The things we all carry
A couple of weeks ago I saw an ad in the local paper for "An Evening with Tim O'Brien," commemorating the 20th anniversary of the publication of The Things They Carried and sponsored by the library and our local independent bookstore. We generally don't get authors of that caliber here, so I tore it out of the paper and put it on the fridge.
Yesterday it was 35 degrees in Chicago and I had a generally crappy day. I came home, put on my yoga pants, and sniffled, generally feeling sorry for myself. The last thing I wanted to do was go back out. But that little voice in the back of my head kept suggesting that I'd regret it if I missed Tim O'Brien (not to mention that other little voice that keeps reminding me that pretty soon it's not going to be so easy to do this kind of stuff). So I dragged my ass off the couch, put on real pants and a coat, and went.
And of course, that little voice was right, because it was amazing.
Anytime an author comes to town, I automatically assume it will be a reading. This was more of a lecture, although he did read a short passage from the book, as well as a letter from a fan. But for the most part, he just talked, about writing the book, its reception over the last 20 years, and the power of stories and storytelling. I wish I had taken notes, because I would have loved to be able to quote him verbatim when he read the fan letter, from a young woman whose father never talked about the war until she read the book in high school and then gave it to her dad to read. He got quite choked up at owhile he was reading it, even though he said he's read it several times over the course of this tour, and he talked about the difficulty he and many vets have talking about their war experiences and how something like a novel is a way of starting the dialogue.
But one of the most interesting parts of the evening came during the Q and A, when one of several high-school age attendees asked him to address the fact that the book's opening (I think; it's been a long time since I've read it) states very clearly that it's a work of fiction, despite the fact that there's a character named Tim O'Brien from Minnesota who goes to Vietnam in 1968. His answer was long, and really fascinating.
He talked about the section of the book where Tim the character going for a swim in a river on the Minnesota/Canada border the summer he was drafted and wrestling with whether to go to Canada and avoid being sent to a war he didn't believe in, or staying true to his small-town Minnesota roots and making his family proud by acquiescing. Did that literally happen? No, he said--during the summer of '68 he played a lot of golf, which would have made for a really boring story. But the inner turmoil was there, and incorporating it into that setting was, in a sense, truer than what really happened, because it gave the reader more of an insight into the essence of the story.
I'm phrasing it really badly, but I found that really powerful, and a perfect description of what good writing--whether "fiction" or "nonfiction" ought to do. I never got too caught up in the whole James Frey controversy, in part because I had no interest in the book itself, but also because I think of memoir as a completely separate genre from straight reporting, or even biography. While Frey obviously misrepresented some essential facts in his story, the idea that memoirists should be held to a strict definition of truth when it comes to remembering dialogue and actions that happened years before seems unrealistic to expect.
Calling his book a novel got O'Brien off the hook in that respect, but I think his book is at least as true as a lot of the nonfiction out there. And if it gets people like me and the high school students and the baby boomers in the audience to read and think about issues like war and morality and the nature of truth, then I think he is more than doing his job.
If nothing else, he made me want to go out and re-read the book ten or more years after I first picked it up. That's something right there.
Yesterday it was 35 degrees in Chicago and I had a generally crappy day. I came home, put on my yoga pants, and sniffled, generally feeling sorry for myself. The last thing I wanted to do was go back out. But that little voice in the back of my head kept suggesting that I'd regret it if I missed Tim O'Brien (not to mention that other little voice that keeps reminding me that pretty soon it's not going to be so easy to do this kind of stuff). So I dragged my ass off the couch, put on real pants and a coat, and went.
And of course, that little voice was right, because it was amazing.
Anytime an author comes to town, I automatically assume it will be a reading. This was more of a lecture, although he did read a short passage from the book, as well as a letter from a fan. But for the most part, he just talked, about writing the book, its reception over the last 20 years, and the power of stories and storytelling. I wish I had taken notes, because I would have loved to be able to quote him verbatim when he read the fan letter, from a young woman whose father never talked about the war until she read the book in high school and then gave it to her dad to read. He got quite choked up at owhile he was reading it, even though he said he's read it several times over the course of this tour, and he talked about the difficulty he and many vets have talking about their war experiences and how something like a novel is a way of starting the dialogue.
But one of the most interesting parts of the evening came during the Q and A, when one of several high-school age attendees asked him to address the fact that the book's opening (I think; it's been a long time since I've read it) states very clearly that it's a work of fiction, despite the fact that there's a character named Tim O'Brien from Minnesota who goes to Vietnam in 1968. His answer was long, and really fascinating.
He talked about the section of the book where Tim the character going for a swim in a river on the Minnesota/Canada border the summer he was drafted and wrestling with whether to go to Canada and avoid being sent to a war he didn't believe in, or staying true to his small-town Minnesota roots and making his family proud by acquiescing. Did that literally happen? No, he said--during the summer of '68 he played a lot of golf, which would have made for a really boring story. But the inner turmoil was there, and incorporating it into that setting was, in a sense, truer than what really happened, because it gave the reader more of an insight into the essence of the story.
I'm phrasing it really badly, but I found that really powerful, and a perfect description of what good writing--whether "fiction" or "nonfiction" ought to do. I never got too caught up in the whole James Frey controversy, in part because I had no interest in the book itself, but also because I think of memoir as a completely separate genre from straight reporting, or even biography. While Frey obviously misrepresented some essential facts in his story, the idea that memoirists should be held to a strict definition of truth when it comes to remembering dialogue and actions that happened years before seems unrealistic to expect.
Calling his book a novel got O'Brien off the hook in that respect, but I think his book is at least as true as a lot of the nonfiction out there. And if it gets people like me and the high school students and the baby boomers in the audience to read and think about issues like war and morality and the nature of truth, then I think he is more than doing his job.
If nothing else, he made me want to go out and re-read the book ten or more years after I first picked it up. That's something right there.
posted by Madame Defarge at 4:09 PM
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