Dad's Maybe Book

By Tim O'Brien

Best-selling author Tim O’Brien shares wisdom from a life in letters, lessons learned in wartime, and the challenges, humor, and rewards of raising two sons.
 

“We are all writing our maybe books full of maybe tomorrows, and each maybe tomorrow brings another maybe tomorrow, and then another, until the last line of the last page receives its period.”

In 2003, already an older father, National Book Award–winning novelist Tim O’Brien resolved to give his young sons what he wished his own father had given to him—a few scraps of paper signed “Love, Dad.” Maybe a word of advice. Maybe a sentence or two about some long-ago Christmas Eve. Maybe some scattered glimpses of their rapidly aging father, a man they might never really know. For the next fifteen years, the author talked to his sons on paper, as if they were adults, imagining what they might want to hear from a father who was no longer among the living.
 
O’Brien traverses the great variety of human experience and emotion, moving from soccer games to warfare to risqué lullabies, from alcoholism to magic shows to history lessons to bittersweet bedtime stories, but always returning to a father’s soul-saving love for his sons.
 
The result is Dad’s Maybe Book, a funny, tender, wise, and enduring literary achievement that will squeeze the reader’s heart with joy and recognition.

Tim O’Brien and the writing of Dad’s Maybe Book are now the subject of the documentary film The War and Peace of Tim O’Brien available to watch at timobrienfilm.com

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Oct 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9780358116714

Tim O'Brien

TIM O’BRIEN received the National Book Award for Going After Cacciato. Among his other books are The Things They Carried, Pulitzer 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.

Reviews for Dad's Maybe Book

[bell7_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In a collection of essays, almost letters written to his sons, Tim O'Brien reflects on what matters most to him: fatherhood, love, pacifism, Hemingway, and so much more that he wants to share with his boys.Being an older father, O'Brien is cognizant of his own mortality and this seems to drive much of the force behind the essays that have disparate but windingly related topics, all things that Tim O'Brien seems to want his sons, and readers, to know about him when he's gone. It gives us a peek behind the curtain at the man who wrote The Things They Carried and despairs of being known as a "war writer," the man who enjoys putting on amateur magic shows and above all absolutely adores his sons. At once far reaching and deeply personal, I highly recommend Dad's Maybe Book to any fan of his fiction and any parent who reflects on what they'd like their children to remember after they're gone.

[samsattler · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Dad’s Maybe Book is Tim O’Brien’s first new book in seventeen years – and, sadly enough, it is likely to be his last one. But never say never, because O’Brien didn’t expect the material that comprises Dad’s Maybe Book ever to be published when he began writing the pieces to his two young sons back in 2003. Near the end of this one, though, the seventy-three-year-old author does seem to be formally announcing his retirement when he says, “…no more early (writing) mornings. The daily agenda will be simple: sleep until seven or eight, then settle in to read the books I want to read. At my age, a certain selfishness seems permissible – doing the things I long to do and not what some preacherly internal voice tells me I must do.”In June of 2003, the fifty-seven-year-old Tim O’Brien was surprised by the gift of a first child, a little boy called Timmy that the author describes as “an eater of electrical cords, a fertilizer factory, a pain in the ass, and a thrill in the heart.” As Timmy entered his sixteenth month of life, O’Brien was struck by the thought that his young son might never really know him. After all, if the actuarial tables were correct, they would not be spending too many more years together. And that’s when Dad’s Maybe Book was born. But the book didn’t really begin to gain much momentum until O’Brien and his wife learned that they were expecting a second son, a little boy they would call Tad. The book that began as a series of “love letters to his children, along with a few anecdotes and some tentative words of advice” was finally published in late 2019. That Dad’s Maybe Book turned into so much more than that, and that Tim O’Brien (the National Book Award winner for 1979’s Going After Cacciato) fans would enjoy reading it, seems to have caught O’Brien at least a little bit by surprise. Personally, I’m not surprised by that at all because what O’Brien has written here is as much a terrific memoir as it is a book about parenting or a series of letters to his young sons. Even more importantly for contemporaries of the author, this is a very fine reflection on the aging process and facing the ultimate ending that grows closer for all of us with each day’s passing. The book is largely structured around “Home School” and “Homework” assignments that O’Brien requires of his sons over the years. Surprisingly, many of those assignments focus on the stories and novels of Ernest Hemmingway, an author whose work O’Brien both admires and dislikes – often at the same time. It is in these five sections of the book (titled “Timmy and Tad and Papa and I) that O’Brien, a decorated Vietnam War veteran, explains how he became a pacifist and why he despises wars of any type so much today. (He particularly despises those who are so willing to fight wars using someone else’s sons to fight them.)Dad’s Maybe Book was written over a fifteen-year period during which O’Brien’s sons grew from babyhood to teenagers; a time during which they, their father, the country, and the world changed greatly. It is a hopeful book, but it is often a sad book, one in which the author’s anxiety about being so much older than his children becomes more and more obvious as the years pass. It ends, though, with a comforting piece that O’Brien calls “One Last Lesson Plan,” instructions on just how he want his sons to spend the day together on what would have been the author’ hundredth birthday, October 1, 2046 (wouldn’t it be something if he were still here to spend that day with them). He wants them to play a round of golf together, drink some beer, look at some old family pictures, and “Forgive what needs forgiving, laugh at what needs laughing, and then go home.”Bottom Line: I saved my favorite quote from Dad’s Maybe Book for this summation because I think it represents the overall tone of the book so well: “It’s 3:12 a.m., October 1, 2016. I have turned seventy. Daylight will bring slices of cake and cheerful goodwill. It will be like celebrating a hernia.” God help me, but I love this quote.