Tim O’Brien reads tonight

Author and veteran Tim O’Brien will be at the Butler University Reilly Room tonight at 7:30 p.m. You will be there. I will be there. We all will be there because it’s Tim O’Brien.

obrien mugAnd as much as I look forward to tonight, I’m even more intrigued by the promise of what will happen a year after today, then five years, then ten years, maybe twenty. I will bump into you somewhere, and for whatever reason, we both will be thinking about Tim O’Brien’s reading, and I’ll tell you what happened, and you’ll tell me what happened, and our stories won’t match. There will be this beautiful human moment where I will start to doubt my own recollection, and you will question your own memory, and our minds will assimilate a shared experience, to the degree that when we discuss the reading again even further removed, neither of us will be certain how we as individuals actually perceived today, but we will have stories to share that more accurately represent what it was like to be there.

Normally in this space, I’d mention that Tim O’Brien won the 1979 National Book Award for Going After Cacciato, and that he is also the author of The Things They Carried, In the Lake of the Woods, Tomcat in Love, If I Die in a Combat Zone, and July, July. But those are facts that have no real bearing on where my Tim O’Brien story starts.

I first read Tim O’Brien in the first class I ever took in Butler MFA’s program. Mike Dahlie had our workshop group read “How to Tell a True War Story” from The Things They Carried. I don’t know remember why we would have read it, and I have not recently verified this with Mike or my classmates, because it doesn’t matter.

What matters is that before getting into the MFA program and taking the class and reading Tim O’Brien, I was a writer of facts exclusively, having worked as a small-town newspaper reporter for the previous three years. I dabbled in fiction and poetry as an undergraduate and returned to creative writing on a whim, without any concrete notions of why it mattered to me or the world.

That is, until I read “How to Tell a True War Story,” and I was introduced to the way that the truth and fiction interact, the idea of verisimilitude. I bracketed and starred the following paragraphs in the xeroxed copy of the story Mike gave me:

You can tell a true story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let’s say, and afterward you ask, “Is it true?” and if the answer matters, you’ve got your answer.

For example, we’ve all heard this one. Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast and saves his tree buddies.

Is it true?

The answer matters.

You’d feel cheated if it never happened. Without the grounding reality, it’s just a trite bit of puffery, pure Hollywood, untrue in the way all such stories are untrue. Yet even if it did happen—and maybe it did, anything’s possible—even then you know it can’t be true, because a true war story does not depend on that kind of truth. Absolute occurrence is irrelevant.  A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. For example: Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast, but it’s a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die, though, one of the dead guys says, “The fuck you do that for?” and the jumper says, “Story of my life, man,” and the other guy starts to smile but he’s dead. That’s a true story that never happened.

And I thought, that’s it. That’s why I want to write fiction. There is a truth in every lie, and a lie in every truth. And that’s why and how writing is the art of life.