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Overview
“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
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780358116714 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 02/27/2024 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 404 |
| Sales rank: | 796,309 |
| File size: | 27 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
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.
Tim O’Brien received the 1979 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 in 2013.
Date of Birth:
October 1, 1946Place of Birth:
Austin, MinnesotaEducation:
B.A., Macalester College, 1968; Graduate study at Harvard UniversityRead an Excerpt
A Letter to My Son
Dear Timmy,
A little more than a year ago, on June 20, 2003, you dropped into the world, my son, my first and only child—a surprise, a gift, an eater of electrical cords, a fertilizer factory, a pain in the ass, and a thrill in the heart.
Here’s the truth, Timmy. Boy, oh, boy, do I love you. And, boy, do I wish I could spend the next fifty or sixty years with my lips to your cheek, my eyes warming in yours.
But as you wobble into your sixteenth month, it occurs to me that you may never really know your dad. The actuarial stuff looks grim. Even now, I’m what they call an “older father,” and in ten years, should I have the good luck to turn sixty-eight, I’ll almost certainly have trouble keeping up with you. Basketball will be a problem. And twenty years from now . . . well, it’s sad, isn’t it?
When you begin to know me, you will know an old man.
Sadder yet, that’s the very best scenario. Life is fragile. Hearts go still. So now, just in case, I want to tell you about your father, the man I think I am. And by that I mean not just the graying old coot you may vaguely remember, but the guy who shares your name and your blood and half your DNA, the Tim who himself was once a Timmy.
Above all, I am this: I am in love with you. Pinwheeling, bedazzled, aching love. If you know nothing else, know that you were adored by your dad.
In many ways, a man is what he yearns for, and while it may never happen, I yearn to walk a golf course at your side. I yearn for a golden afternoon in late August when you will sink a tough twelve-footer to beat me by a stroke or two. I yearn to shake your hand and say, “Nine more holes?”
I yearn to tell you, man to man, about my time as a soldier in a faraway war. I want to tell you what I saw and what I did. I yearn to hear you say, “It’s okay, Dad. All that’s over.”
So many other things, too. Right now, as I watch you sleep, I imagine scattering good books around the house—in the bathrooms, on the kitchen counter, on the floor beside your bed—and I imagine being there to see you pick one up and turn that first precious page. I long to see the rapture on your face. (Right now, you eat books.)
I yearn to learn from you. I want to be your teacher, yes, but I also want to be your student. I want to be taught, again and again, what I’ve already started to know: that a grown man can find pleasure in the sound of a happy squeal, in the miraculous sound of approaching feet.
I yearn to watch you perform simple acts of kindness and generosity. I yearn to witness your first act of moral courage. I yearn to hear you mutter, however awkwardly, “Yeah, yeah, I love you, too,” and I yearn to believe you will mean it.
It’s hard to accept as I watch you now, so lighthearted and purely good, so ignorant of gravestones, but, Timmy, you are in for a world of hurt and heartache and sin and doubt and frustration and despair. Which is to say you are in for being alive. You will do fine things, I know, but you will also do bad things, because you are wholly human, and I wish I could be there, always, to offer forgiveness.
More than that, I long for the day when you might also forgive me. I waited too long, Timmy. Until the late afternoon of June 20, 2003, I had defined myself, for better and for worse, by the novels and stories I had written. I had sought myself in sentences. I had loved myself only insofar as I loved a chapter or a scene or a scrap of dialogue. This is not to demean my life or my writing. I do hope you will someday read the books and stories; I hope you will find my ghost in those pages, my best self, the man I would wish to be for you. Call it pride, call it love, but I dare to hope that you will commit a line or two to memory, for in the dream-space between those vowels and consonants is the sound of your father’s voice, the kid I once was, the man I now am, the old man I will soon become.
Table of Contents
1 A Letter to My Son 1
2 A Maybe Book (I) 5
3 Row, Row 9
4 Skin 22
5 Trusting Story 23
6 First Words 33
7 Home School 34
8 The Best of Times 40
9 Highballs 45
10 Spelling Lesson 49
11 Home School 50
12 Hygiene 58
3 The Magic Show (I) 59
14 Abashment 69
15 Sushi 70
16 Pride (I) 75
17 Balance 78
18 Child's Play 90
19 Telling Tales (I) 91
20 Telling Tales (II) 97
21 Pride (II) 101
22 What If? 110
23 Home School 112
24 Home School 119
25 The Old Testament 123
26 Timmy and Tad and Papa and I (I) 124
27 The Language of Little Boys 150
28 Home School 154
29 Turkey Capital of the World 158
30 Pride (III) 172
31 Pacifism 179
32 Timmy and Tad and Papa and I (II) 181
33 Home School 193
34 Home School 198
35 Easier Homework 231
36 Timmy's Bedroom Door 232
37 Lip Kissing 235
38 The King of Slippery 236
39 Timmy and Tad and Papa and I (III) 241
40 Timmy's Gamble 252
41 Dulce et Decorum Est 253
42 Pride (IV) 255
43 War Buddies 258
44 A May be Book (II) 269
45 The Magic Show (II) 273
46 Practical Magic 276
47 An Immodest and Altogether Earnest Proposal 277
48 The Golden Viking 289
49 Timmy and Tad and Papa and I (IV) 296
50 Getting Cut 309
51 Home School 318
52 Home School 321
53 The Debating Society 324
54 Sushi, Sushi, Sushi 328
55 Timmy and Tad and Papa and I (V) 332
56 Into the Volcano 345
57 And into the Stew Pot 349
58 Lesson Plans 356
59 Tad's Literary Advice 365
60 One Last Lesson Plan 366
Acknowledgments 371
Notes on Sources 373