Conversations with Tim O'Brien

Tim O’Brien: “Maybe So”

22 Tim O’Brien: “Maybe So” Eric James Schroeder/1984 From Vietnam, We’ve All Been There: Interviews with American Writers (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992), 124–43. Interview first appeared in“Two Interviews: Talks with Tim O’Brien and Robert Stone.”Modern Fiction Studies 30.1 (Spring 1984): 135–64. Schroeder: I want to start out with your first book because I think it raises the issue of fiction versus nonfiction and how the two begin to merge in Vietnam literature. On first reading, If I Die in a Combat Zone strikes one as a straight autobiography. Yet the impulse was obviously there for you to fictionalize. How much did you fictionalize, or why was there the impulse to fictionalize that experience when so many other writers obviously resisted it? O’Brien: Well, most of If I Die is straight autobiography. All of the events in the book really happened; in one sense it is a kind of war memoir and was never intended to be fiction. It’s not fiction. But you’re right that I tried to cast the scenes in fictional form. Dialogue, for example. Often I couldn’t remember the exact words people said, and yet to give it a dramatic intensity and immediacy I’d make up dialogue that seemed true to the spirit of what was said. Schroeder: That’s what Gay Talese says he does in writing his New Journalistic pieces. O’Brien: I think it’s probably not very new. I think it’s old. Any memoir has it, going back to anybody. Unless you’re sitting with a tape recorder or taking precise notes every time something happens, obviously you have an imperfect recollection. Things like ordering chronologies, that’s made up. I didn’t follow the chronology of the events; I switched events around for the purpose of drama. And drawing characters and descriptions and so on. It’s not even sewn, just a little vignette and another vignette and another vi- ERIC JAMES SCHROEDER / 1984 23 gnette. I’m not even sure what that is, but it’s a fictional technique. It doesn’t really matter. What’s odd about it, though, is that a book which I published and intended to be a straight autobiography or war memoir is now called a novel by everyone, and everyone writes about it as a novel. That goes to your point, which is that for some reason (I’m not even sure what it was; it must have been largely subconscious) the book was written as a novel; that is, the form of the book is fictional. Schroeder: When I first read the book, I assumed it was straight autobiography , and I was not aware that it might be something else until I read an annotated bibliography that described it as fiction. Then I went and examined my copy—sure enough, on the spine of the book it says “Fiction.” O’Brien: I never noticed that. Schroeder: So I thought, “I wonder how much is fictionalized and how much is autobiographical; if the publisher is going to put the stamp on it, it’s for a reason.” O’Brien: It’s not on any of the other editions. That’s really odd. Well, there’s another reason people think it’s fiction. Even my own publisher can’t tell. I’m not sure it matters, to be honest. It is what it is, clearly, no matter what kind of label you put on it. It never bothered me when people began calling it a novel. I think Gloria Emerson was the first to do so. I tell them it’s not a novel, but really it doesn’t bother me one way or the other. Schroeder: Do you think, then, that this perception has more to do with the book’s structure than its content? As you say, its episodic method? O’Brien: I think it’s the dialogue and that sense of drawing scene. When we think of nonfiction, we think of someone telling us, “And here’s what happened when they went on like this,” without stopping to give us dialogue and characters and so on. If I were to tell you a story about something that happened yesterday, I wouldn’t go on for four or five pages without a “scene drawing,” that “he said, she said.” This creates the illusion of “happeningness ” which usually isn’t there in nonfiction. Nonfiction is usually cast...