew me away. They went on before Godsmack, I think after Papa Roach, after
00:03:35
Speaker
Well what band is it was slash plays slash plays with them any case see there was in there And he came out there, and he's just roaring Words as weapons man. That's the song Told my wife about this and she's like someone's got a man crush, and I was like so oh
00:03:53
Speaker
Enough of that. You signed up for the newsletter, right? People seem to be digging it. And there's an added bonus. Oh, who doesn't like added bonuses? Probably some monster. Probably someone who doesn't like Sean Morgan from
Newsletter Book Raffle Announcement
00:04:07
Speaker
See The... I'm going to be raffling off books at random to subscribers of this very podcast.
00:04:13
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I have several shiny hardcover books and I'm going to give it away. Give them away. Two lucky newsletter subscribers. If you're not on it, get on it. BrendanOmero.com. I will email you out of the blue and say, hey, you won.
00:04:28
Speaker
What's your address and you might say 114 South Picking Street and I'll say, that's weird, that's where I grew up and I will mail it to you meteorate. So be patient. Newsletter means reading recommendations, riffs, and podcast news. First of the month, no spam, can't beat it. Unsubscribe anytime you want but know that I take it wicked personally.
00:04:50
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You're going to want to leave a review on Apple Podcasts too. We're a community of CNF-ers. You can follow the show on various social media channels at cnfpod across the mall. No TikTok. We draw the line at TikTok. All right. Is that it? I've kind of drawn this out a little, a little long, maybe, maybe a little weird with Sean Morgan. If any of you out there know Sean Morgan, it can make the introduction, you know, through.
00:05:19
Speaker
throw Biola bone.
From Letters to Memoir: The Birth of 'Dad's Maybe Book'
00:05:20
Speaker
Alright, this is me and Tim O'Brien. Let's do this.
00:05:31
Speaker
It's always fun to get a sense of how someone who primarily writes fiction dives into non-fiction. So what was maybe the impetus of this book? I mean, you kind of write about it and allude to it, but what made you really want to say, okay, this is my time to write a memoir sort of as a love letter to your sons? Well, it grew in stages. At first I wasn't really writing a book at all.
00:06:00
Speaker
It was began as a set of little one page, two page letters to my kids in the event. And I put them in a desk drawer over the course of several years and they added up to maybe 30 pages. And one day my youngest, younger son came into the office and saw in the drawer and I messed up. I told him,
00:06:28
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I'm old and I may not be here forever and I've been writing some messages to you and to your brother. And he asked, well, will it be a book? And I said, no, I didn't think so. Books are hard to write and take a long time and so on.
Exploring Uncertainty and Mortality in Writing
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And he said, well, what if it does become one? Call it a maybe book.
00:06:57
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And I started the idea, kind of chuckled at it, but later when I told my wife about it, about our conversation, my conversation with my son, she said, well, you know, all books are maybe books, whether they're fiction or nonfiction, until they're finished, it's always a maybe book, so much can intrude
00:07:23
Speaker
And, uh, I said, that's true. And then she reminded me of my time in Vietnam, where every step was a maybe step. Maybe there'll be another one. Maybe there won't. And I nodded and she, she went on and said, well, all of this in one way or another are leading maybe lies. Maybe it'll be tomorrow. Maybe there won't.
00:07:54
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And at my age, and now 73, that comment pretty much sealed it for me that I was going to try to write a real book and a book of nonfiction, which as you say, I haven't done for years and years, but then embarked on. So the process of this becoming a book, even over maybe 10 years or so,
00:08:24
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between starting these little letters to my kids and actually embarking on a real book. What I particularly like about the way the book is structured is how fragmented it is in a way that memory can be. Do you think writing it over the course of 10 years led to some of that fractaling in the way you were able to tell this story?
The Fragmented Structure of Memory
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Partly it was because the composition of the book was over some years, really over 17 years or so. And that accounts for part of the fractured feel of it. But it was also intentional that I wanted to, as much as I try to represent life as I lead it, which feels fragmented to me.
00:09:21
Speaker
It doesn't feel linear. It feels that things intrude that are unexpected and then vanish. My memory is also fragmented. I have difficulty, as probably all of us do, recalling what happened first and what happened second. Even yesterday, it's hard for me to remember much less 10 years ago, 20 or 40 years ago. I think that we have this illusion
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of a linearity in our lives, when in fact, both our memories and our lives come at us in little starbursts. If I were to recollect my kid's first words, I would have
00:10:13
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the words perhaps in my memory, but I wouldn't have anything that preceded that utterance or anything that followed it. It would just be a little starburst of memory and not a continuous and coherent sort of long-term sense of memory. And I want to try to recapture this in the book.
00:10:37
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by jumping around in content and jumping around in time, just as my memory does. Yeah, you even write that in a novel or in a story, the illusion of order can be imposed on a human life, but in a book that remains essentially a compilation of love letters to my sons, the imposition of order would be an artificial disgrace and, worse yet, deceitful. Yeah, you just read a much better statement of what I was trying to explain a moment ago.
00:11:07
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But I felt it would be duplicitous to write a traditional kind of memoir that gives a kind of sequential order to things when in fact, my memory simply doesn't operate that way. Nor do many of us. I mean, if I were to ask you about what happened yesterday, you'd probably have difficulty putting even yesterday in a good linear
00:11:36
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coherent, you know, order. Absolutely. Yeah, it is. It's definitely hard. Like, even just, you know, 12 to 24 hours ago, you have to really labor over it. And geez, if you can't even remember what happened 24 hours ago, what of 24 years ago and everything. Exactly. Exactly. And that was partly the intent is to try to replicate how memory works.
00:12:05
Speaker
It works more like poetry, I think, than prose or poetry where one's hands will bang up against another. It's associative and not linear. And that's how I think, by and large, my memory works.
00:12:20
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What I found such a delightful surprise about the book, too, just when I got it in the mail, it was like, dad's maybe book. I was like, oh, okay, and a picture of your kids on the cover. I'm like, all right, this is gonna be just a memoir of, you know, just being in a dad and what that was like for the last, you know, 18 or so years.
00:12:38
Speaker
But it's so much more than that. It's a book on writing, on fatherhood of course, and your relationship to your sons, and of course your relationship to your own father. So it has this really wonderful sort of buffet of content that stems from what's important to you.
Revealing Personal Aspects to Family
00:13:01
Speaker
So like, was that always the intent that you wanted to sprinkle in all these things that were, you know, important to you as a way to tell your sons like, oh, this is what's important to me. This is who I am. When I'm gone, you can read this and figure out more stuff about who your dad was. My, my essential intent was to, to tell my children about a father they may not know. And that meant,
00:13:28
Speaker
talking and writing about Vietnam and about my father and his alcoholism, my obsession with the making of sentences and of telling stories, a lifelong obsession, and other facets of my life so that my kids might know a father that I worried they would never really get to know except as a memory and not a person.
00:13:57
Speaker
on a very dim memory of that. It occurred to me at the birth of my first son way back in 2003 that if and when he began to know me, he would certainly know an old man. And that would have been the best scenario. The worst scenario was I'd be dead because I'm old.
00:14:22
Speaker
And it's not a grim or macabre thought. For me, it was sort of a joyous opportunity to try to leave some written record for my children of who I was. This moved, though, to another plane. It moved to the plane of literature. It moved to the plane of writing a bunch of essays about various aspects of my life that, as you said, offered this kind of buffet of
00:14:51
Speaker
very radically different takes on the world and angles of perspective on the world.
00:14:58
Speaker
And as I was reading this book and it was what struck me about it was, to me, in a lot of ways, it was about every bit about as much of a relationship or you come into terms of the relationship with your own father as it is about your kid's relationship to you. What was that experience like in kind of delving back into the relationship you had with your father growing up in Worthington, Minnesota?
00:15:27
Speaker
It was extremely painful. I had been pushing it aside for years and years and decades and decades, not wanting to really confront it. My dad was a terrible alcoholic. I remember finding vodka bottles hidden. By vodka bottles, I mean hundreds of empties in the basement and in the garage. As a little boy, I remember couching in the house between my mom and dad.
00:15:56
Speaker
such tension that it was sort of simultaneously embarrassing and terrifying. The two things combined, somebody who was seven years old, the impression that my dad didn't even like me, much less loved me because he was drunk so much.
00:16:20
Speaker
He was committed twice to institutions for the treatment of alcoholism and his absences when you're a young kid were long and they were painful not to have your dad around. And they were embarrassing as well among with my friends. Where's your dad? And I would have to make up either a lie or not say anything at all. So.
00:16:48
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I had been pushing all this aside for years and years, but I felt it was my duty to my own kids to tell the truth about my childhood. It was really painful to confront it and even talking about it now with you, hear my voice catching, but
00:17:13
Speaker
The alternative was either silence or deceit, and I had to, for my own kids, break the silence and try to tell the truth. And is that why you found yourself, even as a young kid, taking up magic so you could, in essence, conjure these own worlds and be at one with your own aloneness, I think, as you write in the book?
00:17:44
Speaker
You're right on the money. I mean, you're a good reader. The hobby of magic grew almost directly out of my dad's alcoholism and the tension in the house.
Escaping Reality with Magic Tricks
00:17:57
Speaker
I used to go into the basement where I could be alone and not listen to the arguments going on upstairs and practice magic, little tricks, mostly with boxes and so on.
00:18:14
Speaker
were a way of escaping the realities of the world above upstairs. It was a way of making miracles happen. And the big miracle was in my head as a kid was God, if I can cut my dad's tie in half and restore it whole, I can somehow stop him from drinking too. It was a make believe
00:18:43
Speaker
world where I found at least some peace and some solace and escape from reality. And I think that probably the hobby of magic later led to later led to writing stories and the illusions that stories give us.
00:19:11
Speaker
Yeah, I think I read in a story about you from several years ago that the allure of reading and writing partly stemmed from seeing almost the look of rapture on your parents' faces as they were
00:19:29
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just a very deeply immersed in the stories they were reading and then I think you might have been nine years old or so when you started kind of writing your own story. So in a sense, do you think that writing stories was a way for you to find that and maybe bridge that connection to your parents and especially your father? I think absolutely. I recount an episode in the book
00:19:57
Speaker
in which I'd come into the living room on a winter, late winter afternoon. Darkness was falling outside. My dad was sitting in an easy chair reading, I don't know what book, but reading a book. He was sober. He was deeply involved in the book. And he was looking into the pages of the book with gravity and
00:20:27
Speaker
contentment and a sense of, of, of happiness and peace that was astonishing to me. And that image of my dad sitting in that chair with a light behind him has stayed with me ever since. I remember thinking how much I wanted to physically be the book. So he would look at me with that same peace and contentment.
00:20:56
Speaker
and love. And I wanted to kind of crawl into the book and have him look at me that way, and be the book for him. And that explains, I think, in part, at least why I took up writing at a pretty early age and have done it for many, many decades now.
00:21:17
Speaker
Yeah, and there's a part too where you write in your most recent book that when you decided to sort of eschew the Harvard education to pursue writing and writing with deliberation and purpose and professionalism.
00:21:34
Speaker
Even your, you know, your father said, like, listen to me, the world is full of people who think they can be writers. I'm one of them. Look how it turned out. Don't do it. And you go on to write that, I would be exchanging security for Jeopardy, forfeiting a Hartford degree for a degree in advanced uncertainty. And yet you still did it. So what was, take us to that moment, and what made you want to still lean into it and double down on your talent?
00:22:03
Speaker
Well, I think a couple of things that into my determination to try to actually be a professional writer. One was experiences that are duplicated now with my own children's as much as I try to influence their takes on the world and their things that I think they, that they should pay attention to and things they should do.
00:22:32
Speaker
A parent's influence only goes so far, at which point you have to surrender to whatever the child wants and the other human being wants. So when I began writing about my own conversation with my mom and dad, when I had decided to give up graduate school at Harvard and try to make it as a writer and how they tried to dissuade me from this,
00:22:59
Speaker
I realized I was doing kind of the same thing with my own kids, maybe not on that scale because they were too young, but nonetheless trying to influence their interests and so on, where instead I should have and now try to do, trying to let the reins loose a little bit and hope they'll find their own interests and pursue them with diligence and so on.
00:23:29
Speaker
as opposed to trying to impose them on them. Every parent, my own included, wants the best for their child and wants safety for their child. I presume my parents wanted safety for me, you know, get a degree and PhD and get a good job and so on. And I'm sure they were concerned that the writer's life is a life of jeopardy. It always is.
00:23:59
Speaker
Even if you like a book, the author doesn't mean other people will like it. And there's also the possibility you may not like it, but there's the jeopardy of failing yourself when you try to write a book. And the parents craving to have safety for a child
00:24:24
Speaker
physical safety, but also emotional safety. It's a strong, strong impulse. I had to look back at my own resistance to that impulse and then pay heed to how I was going to treat my own children.
00:24:41
Speaker
Yeah, to that point of determination that you saw in yourself, that is really echoed in your oldest son and his determination and commitment to basketball, even when he was, I think, maybe cut from his freshman or maybe team right around there, and then you saw him still grinding and grinding and grinding.
00:25:05
Speaker
this and now you have to sit back and and and kind of let that unfold is kind of exactly what you're talking about yeah in part that's that's that's true it was uh my kid Timmy the older boy just from the time he was seven years old maybe even younger was bouncing the basketball around and shooting baskets and love basketball and
00:25:33
Speaker
When he was cut from his freshman team, it was devastating to him. He retreated into a kind of box or insular space of silence, go into his room after school and close the door. And God knows what was happening in that room, but he was not a happy boy. Um, his dreams had been dashed and, uh, the,
00:26:00
Speaker
Perseverance had not paid off for him. And his love of the game had not paid off. He was devastated. And as a parent, it was a hard time to go through. I would ask him, how are you doing? And he'd say, I'm fine. I'm fine. But he was not fine. He was in great pain. What do you take from that? Well, you take a bunch of stuff.
00:26:28
Speaker
One, one thing I took from it was that you, failure is a fact of life that in all kinds of ways, all of us fail. They might fail other people. We might fail ourselves. We might fail at our jobs. We might have moral failures, failures.
00:26:55
Speaker
is part of being a human being. And accommodating yourself to failure is a painful and difficult thing to do. But it has to be done. And because it's part of living. When it's your own kid who has failed, it's a much more difficult thing to deal with because you feel so helpless. You can't shoot baskets for him and you can't
00:27:25
Speaker
drive, you can't be aggressive for him, it has to be done alone. All you can do is say, I love you and I'll love you, failure or no failure.
00:27:38
Speaker
Yeah, even if you said persistence and grit is some of the greatest skills that you can take away from that, it's gonna fall, at least in the short term, it's gonna fall on deaf ears, because the pain is too raw to draw a lesson from that. But it's something that I'm sure maybe now, he's about 18 years old, I'm sure he sees it now, but at the time, it's like, I can't hear. He's only 16 now. Oh, okay.
00:28:09
Speaker
Sorry, I don't mean to rush his age. I think he's still hurting from it. And I think he always will. In that same chapter about his getting cut, I talk about my own blunder when I was young, which I had given a speech before a PTA meeting.
00:28:37
Speaker
and like a little 10-minute speech in Maya. I had chosen the subject of Angola, a civil war that I'd read about in Time magazine, and it was just basically a speech about current events in which I mispronounced the word chaos. I thought it was pronounced chaus. I had never seen the word before, and I had chaus here and chaus there, and I remember the laughter that skittered around the room and
00:29:07
Speaker
The strange looks on people's faces as I said this, mispronounce this word. And I remember sitting down beside my dad afterward and he kind of murmured to me, chaos, not chouse. And my embarrassment and sense of failure was, you know, I was just mortified.
00:29:30
Speaker
And it's, it's stayed with me all these years. This happened decades ago and yet it remains with me. And I think in all of us, when we searched through late at night, our own memories, certain times you'll feel that little trickle of, Oh my God, I did that, or I said that. And the embarrassment lingers. And so I think even the embarrassment of being caught from a basketball team probably is going to stay with him.
00:30:01
Speaker
And there is something you wrote, too, that I love, that to read as a writer is to read not only with attention to artistry, it's also to read with jealousy, with ambition, with disputation, with rivalry, with fellowship, with fear. And you kind of go on and on there, and it's just this great sort of, this great sentence about how you go about reading. And I wonder, like, what is the process by which you go about cracking open the eggs of what you read like that so you get to that depth?
00:30:33
Speaker
Well, you kind of summarized how I read, as probably all people do, a necessity we read personally. We're not machines deciphering words or human beings bringing our own backgrounds and temperaments, values, our personal histories. We have to bring the books. We're not machines. And so when I
00:31:03
Speaker
When I'm reading, I'm sometimes arguing with the author, sometimes chuckling at an author's mistake. Other times I read with great awe, thinking how was that done? And how can I do it?
Engaging with Books: A Personal Experience
00:31:22
Speaker
We do bring our own personalities to books. So when I
00:31:31
Speaker
When I write about Ernest Hemingway in the book, when I read some of Hemingway's stories, I'm thinking not just about the content of the story, but I'm thinking about my own father, or my own war, or my own moral failures, or my own moral successes, few as they've been.
00:31:59
Speaker
and adjudicating what I read through the personal lens of my own history. Well, that's hard for an author to accept that a book will be taken by a reader in ways the author didn't intend. And yet it's inevitable. And somehow I and other writers have to learn that books and readers
00:32:28
Speaker
kind of brush up against one another. They don't intersect necessarily. They sort of glance off one another. I recount an incident in dad's maybe book about giving a reading, I think it was in Chicago, of a chapter in the things they carried about
00:32:58
Speaker
called the man I killed. And then my voice choked up, personal memories came to my head and so on. It was hard to read it. And afterward, a young man came up to me maybe 22 years old or so. And he said, look, I could tell that was really hard for you to do. And I appreciate your honesty and your emotions. And I said, thanks.
00:33:27
Speaker
He gave me a little hug and I hugged back and he started to move away. And then he turned around and came back to where I was sitting and said, you know, I've been thinking about joining the Marine Corps. And after listening to you, I've now decided I'm going to do it. I am joining. And I was shocked.
00:33:57
Speaker
As I always am, I've heard comments like that 20 times, 30 times. And I'll go back to my hotel room and take off my tie and look in the mirror and think of what a failure I've been and what a bozo and how my words were taken in a way that were directly contradictory to what my intent was to warn people about going to wars.
00:34:25
Speaker
caution them about killing people. And it was a taken exactly the reverse. It's a good example of what I mean by bringing our own values. What I meant as a cautionary story was taken as an imperative. I want to do this. I want to go to war.
00:34:50
Speaker
And to that point, even though it felt like on one level of failure, like you failed to dissuade this young man from enlisting, it was also a success in a sense because, as you write in this book about stories leaving room inside a story for your reader's own joys, terrors, lost fathers, and just their own interpretation. So in a sense, the story itself was a success even if the result
00:35:18
Speaker
of this man wanting to take up arms is, you know, in and of itself a failure to you when you go back to that hotel room. So it's this very sort of contentious dichotomy, right? Totally. On the one hand, you do have to leave reading room for a reader's own values and so on to intersect with a story or at least brush off a story. But at the same time, you have to tell yourself that what I had intended
00:35:48
Speaker
had not been absorbed by the person. So they're contradictory, these two feelings that you have as a writer.
00:36:00
Speaker
And the way you write about Hemingway in this book, too, I think was especially just very informative and delightful to read, because of course it starts with your father handing you the tome of Hemingway's short stories and then vanishing, leaving you with this thing, this codex, if you will, in your hands.
00:36:23
Speaker
And since that moment, Hemingway has been this person and this titan of literature that you've carried with you your entire life. I was wondering maybe you could speak to Hemingway and why your Hemingway speaks to you in the way that your father's Hemingway spoke to him. Well, it's my responses to Hemingway.
00:36:45
Speaker
always been love and hate, kind of not simultaneously, but I'll jump from one story I really admire to another that I find, you know, pretentious or stereotypical or wrongheaded. And then another story, I'll hold the door. I don't, I don't think you need to indulge in hero worship to admire a writer.
00:37:16
Speaker
that I admire Madame Bovary a lot. And I'm not so taken by Salombo, by Flaubert. The same is true of many writers. And I try to express not my take or opinions on Hemingway to my children when I write about Hemingway, but I try to express the thought that we should be talking to books as we read them.
00:37:46
Speaker
sometimes arguing with Aristotle or, you know, disputing not askew or as I did talking to Hemingway, as I read Hemingway, books should be, I think, engaged with and spoken to and listened to and not read as a kind of gloss or
00:38:14
Speaker
slide through it as quickly as we can. The one sign for me of a really good book is one that we're taking to bed in our heads with us and thinking about and wondering about how would I behave if I were in the circumstances that that character was in. Would I have done what that character did? That is someone I'm
00:38:42
Speaker
taught when I'm writing about other books, I'm kind of writing about my own as well. That I don't accept, I don't expect my books to be just taken, I expect them to be argued with and disputed. Dad's maybe book is an example that that that my book can be taken as sentimental. And it is in many cases is that I didn't find
00:39:12
Speaker
sentiment to be villainous or immoral. Many writers do, I don't. The expression of love and expressions of nostalgia and expressions of virtually any emotion to me are a virtue and always have been. But I realize that others don't feel that way.
00:39:39
Speaker
And so I'm even arguing with myself when I read my own books. Why do you think sentimentality is so panned among many writers, probably especially against writers who consider themselves quote-unquote serious writers? Yeah, I think that there's sometimes a disguise or a kind of psychic clap camouflage.
00:40:10
Speaker
It's recognizable when I see it. I chuckle at it. I remember, I think this was James Dickey, a really terrific poet, who was asked about this very issue of sentimentality. He said, I don't know why the fuck people are complaining about it. To me, that's what being a human being, we are sentimental creatures.
00:40:34
Speaker
And he said, I'll be damned if I'm not going to be a human being. I use a couple of expressions in my own book, and I just addressed the issue of sentimentality. I said, what am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to chill my emotions with literary ice? Am I supposed to lie? Am I supposed to hide behind the camouflage of
00:41:03
Speaker
objectivity, that there are times, especially in really, really good books, where you can feel the tug of emotion and the give and take of emotion in the book in a way that can be so powerful as to be, I mean, and overwhelming as to be a great, great virtue of the book.
00:41:33
Speaker
And when you talk about reading a good book and you're talking, you're engaging with the book, I'm one of these people who likes to write in the books, write in the margins, sometimes with colored pencils or colored pens, so I can have that kind of dialogue. Do you engage with the text in that way too, where in fact you feel like you're in dialogue with it? I engage in exactly the same way. I write little notes in books.
00:42:00
Speaker
I highlight even on my iPad when I'm reading, I'll highlight and put notes in of my responses. Sometimes they're really, they're reverential and awestruck. This is amazing. Other times I'm disputing what I read. But I do feel that the mediocre and too bad books are those which I don't have much occasion to take many notes.
00:42:30
Speaker
Things like stereotypy and things like nulladrama are enough to make me close a book and not even read it, much less take notes on it. One of the great pieces of advice you offered, too, in the book was read widely, ration the booze, and don't forget to write a little. And I want to be helpful, of course, but I don't know how. I feel like an imposter. And I wonder, like, how does Tim O'Brien feel like an imposter?
00:43:00
Speaker
This is a sensitive subject to me, but it's still worth saying, I guess, is the whole issue of fame and the words Tim O'Brien. I don't, to me, they mean a guy sitting in his underwear in front of a computer trying to write a decent sentence. And I certainly don't walk to the grocery store and
00:43:26
Speaker
board airplanes, and so on, thinking to myself, as famous. And, and by that, I mean, literally, it's just not true. 99% of America has no idea who I am. Partly because they don't read because they don't read my books, but partly because maybe they don't like my books.
00:43:53
Speaker
For every person who knows who I am, there are, you know, 99 people who don't. And of the one who does may just have heard of me and not even read me. It's an example of, it's a crass example and a gross example, I guess, of self-impression.
00:44:19
Speaker
that to me, as I try to explain in the book, every sentence is a struggle. And every paragraph is a struggle. Every clause is a struggle. Am I repeating myself? Is it fresh? Is it original? Is the language inviting and graceful? All those questions to which the answer is almost always no, no, no, it's not.
00:44:48
Speaker
and then trying again and trying again. And so the best advice I give to myself and my kids in the course of the book is Joseph Conrad's advice, which is the sitting down is all. You sit down and you try. And you may fail, but you sit down again and you try. And you may fail again. And it's the record of my writing experience.
00:45:16
Speaker
mainly a record of failure and trying to recognize and admit failure.
00:45:24
Speaker
and then the effort to do better. The times I felt most alive playing during my baseball days were when I was just alone in my basement hitting hundreds of balls off a tee. And that was, to me, the most fun. I loved it more than anything. And I have this image of you, too, just in your office in front of that computer, perhaps in your underwear at 3 AM.
00:45:50
Speaker
hitting a ball off a tee, essentially. Is that where you feel most engaged and most alive when you're up against that struggle? Yes. It's the doing of the thing and the trying to approach some sort of standard of excellence that's the fun. It's the challenge and it's the frustration.
00:46:18
Speaker
The fun of it, it's the trying of it that is most memorable to me and most important to me. Once a thing is done, you can feel some satisfaction. But unfortunately, there's always the next sentence and then the next and the next.
The Joy and Struggle of Writing
00:46:41
Speaker
And so one has to find the pleasure and the doing of it and the sitting down and the doing of it
00:46:49
Speaker
even knowing that most often the consequence is going to be failure and then trying again. And are you the kind of writer that labors over, let's say like one sentence at a time and then kind of moves to the next one? Or can you kind of like churn and burn and then go back and rewrite? I do both. I slave over a sentence.
00:47:19
Speaker
And finally find some reason to leave it for the next. Usually it's, it's a kind of satisfaction over that sentence. But three sentences later, I'll find myself going back and either deleting the sentence I had laid over because I had gone, the story had gone elsewhere or my intentions had gone elsewhere.
00:47:46
Speaker
That is true of whole chapters of not only my current book, but of all my books, where it's paying attention to each sentence, moving to the next and then having to return. And almost always it's returning way back. It's delete that chapter or rewrite that chapter because of discoveries that can't come later on in the process of the story.
00:48:17
Speaker
So it's a mixture of both the here and now, this sentence, and then having new months later or weeks later or sometimes years later revisit a whole chapter or revisit sentences and have to redo that which we thought was already complete.
00:48:36
Speaker
And so much of the great advice you offer in this book just from a writing perspective, I love it. Of the many countless sticky notes I put in this book, a lot of them are with some of the prescriptive stuff that you offer just as a way of like these little, it's like these many, many writing books, if you will, writing on craft.
00:48:56
Speaker
Were a lot of those tips and pointers that you cite, or those things that were just hard won through the sheer act of your own writerly repetition, or were they some things you kind of picked from the apple tree of this writer and this one? How did you arrive at a lot of those? They came through the consequence of talking to my kids about writing, reading their papers.
00:49:22
Speaker
all the writing that had to do in the course of your schoolwork, and finding things that I'd encountered earlier on, and then talking to my kids about it. I give for one example, this is just one of many things, but I say information is not story, information is information. You can do pages of description giving information as to setting,
00:49:52
Speaker
or character background. You can write pages of it. It can be done to infinity. But at some point, something has to occur. Some behavior has to happen that would surprise a dramatic event. That without human behavior, description is simply information. Well, this comes from reading.
00:50:22
Speaker
The kit, the paper is written by my kids. It'll give lots of, you know, they're told to write a story. Instead, they write information and not a story. Nothing happens. Happeningness is important to stories. Without happeningness, a story is not a story because stories are, among other things, at their core, characters behaving in the world. And there's other behaviors in the world.
00:50:51
Speaker
So the so-called writing tips that I offer in the book are those that I've simply delivered to my own children.
00:51:00
Speaker
and there's one uh... one lesson they they uh... i think you're teaching uh... teaching to me this uh... that it essentially words uh... that are going to be italicized should just be implicitly and italicized by the mere selection of that word that you don't have to tell the font you can just if it's a good enough word it will in fact read as if it's italicized i really love that inside i was like really really sharp in astute never had to meet
00:51:30
Speaker
Thank you. I agree with the advice I gave to Timmy about italics. We should try to avoid them. They're artificial devices. On the other hand, can you give the example in that very short chapter? I bet you italicized this, and I did in the book. There are no hard and fast rules, obviously, that italics are not immoral or illegal.
00:51:59
Speaker
And then helpful. And Timmy reminded me of that in a very personal kind of way. And early in the book too, when Timmy had the acid reflux and he was really sick and he just wouldn't sleep and you guys are trying to
00:52:25
Speaker
of course, and you know, appease him, try to figure out what was wrong, and then of course you finally figure it out, and then all of a sudden it was like the sheer absence of that. It reminded you of your experience in Vietnam of when a firefight ended, it was so excruciatingly present and then became so shockingly absent.
00:52:45
Speaker
Yeah, and just embedded in that, it just made me think I wanted to just ask you, like even 50 years removed from your traumatic war experience, it's something that has stayed with you and essentially it's with everything you write.
00:53:04
Speaker
So for you, has writing the last 50 years, what's it been like carrying that with you for 50 years and working through it on the page and right to this day, right through your last book? It's hard to answer that question, but I don't know myself probably well enough to answer it completely. There's been a burden.
00:53:33
Speaker
In the sense of, uh, that I love wake at night and remember things as we all will. If you've been on a cancer ward and survived cancer, you would remember the cancer ward and the chemo and the other patients around you. Some of them probably died and it's not going to go away and probably shouldn't that in the end.
00:54:00
Speaker
I think it's good to remember tragedy. It's bad, I think, to try to eradicate it with booze or with willful forgetfulness or with drugs or by simply turning one's head away from it. I think that's not a good thing to do. I don't think it's psychologically helpful.
00:54:28
Speaker
And I don't think in the end it can work. We're going to remember that which we remember and often remember painful, traumatic things. Some people think it's, I get the advice constantly, you know, put it behind you and you're right about something happy and new. That the advice is well-intended, I'm sure, but
00:54:56
Speaker
you wouldn't say it to a cancer survivor or somebody who had come through breast cancer or somebody who had been at Auschwitz or somebody who had been through a difficult divorce. Or if you said it, you'd be giving bad advice, I think, that it's better, I think, to remember and try to deal with pain than
00:55:26
Speaker
pretend it doesn't exist.
Impact of Writing and Reflections on Violence
00:55:29
Speaker
And I've done that in my writing for decades and I think probably has helped me a little.
00:55:37
Speaker
And I suspect that it's, I have no doubt that it's also probably helped hundreds of thousands, if not millions of others to read your work and how forthright you are with the experience and the way you were able to convey those experiences and not turn that blind eye. That's my hope. On the other hand, I had a letter a couple of days ago from another Vietnam veteran
00:56:07
Speaker
a writer. And he said, you know, here we are old men and people are still killing other people for bad reasons. And what have we really accomplished? And I often feel that way. I remember Kurt Vonnegut had this wonderful line in Slaughterhouse Five that someone asked him if he was
00:56:37
Speaker
if he was a anti-war writer. And Vonnegut responded by saying, I could no more be an anti-war writer than an anti-glacier writer. And I feel that too. That's kind of what my friend had written to me a couple of days ago, that your hope other people would be helped. But
00:57:08
Speaker
It feels like Sisyphus or you're pushing something that uphilled, it won't go uphill. So I feel a certain resignation and a kind of sadness and a kind of failure. But as my friend also said, at least we tried and that's something he said to me. It's not everything that we did try.
00:57:38
Speaker
And you take some solace and at least having tried. And I'm so glad you brought up Slaughterhouse-Five. So that was a note I had made about your recent book here with that. I had this feeling of being unstuck in time the way Billy Pilgrim is in Slaughterhouse-Five with kind of the short chapters and the kind of jumping all over the place, but yet it still feels cohesive and coherent. Was Vonnegut kind of with you when you were writing this book at all in any way?
00:58:10
Speaker
Yeah. And Vonnegut and a slew of other writers, including writers who aren't war writers. Um, so there was with me and Philip Roth is with me. Delillo was with me. Uh, and a lot of bad writers are with me as well. That is don't do what they did there with me. The influences are many. Vonnegut, uh, there's certainly a positive influence.
00:58:41
Speaker
And there are a bunch of other positive influences as well. John Fowls is one who once was a really well-known writer, much respected, and not read much anymore. But he has a book of stories called the Ebony Tower that I reread, I don't know how many times, a dozen, maybe more. It's just a great book. It's almost unknown. And he remains among my influences.
00:59:10
Speaker
And as we, being mindful of your time, of course, Tim, and as we kind of wind down here, there's a little part at the end of the book which really struck me, and it kind of echoes what you were saying of being sort of alive and in the moment, and all you can do is kind of control the controllables when you're at your computer.
00:59:30
Speaker
And you wrote that accomplishment will follow where playfulness takes you. You've delivered joy to a man who once believed there would be no more. And you're writing that to your sons of course towards the end. But I love that sentiment of accomplishment will follow where playfulness takes you.
00:59:47
Speaker
And how have you maintained that playfulness? And do you think that's also maybe the only thing that's probably the best advice you could ever give any kind of artist because so much is out of our control that as long as we're playful and having fun and get to do this, then accomplishment will follow. Yeah, I think in all serious literature there's a playfulness that's involved in it. Playfulness is risk taking in part. What if I write a book that
01:00:15
Speaker
that reads like a memoir, but in fact is fiction. I'm talking about the things they carried. It was playful in its conception. I'm going to write a book that will have all the constituent ingredients of a memoir using my own name and dedicating a book to my characters and all the other aspects of the book.
01:00:44
Speaker
But in fact, there's a work of fiction, which is declared on the front in the front of the book. It is fiction, but then trying to seduce readers into believing it's not. Well, it was playful, but playful in a serious sense that I thought through the play, I can do things that are meaningful to me as a writer, and I hope would be meaningful to other people. I think
01:01:12
Speaker
One serious aspect of that play is that ultimately the reality of what we have gone through in our lives slowly is eroded and undermined and made to feel unreal with the passage of time. When I look back at my time in Vietnam, even though I intellectually know it actually happened,
01:01:38
Speaker
it doesn't feel that way to me anymore. I'll look at my legs and think, how did these legs really walk through this? And did this body actually engage in killing people? Is that it feels like it couldn't have happened that I know it did. And so this blur between what actually happens in the world and what our
01:02:07
Speaker
bodies and minds tell us later is a real thing. So the playfulness gets me at a place that is meant to represent my feelings now about my own life.
Marriage and Fatherhood: Joy and Transformation
01:02:21
Speaker
Could I have actually lived a life I led? It feels as if it's impossible, and yet I know it did. There was a time when I thought I would never be the father, and that was my reality.
01:02:36
Speaker
And now I've got only M1, I have been one for 60 years.
01:02:43
Speaker
The last thing I'd love to ask you is, it's that one little sentence that comes after the accomplishment part, that writing to your son that you've delivered joy to a man who wants to believe there would be no more. And so I think if 56 was when you, how old you were when you had your first son, why at that time did you feel there would be no more joy ahead of you?
01:03:13
Speaker
That question is really almost too personal to answer, but I was in a black time of my life. And it felt that I would maybe commit suicide. There was nothing Lusca lived for. It felt that I was done.
01:03:42
Speaker
And there would be no more. And to the fortuitous incidents of life, I was drawn out of it. And I got married and fell in love and had children, all of which I'd written off as possibilities. And to have such joy delivered after such blackness was lifesaving.
01:04:09
Speaker
Yeah, well, I think I speak for everyone that we're just thankful for all the work you do and that you were successfully able to come out of that time to be a husband and a father and to continue doing the work that we've come to
01:04:25
Speaker
to know and love by you. So with that said, Tim, thank you so much for the work and, of course, coming on the show and being able to talk so forthrightly about craft, the book, your life, and everything in between. So thank you so much, Tim. Well, thank you for being such a close reader. I really appreciate it. You're very welcome. And yeah, well, hopefully we get to do this again sometime down the road. I will take you.
01:04:55
Speaker
Yep. We did it again. We made it. We got here. See you in efforts. Thanks to Bay Path, of course. And then thanks to Tim O'Brien. How great was that? I know he said he's not famous, but to people like you and me, he's freaking DiCaprio. Go buy his book. It's phenomenal stuff. Dad's maybe book.
01:05:17
Speaker
Follow the show, of course, on various social media channels, at cnfpod, across them all. Leave a review on Apple Podcasts. They matter. I don't know how much they matter, but they matter to the packaging of a show. Let's just face it, if you stumble across a podcast and it's got a lot of nice reviews and ratings, you're like, alright, I'll give that one a chance. That's what you can do. You've got the power, man.
01:05:38
Speaker
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