Dad's Maybe Book

“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 received the National Book Award for Going After Cacciato. The Things They Carried has sold more than seven million copies; it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was named a New York Times Book of the Century. In the Lake of the Woods won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize. Awarded the Pritzker Literature Award for lifetime achievement in military writing, O’Brien has been elected to both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.