Article #1: "A Conversation With Tim O'Brien"

Title: A Conversation with Tim O'Brien

Author(s): Tim O'Brien and Patrick Hicks

Publication Details: Indiana Review 27.2 (Winter 2005): p85-95.

Source: Short Story Criticism.

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Ed. Jelena O. Krstovic. Vol. 123. Detroit: Gale. From Literature Resource Center.

Document Type: Critical essay, Interview

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2009 Gale, Cengage Learning

Full Text: 

[(interview date March 2004) In this interview, which took place in March, 2004, Hicks and O'Brien discuss the author's life and writings, focusing on The Things They Carried, which O'Brien regards as a work about the nature of truth and about storytelling itself.]
I picked him up at the regional airport in Sioux Falls. It was a muggy day in late April, but I knew that Tim O'Brien was used to such weather because he grew up only fifty miles east of here, in Worthington, Minnesota. It must have been a bittersweet return for him because it was here that he was inducted into the Army. It was here that he spent a sleepless night in a YMCA with other recruits, and it was here--at the very same airport that he had just flown into--that he was loaded onto a plane and taken to Fort Lewis for basic training. This small city in South Dakota is where Tim O'Brien abandoned his civilian life, and began his long journey into Vietnam.
O'Brien never intended to fight in the Vietnam War. In fact, after graduating summa cum laude from Macalester College in May 1968, he planned to do post-graduate work at Harvard. Instead, he was assigned to the Quang Ngai Province of Vietnam where he received the Purple Heart, the Bronze Star, and the Combat Infantryman's Badge. He was honorably discharged in March 1970 with the rank of sergeant. After returning to the States he picked up where he left off and went to Harvard, he worked as a national affairs reporter for The Washington Post, and he wrote his first book, If I Die in a Combat Zone (1973). This searing indictment against the war brought him immediate attention and catapulted his literary career. His subsequent novels include: Northern Lights (1975), Going after Cacciato (1978), The Nuclear Age (1985), The Things They Carried (1990), In the Lake of the Woods (1994), Tomcat in Love (1998), and July, July (2002). He has won the National Book Award, the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, the O. Henry Award, and he has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Ever since he started writing three decades ago, it has become impossible to discuss contemporary American fiction without mentioning his name.
I met him at Joe Foss Airfield on April 28, 2004. He was dressed in a yellow sweater, ratty jeans, a tan baseball cap, and white sneakers. As soon as we stepped outside into the heat, he lit up a cigarette and squinted at the sky. Tim O'Brien is immediately friendly, very open, and it is easy to laugh with him.
We drove towards his hotel and as we stopped for coffee I asked about his health. Unknown to virtually everyone, he had been inadvertently poisoning himself from December to late March of 2004. Mysterious sores had spread over his entire body, pus and blood oozed from his limbs in frightening quantity, and he lost twenty-eight pounds in one month. He was so weak that he was confined to a wheelchair. Specialists informed him that he probably had liver cancer. He drew up a will, and prepared for the worst.
It turned out to be a vitamin supplement called Niacin. O'Brien had been ordered to take it for his cholesterol, but the dosage was so high that it was damaging his liver. Once the Niacin was reduced, he began to heal almost immediately. The sores dried up into scars, and the doctors ordered him to eat plenty of ice-cream so that he would gain weight.
When I asked if he felt like he had a new lease on life, he smiled widely and nodded. It's little wonder he feels this way because much has changed for Tim O'Brien. Aside from moving to Texas and being granted a clean bill of health, he became a father for the first time in 2003. He's also hard at work on a new novel, which is about a reporter who returns from the Dutch East Indies. This character flies into Los Angeles, meets a sickly woman and ... that's about all he knows at the moment. He says that the terror attacks of September 11 will work their way into the narrative, but he's not sure how yet.
We talked in a hotel that was on the edge of the prairie. Cigarette smoke threaded its way towards the ceiling as we spoke about Minnesota, his latest novel, Vietnam, magic, and the threat of terrorism.
[Hicks]: How, if at all, do you think that growing up in Minnesota affected your writing?
[O'Brien]: In two ways for sure. The settings for many of my books are located in Minnesota. Even in a book like The Things They Carried, although a good portion of it happens in Vietnam, the main character is from Minnesota. Northern Lights, Minnesota. In the Lake of the Woods, Minnesota. July, July, Minnesota. The book I'm working on now, one of the main characters is from Minnesota. It's a way for me to ground the characters in a physical space with which I'm familiar. It means I don't have to do research. It means I know things intuitively where I would have to otherwise look it up. Secondly though, and much more importantly, is the diction with which the books are written. I write--I try to write--in a natural style which for me is born in a place like Worthington or Austin. People in Minnesota talk briskly, efficiently, and at times in grunts. [Laughs]. I like writing that way.
Is Minnesota your version of Yoknapatawpha County?
No, not in that grand a sense. It's more of a psychological background and a linguistic background. Minnesotans speak--maybe all Midwesterners speak--with a certain hubris. They're proud of themselves, but they do it in a neat little way. There's a semi-laughing slyness with which Midwesterners speak, as if they know more than they're going to let on in a conversation. Garrison Keillor, as you know, is a master of this in his humor. I was born and bred in this country so I don't want to write like someone from Philadelphia or Texas or LA. I want to write from my heart, which has to do with my roots.
You wrote a novel while you were a student at Macalester College or, more precisely, when you visited Czechoslovakia with SPAAN (Student Project for Amenity Among Nations). What was that novel about?
[Surprised] I really don't remember much about it. It had to do with what was going on in Czechoslovakia at the time, which was the beginning of the revolution. I was there in 1967. It was about the yearning to be free of the shackles of tyranny and autocracy. It had a thriller surface to it but I can't remember the plot. That was a long time ago but I do remember that it was not good, that part I do remember. But I also remember that it was good to try. It was my first try at writing a full novel and it was abysmal. It didn't get published, and that was good, because I learned how hard it is to write a decent book. It's good to learn that sort of thing early on in your life.
I know that you have great affection for your alma mater.
Yes. Very much so.
What role, if any, did Macalester College have in shaping you as a writer?
It shaped my liberal arts background and being. Because of Macalester I'm an eclectic reader. I always read from the time I was a little kid but I didn't read eclectically, widely, or across a variety of subjects. Because of Macalester I'll read a book on psychology and a book on history and others on economics. Prior to Macalester I'd read deeply and narrowly about things that I cared about, and Macalester taught me to broaden my caring. It's made me not only a better writer but a better citizen. To be that way, you really have to read widely and not scoff at things that on the surface you may not be interested in. For example, I took a course on astronomy, a subject which I thought would be thoroughly boring. But I found myself not only fascinated by cosmology, but fascinated by the religious issues that are born out of that. Where do we come from? Where do we go? What if we live in a collapsing universe? What if we don't and the universe keeps expanding and we turn into protons and subprotons and quarks? Which future is better? What began as a course became a scientific interest, became a philosophic interest, and to this day when I run across a book on cosmology that isn't mathematically inaccessible I'll still read it.
Although Vietnam is the center of gravity for much of your fiction, your themes move far beyond warfare and penetrate deeply into the mysteries of the human experience. In spite of this, do you sometimes feel pigeonholed as a war writer?
I don't have many feelings about it unless I'm asked. If somebody asks me then I've got to come up with an answer. In a way it's flattering to be thought of as a spokesman for people who have gone through this terrible experience. In a way it's frustrating but only when I stop to think about it. When I think about The Things They Carried or Cacciato or In the Lake of the Woods, which are three books that have a lot of Vietnam in them, they're so different as books that it's hard to take seriously the Vietnam part. In the Lake of the Woods occurs after Vietnam and living with the consequences of history and misdeed and horror. Cacciato is a fabulist running-away-from-the-war story. The Things They Carried is a book largely about storytelling and issues about truth. It has as much to do with epistemology as it does with the war. So, I don't take seriously the Vietnam thing. I think if I were a James Webb or a Philip Caputo I'd probably take it more seriously. But because I'm not of the literary world, and I don't travel in literary circles, I don't hear it much. I sit in my underwear and write my books and my wife doesn't pigeonhole me [Laughs]. I just don't hear it much.
One of the most powerful stories in The Things They Carried is "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong." I can see the cheerleader, Mary Anne Bell, as a Kurtz figure, but what was the genesis of this story? Apparently it's based on a real incident?
It's based on a real recounting of a sighting. I was told when I arrived in Vietnam that a young high school girl had been to the Song Tra Bong, a Green Beret camp, which is a real place. Then I heard it from another guy, and another guy, and I heard it--I don't know--twelve times. None of them had ever seen her. They'd just heard the story themselves. Then I came back to the States and heard it some more from people who were actually at the camp as Green Berets. They said it with some authenticity and a look in their eyes which made me think that they weren't making it up. So I heard all these anecdotes about a young woman coming over to Vietnam and like most readers of the story I just shrugged it off and thought that just couldn't have happened. Then when I thought seriously about doing a story, I had to ask myself why I didn't believe it. Logistically it was wholly believable. All you had to do was buy a plane ticket and fly from Cleveland to LA to Bangkok to Saigon. There was nothing to prevent civilians from coming into the country. And there were many civilians there. I mean, there were lots of them. More than has been written about. Everything from hippies traveling through the country to secretaries for contractors to doughnut dollies to nurses to journalists. There were really lots of civilians and women in Vietnam. So the story didn't seem quite as impossible to me when I began thinking about it seriously. The only thing that really stops a person from believing the story is gender. Could a woman be sucked into war the way that a man could be? Then issues of gender began to interest me. If it weren't for the conventions of our society where men, by and large, fill combatant roles, the same thing that happened to me could happen to a woman. There have been societies where women have served in combat roles.
We only need to think of Joan of Arc, or Queen Boadicea of the Iceni. She was certainly a challenge for the Romans.
Yes, absolutely, there's a good example. Women are capable of violence. We know that from reading history. Lizzy Borden, Elizabeth, and we could go on about women who are less than peaceable in their nature. For me it's a story ultimately meant to bridge a gap--a gap of literature--because women sometimes say, "I don't want to read a war story, I don't like them, it's a foreign experience to me, I'll never have to go through anything like it." And what happens in the story is essentially what I went through. Coming over naïve and romantic and full of ideals about oneself and being really altered, irretrievably, just by proximity to violence. I can't prove the story, but I've heard it from so many people that I think that it probably is true.
I notice in The Things They Carried that you obviously have these moments of horror, but it's also quite funny at times. Really funny.
Good, good. I'm pleased you noticed that.
Given that then, what do you think the role of the storyteller is in society?
It's very important to me when I'm writing tragedy to have humor in it, and vice-versa. The world is not uni-dimensional. It's not all sad or all happy. I remember reading Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl's book, and Primo Levi on the concentration camps, and even their humor was a way of coping and dealing with the world--it's called gallows humor. It was rampant in Vietnam. I'm sure it's rampant in cancer wards, bad marriages, wherever horror strikes, and human beings are capable of laughing at it, responding to it, dealing with it. The truth of the role, my role, is to tell a good story. It's not that simple, but in a way it is that simple. If the story isn't gripping to me as the author, whatever message I might have is lost. It will turn into abstraction and proselytizing, which is not what fiction is for. Fiction is simply there for the purpose of story. And by story I don't mean just plot. I mean human beings behaving in a world of situational ethics. That person jumps off a ship because he thinks it's going to sink, and it doesn't. How do you live with yourself? That act of cowardice makes Lord Jim. A whole novel ensues from that, a big fat one, of a man running from his misdeed and trying to deal with it.
Raising questions, I think, is absolutely crucial to good storytelling. You may not feel that you have something to teach your readers, but do feel that your readers want to learn something from your novels?
I think they hope they will, but that hope is frustrated in all my books by my adamant refusal to fulfill that need. In the Lake of the Woods is an example where there is hope that I'm going to solve this mystery for people. My personality is such that I don't see that as my role. My role is not to solve mysteries, but to expand them. To make them bigger. To ultimately make readers think of their lives in terms of ambiguity. It's the human condition and we're uncertain about almost everything. Am I going to be alive tomorrow? I don't know. Where will I go if I'm not alive? Will I go to heaven or hell or is there someplace in-between? We don't know and most of the disciplines of the world are there to give us hints of certainty. Science is organized that way. Houses are built so that you are a little more certain that you won't freeze to death. The world is organized, but fiction is different. Fiction is there to open up the door. I don't know why I'm doing what I'm doing, I don't know why I jumped off that ship, why I went to that war, why I married that woman. I don't know why I'm going to rob that bank. There's a book I read when I was a kid by John Steinbeck called The Winter of Our Discontent. It's about this middle-aged man who robs a bank next door in a small town. He didn't know why he was doing it, he was just discontent. I try to write books that don't pretend to give answers. I couldn't write, for example, The DaVinci Code because it's not my take on how the world is, that there's this code which will resolve who Christ was. The mystery of it all is what intrigues me. I want to enhance the mystery and deepen it.
That's one of the ironies, I suppose, of being in Vietnam because one of the certainties you saw was the outcome of hatred or, at the very least, not being able to understand the other side. What did you learn about hatred in Vietnam?
I learned how powerful a force it is. [Pauses]. How people come to hate things ... they don't even know what it is they're hating. The Viet Cong were hated by my fellow soldiers and the Vietnamese in general were hated for their foreignness. We couldn't understand their language, their culture, their religion. It was all beyond us. No one knew the first thing about anything except that everybody was dying, usually from landmines and booby-traps and quick little firefights. You couldn't even see the enemy and therefore the enemy became even more hated. Who were they? Where were they? It was like hating a ghost. It's like being haunted and you're getting blown up, but there are no front lines and there are no enemy soldiers in uniforms. As a consequence, if you took sniper fire you'd just step back and you'd waste a village. Just call in gunships or artillery and the whole village would disappear. Not just the enemy, but the chickens and the dogs and the pigs and the little girls and little boys and the teenagers and the old men. They would all fry. It all became the enemy. Vietnam became the enemy. The whole place became the enemy.
The only certainty was the uncertainty of the place.
Yes, exactly, that's a line out of The Things They Carried. There's some truth about that because your values are changed by war. What was once wrong--killing people--now becomes sanctioned murder. Civility and savagery change places. All your values go upside down, and what you were certain about on the prairies of southern Minnesota change when you get into this heart of darkness called Vietnam. Everything you grew up believing in--politicians don't lie, you must be patriotic--it all gets turned upside down.
Just like Alice in Wonderland.
It really felt that you'd gone through the looking glass.
You have commented in the past that Curt Lemon's sudden death in The Things They Carried is based upon the death of your friend, Chip Merricks. Would you mind describing what he was like as your friend, as a human being, so that we can see him a bit better?
Sure, sure. I can say things about him but of course I can never bring him alive for you. He was a slender, hip-talking, young black kid in his early twenties from Orlando, Florida. I first met him when we were assigned to the same foxhole one night in my platoon. We'd be sharing the same foxhole which meant that he'd be awake for two hours while I slept, and then I'd take over while he slept. So we spent our first night keeping each other alive and trusting each other. That's how our friendship was born. It was born in a life and death trust. It was instantaneous. He didn't fall asleep. I didn't fall asleep. I can't say we become close friends right away because it took about a month of that first night repeating itself in different kinds of ways in combat. Then his humor began to come out. I've got pictures--or had pictures of us together, someone else has them now--of us laughing together. We wrote letters to each other's sisters. We didn't talk about the black/white chasm, which was really pronounced in both America and Vietnam. We talked through it or around it. It was there as a subject, but we didn't want to address it probably because it would wreck our friendship. We became visceral friends and I think that we would have remained friends too. It was that kind of friendship. When he died, he was the one person in my company who I felt really--he was my friend--and to have that one person die was horrible, horrible.
Just to change the pace a bit: there are times when the shadow of Joyce and Borges seem to hover on the fringes of your work--I'm thinking about "How to Tell a True War Story," the news clippings which you fabricate in In the Lake of the Woods, and the numerous footnotes in Tomcat--has Joyce influenced your work at all?
Yes. The same with Borges and Marquez, Faulkner, Dos Passos, Hemingway. Fowles too, The French Lieutenant's Woman and parts of The Magus especially. Equally feeding into these influences are things from childhood like fairy tales. In my books the dead will sit up and talk and that comes from fairy tales where these things can happen. My best work is always set outdoors, not indoors. My best writing happens when the doors open and the characters are outside. Why that is, I don't know, but I think it has to do with childhood reading where I was enamored with outdoor stories. There was a series called The Young Pioneers by Joseph Altsheler and my Dad put me on to it. I guess it was big in the 20s. He wrote a series about the Civil War too. I can't remember the name of it, but he wrote a total of thirty books and I read them all. And the Hardy Boys. These were not closed room stories and, to this day, it's very hard for me to work with characters when doors are around them. I don't know what it is, but it closes me up. I like moving through the outdoors because it opens up possibilities for human behavior.
I want to talk about this idea of opening up possibilities in the physical world. I know that as a child you dappled with magic.
I still do. [Laughs]
And not just in the physical sense I think, because you manipulate reality through your fiction. In particular, you write about deception and lies. What role do you think illusion plays in writing?
It's essential to all fiction because it's illusion, it's not really happening, it's made up. As with a magic act, the reader knows it's made up. You begin a novel knowing that it's invented and that the characters aren't real. It's the same with a magic act. You know that lion hasn't really vanished into thin air, it just seems that way. With an act of magic or a good novel you suspend disbelief. So, if I'm reading--I don't know--The Sun Also Rises, I see Jake and Lady Brett in a taxi-cab, it's so well done and the art is so perfect that there's nothing in the way of surrendering to the illusion of it all. The same goes with magic. If it's done artfully, which means not as a trick, a good magic act flows. The dove turns into a rabbit, and the rabbit jumps up and goes into the lap of the audience, and takes a card out of the pocket of the audience, and brings it back to the magician, and it's the card that an hour earlier he made vanish.
It's the story. That unbroken illusion that mesmerizes the audience. As with good writing, the tricks become more important than the magician on the stage.
Yes. It's all wrapped together. One thing leads into another and these are the principles that used to apply to magic. By that I mean one-hundred and fifty years ago when real magicians were doing theater magic, it was an evening of connection where everything was married to everything else. This often was done by magicians who didn't speak a word; it was just body language and the flow of one object into another. But the principles of fiction and magic are very similar for the building of illusion. That's what dialogue is for. It gives the illusion of somebody talking. That's what description is for because it gives the reality and smell of a place. Even though you're not really in that moldy and dank basement you feel as if you are by the word "moldy" and the word "dank." Then you try to find words that aren't even moldy and dank, but objects like "algae," and then you don't even have to use the word "moldy."
This sense of illusion and searching for meaning, I see this most vividly when I think of In the Lake of the Woods because the reader has to search through the narrative to find meaning and truth to it all. How do you think that love and trust can operate after a traumatic experience like war? What about a love affair in jeopardy, which is exactly what John and Kathy Wade experience in In the Lake of the Woods?
It's difficult to trust once that trust has been betrayed. In a way it's not healthy to have absolute and abiding trust in everything and everyone. Americans are often taught that it's good to trust everything, but sometimes it's healthy not to. Sometimes it's healthy to have a little distrust of the world, including of oneself. One of the things that you learn as you go through life is that you're not always capable of being a good person or of doing the decent and right thing. We have moments when we're not ourselves. It's good to have a sense of knowledge of the entirety of the human spirit. Most human beings are capable of decency and goodness, and also capable of indecency and real nastiness. You don't have to be a Hitler or a saint. Most of us are in between. My books are always about people who are capable of great good, but also capable of barbarity too. Unfortunately that's who we are as human beings. [Pauses] Or maybe fortunately? It would be very boring to walk through life as a saint and then to be surrounded by other absolute utter saints. It would be like living in--it would be like living in the Partridge Family. [Laughs] I'd rather be in one of those uglier families on TV, just as a matter of interest.
In regards to this sort of psychological terrain in your novels, is there a particular book of yours that you wished received more critical and popular attention?
[Long pause] No. I don't really think about those things. There are aspects of all my books, including the ones that have been wildly popular, that I wish people would notice more. This is also true for things that got less popular acclaim. It's not a matter of the popularity. It's a matter of working, for example, hard on one sentence. You know, your secret thought is, "boy this is a great sentence on that page." And you know why you love it, and you want to hear somebody else talk about it. Once in a blue moon, a student or a teacher or someone that I'll meet along the road of life will mention that sentence or paragraph, and that one mention is sufficient to justify the whole enterprise. When you write a sentence or a paragraph or a page that you feel genuinely giddy about, it's about beauty. You say to yourself, "well, I don't know how I did it," and you don't even take credit for it. It's not you, you just love the thing. Maybe it's like a child? You're aware that you are a part of the creation but you're just so giddy at its beauty.
Your two most recent novels--Tomcat in Love and July, July--deal very much with contemporary American society and gender issues. More specifically, how have women's issues influenced your writing?
In the same way the war did or childhood. I've lived a life and because I've lived a life I know loss, and betrayal, and hurt, and joy. All those things that everybody's felt. I wanted to address those things through the lens of comedy so I wrote Tomcat in Love. I wanted to write about a really despicable sexist guy, but I also wanted it to be really funny. Because Clinton, upon whom the character is kind of based, struck me as funny at times. He's a smart guy, and I liked his politics, but he was a liar and a deceiver of the American people and of his own family. I wanted to get inside somebody like that and ask questions like: How did he get to be that way? And what would it be like to live inside that skin? Take the book I'm writing now; I'm inside the head of a character that's not me. Actually, I'm more of an observer of this character and yet the closer I get to him--just in terms of physic distance--the more intrigued I get, like with Clinton. I guess I need this sense of intrigue in all my books. This is true of John Wade. I didn't know him well and wondered who was this magician, liar, secret-keeper, politician, possible murderer? I know things about him, but I don't know him. The characters that most intrigue me are characters like Lady Macbeth. How did she get to be that way? We'll never know, but you get close enough to feel the vibrations coming off the character. That's what I love about fiction.
We talked early today about the current novel that you're writing. You've got this character coming from Southeast Asia and he lands in Los Angeles, where he meets a sickly woman. How did you come up with these particular scenes?
Part of it is just interest in the world. I've never been to Indonesia and I want to go there, and I will sometime and look around to get the feel of the place. Similarly, this guy is from Santa Monica and while I've been there once, I've never lived there. It's a way of imagining yourself living in another world. There's going to be a Minnesota connection in the book of course, but this guy's home is Santa Monica, a place of the boardwalk, and muscle beach, and movie stars, and poverty. I was intrigued by the place in the way that Vietnam intrigued me. It seems so foreign. The people have their skateboards and their roller-blades and their hard midriffs. They all look beautiful, as if they've come out of a cookie-cutter. I wondered what it would be like to grow up as a middle-class kid with all this tempting wealth and fame surrounding you and making you feel inferior. It seemed like a neat background for a character to grow up in, a place where you're living amid the kind of the people that you can't be. It must hurt. It must cause psychological damage. I want to write about the consequences and the adulthood of where that damage would take you and how you'd compensate for it. What are the risks you'd take, and the things you'd do to aspire to that life? It would be like looking at a candy store through a window. I'd gone out to Santa Monica for a table reading for the script of Going after Cacciato, which was going to be made into a movie, and I went to this place called Shutters which is a famous hotel. There in this room--which was twice, maybe three times, the size of this hotel room we're in--was John Voight, and Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey McGuire. These were people that I'd seen on the screen, and I felt something of what my character felt. I felt ... [Pauses]
Alienated?
Yes, I felt excluded from this whole world of fame and huge amounts of money and physical beauty. This is not my province. I'm from Worthington, Minnesota, and I always will be. They're not. They're of Hollywood.
This is very interesting, I think. Like Hemingway, many of your stories deal with courage, or sometimes the lack thereof, but you also remind me of that sense of loss and coping and of extreme wealth that we find in Fitzgerald. Both of these writers are from the Midwest of course. Do you see any connection? Is this a Midwestern thing?
I think it is partly a Midwestern thing. There's a yearning for the other side of the fence. Not that the grass is greener, but golder. It's got a glitter and a fantasy potential to it that Gatsby aspired to. For a writer who grew up in the Midwest it's not just tempting material, it's necessary material for me to write about. I remember as a kid growing up in Worthington that I was just dying to get out of the place. I was fed up with Kiwanis clubs and

Main Street

and Rotary boys. Everyone knew everybody else and there were no secrets. I hated it, really hated it. I had a yearning for--I don't know what exactly--but it was gold and glittery and there was anonymity around it. I still dream about islands where no one can get at me. I think that is a Midwestern small town desire to get away from the cloistered feel of it all.
But yet we feel alienated and lost when we do get to the larger city.
Yeah, as all the characters do. Yes, that's the sad end to all of these stories.
You recently became a father for the first time and I'm curious to know how fatherhood has changed your perception on life or writing.
[Laughs] All the clichés are true. You come to value something more than you value yourself. It seemed impossible that nine months ago anything would replace writing as the center of my life, but it has. You're filled with fears for the world that before were abstract, like terrorism and anthrax. I fear for the world.
Is this why September 11 is going to be a part of your new novel?
We live in an age with the proliferation of biological and chemical weapons and on every corner there is an evil lurking, and I fear for my son's future. In a way, I didn't fear for myself so much, even in Vietnam, as I fear for what's in store for my kid of nine months. I'm writing about 9/11 in my new novel because it's more than just a political threat or the world blowing up or New York collapsing. It has more to do with the future of the human being in my life now. It makes me want to write about it.

Source Citation

O'Brien, Tim, and Patrick Hicks. "A Conversation with Tim O'Brien." Indiana Review 27.2 (Winter 2005): 85-95. Rpt. in Short Story Criticism. Ed. Jelena O. Krstovic. Vol. 123. Detroit: Gale, 2009. Literature Resource Center. Web. 25 Oct. 2011.

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