Tim O'Brien
Tim O'Brien
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth1 October 1946
CountryUnited States of America
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Life is never all one thing. It bounces around. Certainly, my own life has. Look at Woody Allen's funny movies - all the humor comes out of sad stuff. Sometimes you have to laugh, no matter what life deals you.
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The human life is all one thing, like a blade tracing loops on the ice: a little kid, a twenty-three-year-old infantry sergeant, a middle-aged writer knowing guilt and sorrow.
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It does not exclude him from the process, and we wish his daughter luck.
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I didn't get into writing to make money or get famous or any of that. I got into it to hit hearts, and man, when I get letters not just from the soldiers but from their kids, especially their kids, it makes it all worthwhile.
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After each of my books about the war has appeared, I thought it might be the last, but I've stopped saying that to myself. There are just too many stories left to tell - in fact, more all the time.
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Stories are not explanations of the world we live in. Science does that, and math does that. Our obligation as fiction writers is to enhance the mysteries.
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In fiction workshops, we tend to focus on matters of verisimilitude largely because such issues are so much easier to talk about than the failure of imagination.
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In February 1969, 25 years ago, I arrived as a young, terrified PFC on this lonely little hill in Quang Ngai Province. Back then, the place seemed huge and imposing and permanent.
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I received my draft notice right after graduation from college and had three months before going into the Army in September to think about it.
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Place is so important to me. The Midwest is like a ghost in my life. It's present as I look out the window now. I see Texas, but if I close my eyes and look out the same window, I'm back in my hometown in Worthington, Minnesota, and I cherish those values and that diction.
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It's a souvenir. You never know, it may be worth something on eBay.
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The world comes at me that way - comes at me in clumps of stuff, sometimes little vignettes and sometimes whole stories. And then the rest is erased by the internal filter that erases things for the same reason you'd forget swatting a mosquito.
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Who do you call a civilian in a guerilla war? I mean, it might be a farmer by day or a merchant, a housewife, and by night the housewife may be helping to make landmines and booby traps and who knows.
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With no draft, the only people who went to war were those who wanted to, or at least those who wanted to join the military.