Reached by Zoom one recent afternoon from his home in Austin, Tim O’Brien says he’s just taken another pass through the manuscript of his new novel, deleting all the fucks—maybe 80 of them—for fear of overuse. “And then I thought, fuck getting rid of fucks!” he laughs. “If that word disturbs people, go read another book! You get one chance to let it rip, and I decided in this one, it’s gonna rip.”
O’Brien has never shied away from letting it rip in his past works either, writing about the rawest, roughest aspects of American life. He served in the Vietnam War from 1969 to 1970, and is most well known for his searing accounts of the conflict—in memoir, novels, and hybrid works that famously blur the lines between fiction and reality. His 1979 novel, Going After Cacciato, won him the National Book Award, and 1990’s The Things They Carried has become part of the American canon. Told as a series of sketches featuring the men of Alpha Company, it creates an affecting mosaic of what it’s like to be a young soldier, one that’s read throughout middle and high school classrooms across the country. It purposefully strays away from any tidy lessons (“A true war story is never moral,” O’Brien famously wrote), but has plenty of wisdom to impart about masculinity, loss, courage, and living with the emotional burdens life leaves us to carry.
For the last two decades, O’Brien has been delivering those insights more directly, raising two boys. The older of the two was born in 2003, when O’Brien was 56 years old. Afraid he might not be around to watch his kids grow up, O’Brien compiled another book of vignettes, this time as musings written for his sons. It was released in 2019 as Dad’s Maybe Book. Now, as he finishes his new novel, and with the beloved The Things They Carried being made into a movie featuring Tom Hardy, Tye Sheridan, and Pete Davidson, the 75-year-old reflects on aging, fatherhood, his time in Vietnam, and his new book, which he says offer his most “savage” take yet on the nation that sent him to war.
“It’s not that I don’t love and admire my country in many, many ways,” he says, wearing his signature baseball cap and occasionally taking drags of a cigarette. “It’s a lot like having children: They do bad shit and you love them anyway.”
GQ: Did you always know you were going to write another novel?
Tim O’Brien: No. I thought I was done four books ago. After In the Lake of the Woods came out [in 1994], I thought, “That’s got to be it.” [It was] such a hard book to write. But I had a character in my head and I couldn’t get rid of her and started dabbling. For the first 300 pages, that’s all it really was. I vowed I would only write for as long as it was fun. If it stopped being fun—hard fun, but still fun—then I’d quit. And I never did. Now it’s un-fun. There’s quite a lot of revision to do.
Given that this novel might be your last, does that change the way you approach it or what you want for it?
It did in a way, yeah, in the sense of a kind of “fuck it” attitude: I’m gonna be as savage as I wanna be, and if people don’t like it, fuck ’em, go read another book. It made it a better book. For a little bit today when I started to do this revision thing, I started thinking, do I have the word fuck in here too many times? So I started deleting fucks. Maybe I got rid of 80 of ’em? Something like that. And then I thought, fuck getting rid of fucks! So I systematically tried to go back through and remember all of the times I [deleted fuck] today. It was driving me crazy all morning. When we first started talking, that’s what I had been through. I’d been doing my anti-fuck editing. There are no synonyms that [work]. For “He fucked with me,” you can write “He messed with me,” but it doesn’t have the same clout when it comes from the characters I’m dealing with. You’re dealing with an electrician and a rodeo cowboy in the same character, and a burglar, and, in the end, a murderer, and he’s not going to say fuck? He’s fucking murdering people! He’s not going to think about it. I’ll deal with it tomorrow. I’m done dealing with it for today. I’m going to go have a Xanax and take it easy.
What’s the book about?
Impossible to describe. I’ve never been any good at it. I could say the same about The Things They Carried—what’s it about? Or any of my books. It’s the first book I’ve written that has multiple points of view. That was liberating for me. A Pentecostal Christian, and a bank robber, and the owner of a bank, and a police dispatcher. [There are] 12 different points of view. That’s been the fun of doing it, really: Whenever I got sick of one point of view, there’s another one to go to.
Does it fit in line with the other books? Is it dealing with the same themes?
It’s about America, as all my books have been. It’s about contemporary America, which none of my books have been. It’s set in the days leading into the COVID, and near the very end of the book, it pops in. It’s a way I have of killing off a couple of my characters. It came in really fucking handy. I have a woman kissing a guy to death. It’s really hard to [describe]—everything you could say about any book is either paraphrasing badly what’s in the book, or not doing justice to what’s in the book. I just hate going on these PR trips around the country and talking about a book. All I want to say is, “Read it, then write me a letter and tell me what you think.”
Well, it sounds like an examination of contemporary America.
It is in some ways. My main character is a pathological liar. He’s lied his whole life about everything. That grew out of living with Trump for all those years. The word Trump is not in the book, and politics are never referred to, but lying is a big part of what the book is. If there’s a single theme to it all, it’s deceit and lying. Intentional deceit. It’s, I hope, a funny book. If it’s not, I’m in big fucking trouble, because I think it’s funny. I think half our country will not find it funny.
There’s a line from The Things They Carried where you write, “In many ways, he was like America itself, big and strong, full of good intention, a roll of fat jiggling at his belly, slow of foot but always plodding along, always there when you needed him, a believer in the virtues of simplicity and directness and hard labor.” Do you still feel like that’s a good read on America, or is this book putting forth a different read?
It’s a little more savage in this book. Heck, a lot more savage. It’s not that I don’t love and admire my country in many, many ways. It’s a lot like having children. They do bad shit and you love them anyway. They’re still my children I don’t un-love them as a consequence of the stuff they do. This could not have been written without living through that pandemic. I’m 75 years old. I’m isolated. I’ve seen like 20 people up close in the last two years. The Walmart guy would bring out the groceries and put them in my trunk, and I’m counting him. It seems like a good quarter of our country thinks it’s all a hoax. Here in Texas, people are not wearing masks as a matter of ideology, not of science or of staying alive. It grew out of a frustration and an anger at the conspiracy shit and blatant deceit and a denial of reality. I don’t understand my own country anymore in a way I thought I had back in the 1970s and ’60s. It grows out of that.
What was something you thought you understood?
Basically, it was a kindhearted country. There was dispute—major dispute—during the Vietnam era. But it was not without ameliorating kindness on the part of those you disagree with. Now it feels that the kindness valve has been shut somehow. Kindness pops up so rarely now that it shocks me on CNN, or any other news channel, when I hear words of “Maybe I’m wrong” or “Here’s what I think.” Instead, it’s these absolute declarations about the world that just drive me absolutely crazy. How can people be so absolutely sure of stuff?
Something that comes across in your books—specifically, Dad’s Maybe Book and The Things They Carried—is the power of imagination, and the ability of story to convey truth and feeling in a way that fosters understanding and captures the emotional ambiguity of being alive. As opposed to absolutism and determinism and self-righteousness, which it feels like we have a lot of these days. How do you feel about seeing some of these tensions you’ve been exploring in your books play out in the real world?
I feel disheartened. I had expected more of a pretty well-educated country, relative to many others. The American values of politeness to your neighbor and staying away from these absolutists, even qualifying speech just a little bit—I expected it of this country in a way I wouldn’t say about a country that had a history of Orthodoxy and autocracy. I expected democratic values in ordinary human interaction.
You’ve written about how many of your war buddies disagree with you politically. What was it like when you guys would disagree?
It was “Maybe you’re right, O’Brien. Maybe I’m an idiot.” I’d say the same thing. “Maybe I’m wrong. Who the hell knows? Let’s stay alive together.” There was a civility underneath radical disagreements. Three-quarters of my buddies in Vietnam wanted to nuke Hanoi. Literally. Nukes. Get [the war] over with. There was racism underneath it. They wouldn’t be saying the same thing if we were at war with France or something. There were huge disagreements, but there was a civility underneath a disagreement, a kindheartedness. “I love you anyway” kind of feeling. The disagreements have lasted over the years, as far as I can tell from the emails I get. But there’s still that “Live and let live, let’s get along anyway,” and an avoidance of absolutes.
What do you think is driving it?
I’m befuddled by it. It comes out of some emotional thing in the past, I think, where people have felt—on the right, especially—maybe out of the ’60s and the flower child and the radicalization of America back then, a kind of resentment. You don’t love your country enough to swallow orthodoxy. I was born in 1946, so my growing up years were during the ’50s, Ozzie and Harriet years. Orthodoxy prevailed on the hearth level, the home level, and on the higher levels, politics and religion and so on. It was impolite to question. During the ’60s, it got questioned in a big way. I do think that half of our country feels disrespected and is responding with this sort of “fuck you” absolutism.
If you were born in 1946, does that make you part of the Silent Generation or a very early Boomer?
Boomer. There was a PBS show called The Boomers. Samuel Jackson was on it. Maria Shriver. Billy Crystal. A whole bunch of people. I was the old fucking man. It made me so angry. I always thought Samuel Jackson was, like, 1,000 years old. [Laughs.] He’s younger than I am. I’m the oldest of the Boomers. At least on that show
So you have an interesting perspective, in that your kids are almost three generations removed from you. What are the most striking differences between the way you grew up and how your kids are growing up?
The odd answer is that there are few that I can detect. My kids are interested in pretty much what I was interested in as a kid up to age 18. Sports. Not much interested in Plato, but having to read it anyway. They care about good grades the way I did. The only obvious difference is this whole living the video world. That includes Facebook, Twitter. That whole world of communication through technology. That’s a radical difference. It has its good side. They’re more connected socially to the world than I ever was. I knew my friends and that was it. They’re connected to people all over the world. They’re much more savvy culturally than I ever was, they know geography better than I do, partly because of it. I didn’t know where fucking Alaska was. [Laughs.] I knew it was somewhere cold.
How do you think the version of masculinity that you’re trying to impart to Timmy and Tad is different than the one your father gave you?
My dad didn’t say words like, “I love you.” If he did, I don’t remember it. I say it to my kids all the time. In every email, every text message, every conversation. And they say it to me. That’s different. I think it’s an important difference. It’s articulating among men that which, in my day, was not articulated. There was no hugging in college among men. Now there’s lots of it. Friends hug each other. Touch is not forbidden in a way it was back then. That’s a good thing.
How did the war contribute to or change your sense of your own manhood?
It made me value peace in a way I never had before. I took it for granted that the world is a peaceful place, because it was [peaceful] in my life in a small town in Minnesota, and in college, up until Vietnam. Peace is a shy thing. It doesn’t brag about itself. War does. It’s loud and it’s all around you and it brags. I value it now in a way I really hadn’t before. Now when I hear that quick draw, “Let’s blow people up!” talk, it irritates me and grates on me in a way it never had when I was young. It was meaningless back then. If you look at enough dead people for a year, and how hideous death is to look at and to feel, when you have to pick somebody up, that feeling of deadness, it’s absolute. It’s unfixable. It’s dead forever. I think that a generation that grows up on movies so much and watches so many dead things, without having to touch them, and with the knowledge that it’s fantasy and not reality, it can inure you to violence and war in a way that’s not healthy.
The trope is that going to war makes you a man. Do you feel like that’s true?
In some ways. It also makes you dead. They’re both true. [It] makes you a man in the sense that you’ve witnessed things that hit your consciousness in the way they wouldn’t if you were a baby or a toddler or a middle schooler. You’re able to process the stuff. That’s part of getting older and seeing more of the world and being forced to imagine your own death in a way that I never did as a toddler or a middle schooler. It didn’t even cross my mind that I would one day die, or even that others would.
How did war change the way you thought about courage?
One is how hard it is to be physically brave. It’s one thing in a schoolyard to have a fight with somebody. But standing up under fire, knowing that a bullet could end your life forever, it’s hard to physically make your legs move. I came to value physical courage in a biological sense. In Vietnam, even walking felt brave. We called it humping. Going up the trails and through the rice paddies and up into the mountains and through the jungles, where every step could be your last. Where I was, in Quang Ngai Province, it was the most mined place on earth. I’d say probably 80 percent of our casualties came from land mines, not from gunfire. I remember a day when we were going up a hill and we were in a column, one hundred of us, the whole company. About midway through it, a guy hit a landmine. Everybody who preceded him had gone over that same swath of ground, and their foot had missed the mine. Then in the middle, somebody was unlucky and hit it. It felt like you were in a really bad casino. Instead of losing a hand at cards, you lose your life. That was the feel, in the physical sense, of what courage was.
The Things They Carried has obviously become such an important book, and is taught in so many schools. How do you explain its enduring power?
I can’t. The book was an afterthought in a lot of ways. It was written originally as stories, but one story would have the same characters as the previous story—just a cast of characters, each appearing in all these stories. It slowly became a novel. I thought it would be successful as a literary work. But I didn’t ever anticipate how broadly it’s read and how long it’s been read. Its longevity would’ve astonished me. I’ve been told over and over it’s an easy book to teach. It’s accessible to the students. Thematically, the emblem of “the things they carried” can be applied to anybody’s life. I get whole sheaths of big manila envelopes stuffed with student essays, where the assignment has been “Discuss the things you carry, and what they mean in your life. Start with the physical stuff and then go to the emotional things you carry.” But I certainly didn’t intend it to be teachable, because then I would’ve been pedagogic in writing this stuff.
Are you conflicted at all about that? Because I know a lot of what’s in the book is this idea that story should convey feeling, not necessarily a lesson or a moral.
Yeah, I am. If I knew the lessons, I would be obeying them and teaching them to my children. Maybe the lesson is that I don’t know any lessons about how we [should] live our lives and what’s proper, decent human behavior and what isn’t. It’s contradictory for me. For everything I know and could articulate, there’s always a qualification happening in my head that undermines what I’m saying. That’s the fun of writing fiction. The pedagogic thing is contradictory to that: Here is what is good and here is what is bad. When life is a stew of the two, interlocking and inter-penetrating.
It makes me think of the “contradiction between fact and fact” you write about in Dad’s Maybe Book. This also makes me want to ask you how you feel about it being made into a movie, because I can’t imagine Hollywood is very good about allowing for the contradiction between fact and fact.
I don’t know if it will be a movie. It’s been touted, but financing has been a problem. There was a financier, but he wanted final script and final cut approval. To his credit, the producer, the guy who bought the book, said, “No, I’m not going to give it to you,” and the guy dropped out. I don’t really care a whole lot. If I had a preference, I’d get all the money and no movie because once you see a movie and Al Pacino is Jimmy Cross—or whoever plays Jimmy Cross—it’s that way forever in your memory. It kind of undermines what happens in a book, where you make your own characters in your head and build your own Huckleberry Finn, or your own Ahab. It undermines a lot of what the novelist worked so hard to do, to give the reader enough clues and signals of physicality to allow them to construct their own version [of the character].
Mortality has been present throughout your life, in large part because of the war experience, of course. But it’s also there when you’re writing about fatherhood in Dad’s Maybe Book. I’m curious what experience of having mortality ever-present like that is like—if it’s useful and gives you perspective, or if it’s just fucking exhausting.
It’s all of the above. When you turn 75, it’s in your face. You can’t not recognize when you look in a mirror, or when your jump shot isn’t jumping anymore. But I don’t obsess over it. It’s simply present. You’re right about the war thing. I was facing what I’m facing as an old man when I was 22 years old. Death was one step away. It had a good effect on me, in a way, in that I learned to live with it and keep humping. Just keep going. Write another book. If you don’t finish it, that happens to lots of people. They don’t finish their life’s work. It happens, in fact, to everybody. Tomorrow doesn’t happen, eventually, for everybody. The fantasy of forever-ness vanished for me in Vietnam. The fantasy was gone, and that’s been good for me throughout my life.
This interview has been edited and condensed.