In The Things They Carried, author Tim O’Brien writes about the challenge of writing about his traumatic experiences in Vietnam:
“I’m forty-three years old, and a writer now, and the war has been over for a long while. Much of it is hard to remember. I sit at this typewriter and stare through my words…and as I write about these things, the remembering is turned into a kind of rehappening…The bad stuff never stops happening; it lives in its own dimension, replaying itself over and over.”