Tim O'Brien: Life after The Things They Carried
After publishing the collection that is the novel, The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien went on to do more.
The Cal Poly Shared Reading Program 2002 tells us this:
"Following In the Lake of the Woods (1994), which concerns a Vietnam veteran who carries memories of the My Lai massacre into a political campaign in Minnesota, O’Brien somewhat confounded expectations with the novel Tomcat in Love (1998), but he insisted "though I am known as a ‘Vietnam writer,’ whatever that may be, I always pegged myself more as a ‘love writer,’ and in that regard Tomcat in Love is no departure at all." Continuing, he explains:
In a general sense, all of my books are about betrayal and loss of faith. Vietnam is an example. I mean you go over there with all these naïve ideas, believing in country and your president and your fellow man, and you find yourself disillusioned in important ways…And that’s my terrain as a writer, that sense of loss…Every book I’ve written is about that. In Tomcat in Love, this guy’s got a hole in his heart the size of Idaho, that needs filling up with love.
As for the future, O’Brien is currently Writer in Residence at Southwest Texas State University in the Creative Writing Program. In the fall of 2002 he will be on a book tour for his latest work July, July. The subject of the book is the year 1969, which O’Brien says was "a big, pivotal year for me. I was wounded in battle that year, saw friends die. It was the scariest month of my life, May of 69, but it was also a watershed year for America. The whole hawks at the throats of doves thing going on, and battles about the war. The beginnings of the sexual revolution and feminism. It was a huge, huge month in American history." As in his other work, O’Brien will have as his goal 'to try to make the reader really believe the things are happening. And I think in The Things They Carried, I, by and large, succeeded. That book is pretty much read as: that must have happened to that guy, in some form or another.'"
From http://www.preface.calpoly.edu/2002/pdf/biography.pdf
