Author of the week: Phil Klay

last updated 8 January 2015

Phil Klay might strike a lot of people as an atypical Iraq War veteran, said Jeff Baker in the Portland Oregonian. When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, Klay was a creative writing major at Dartmouth University who harbored serious reservations about the campaign. Still, he says, he “knew it was a major moment in our history, regardless of whether or not it was a good idea,” and wanted to “somehow have an opportunity to make things better.” Eleven years later, Klay, 30, resists the idea that there was any typical U.S. experience of the war or typical service member. His acclaimed new story collection, Redeployment, thus gives us the voices of a dozen. “To do justice to the subject,” he says, “I wanted to have narrators that would argue with each other.”

Writing the book even inspired Klay to doubt his own recollections, said Bill Cheng in BarnesandNobleReview.com. When he first returned from Iraq, he was at ease answering friends’ casual inquiries about the conflict. “You get this question, not ‘What was your experience like over there?’ but ‘What’s it like over there?’” he says. “So I would explain Iraq to people with a great deal of confidence that is somewhat embarrassing to think about now.” When he began showing drafts of his stories to fellow veterans, though, they called him out on every misinterpretation. “Even things of emotional importance about my own experience seemed less and less true,” he says. “Writing this book was a process of shredding everything I thought I knew.”