Tim O’Brien: ‘We Are All Writing Maybe Books’

In this episode of Just the Right Book with Roxanne Coady, Tim O’Brien joins Roxanne Coady to discuss his new book, Dad’s Maybe Book, out now from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

From the episode:

Roxanne Coady: How did the process of writing this book impact how you were raising [your two sons]? Or, as you have been raising them—it has been fifteen years—how did that inform your writing?

Tim O’Brien: In numerous ways. The main way was that I stopped writing for something in the order of ten years. I haven’t published a book since 2002, which is almost twenty years because I had decided that what was paramount was to be a good dad. I had to be present to be a good dad. I resolved that I would stop writing, and did, because when I am writing a book I am sitting alone in a room for ten to twelve hours a day. I am not present for children, and when I’m not writing I’m worried about the book and thinking about it. So I decided that I had to quit and devote myself to being a father.

However, occasionally, maybe twice a year I would jot down messages to my kids. At first they would be in longhand, and then I would type them up. I had put the pages in a drawer, and one day when he was eight or nine years old one of my sons saw the pages and said, is this a book? I said, I don’t know, maybe. Very sternly my kid said that you have to call it that. You have to call it what it is: your maybe book.

I discounted the idea at first, but the more I thought about it the more I realized that we are all writing maybe books. Maybe tomorrow, maybe not. Maybe my dreams will come true, maybe they won’t. Maybe I’ll change my dreams.

There is a contingency to life that I have felt since my years in Vietnam where every step was a maybe. Maybe I’ll live, or maybe I won’t. With every step, maybe a landmine will blow me up, or maybe not. This idea of maybeness infuses my new book in big ways. I talk to my children about absolutism, for example. You don’t have to say no doubt” or I’m sure. Maybe is not a crime; it’s not evil. It’s not immoral. There is a little humility in the word maybe.

Absolutism can kill people, and it does. I’ve been trying to teach my children, for me, the most important lesson that I have learned over seventy-three years: to have a little humility. I am wrong as often as I am right about things. … To answer your question, the book began as a few little love-letters to my children, and slowly it evolved into a real book.

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Tim O’Brien received the 1979 National Book Award for Going After Cacciato. Among his other books are The Things They Carried, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a New York Times Book of the Century, and In the Lake of the Woods, winner of the James Fenimore Cooper Prize. He was awarded the Pritzker Literature Award for lifetime achievement in military writing in 2013.

Roxanne Coady is owner of R.J. Julia, one of the leading independent booksellers in the United States, which—since 1990—has been a community resource not only for books, but for the exchange of ideas. In 1998, Coady founded Read To Grow, which provides books for newborns and children and encourages parents to read to their children from birth. RTG has distributed over 1.5 million books.