Tim O'Brien, renowned author and 1968 Macalester graduate, spoke to the Macalester community about his new book July, July and his experience as a writer.

O'Brien is the author of eight books, including Going After Cacciato, The Things They Carried and In the Lake of the Woods. He is most renowned for his works about his experience in the Vietnam War. "I know many of you came here to hear me speak about Vietnam," O'Brien said as he rose to the podium in Kagin Commons. "For now, I would like you to put that on the backburner." He proceeded to read an excerpt from July, July. The book tells the story of the thirteenth reunion of ten members of the Darton Hall College class of 1969, a liberal arts school in Minnesota, which O'Brien described as "uncannily like Macalester." According to the book's jacket, it follows these ten characters though three decades of marriage, divorce, children, careers and hopes that have been deferred and abandoned. O'Brien read a twenty-minute passage chronicling the character Dorothy Stier, a breast cancer survivor desperately seeking the love and attention of her husband. The audience was captivated by O'Brien's witty and emotional prose.

O'Brien then opened a dialogue with the audience. The conversation began with a question about how O'Brien's recovery from Vietnam has affected his writing. O'Brien answered, "Right after the war, I thought of Vietnam just as a war, nothing else. This really changed for me in 1994 when I returned to Vietnam and began to see it as a beautiful country with beautiful people. Now where I used to have a picture in my mind of a rice paddy with machine guns firing over it, I now have a picture of the same rice paddy with a boy with his cow waving at me."

The topic of conversation switched to the critical response of O'Brien presenting his works of fiction as truth. "One thing that I learned through my education at Macalester and life in general is that ambiguity matters. Two truths can go side by side and still be contradictory," O'Brien said. He emphasized this point by telling a story which he incorporated into July, July. He received a letter from a woman addressed to the "real" Tim O'Brien. She wrote to O'Brien saying that she had met and fallen in love with a man who had attempted to pass off O'Brien's works as his own. O'Brien used this as the basis for one of July, July's main characters. Although based in some truth, the story was slightly adjusted to make this "great story" as O'Brien put it, into July, July.

O'Brien ended the evening by addressing how his childhood has affected his life as a writer. "To me, home means as much as Vietnam," O'Brien said. Originally from Worthington, Minn., O'Brien said that there was always the feeling that he wanted to leave the town. "Books are an escape for kids. I do not think I would be a writer today if I wasn't such an avid reader as a kid."

"If you liked what you heard please buy my book. Christmas is coming up, and books make the best presents!" O'Brien concluded with a smile on his face.