UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Maureen Ryan

A wide-ranging critical assessment of the cultural impact of America's longest war

The lingering aftereffects of the Vietnam War resonate to this day throughout American society: in foreign policy, in attitudes about the military and war generally, and in the contemporary lives of members of the so-called baby boom generation who came of age during the 1960s and early 1970s. While the best-known personal accounts of the war tend to center on the experience of combat, Maureen Ryan’s The Other Side of Grief examines the often overlooked narratives—novels, short stories, memoirs, and films—that document the war’s impact on the home front.

In analyzing the accounts of Vietnam veterans, women as well as men, Ryan focuses on the process of readjustment, on how the war continued to insinuate itself into their lives, their families, and their communities long after they returned home. She looks at the writings of women whose husbands, lovers, brothers, and sons served in Vietnam and whose own lives were transformed as a result. She also appraises the experiences of the POWs who came to be embraced as the war’s only heroes; the ordeal of Vietnamese refugees who fled their “American War” to new lives in the United States; and the influential movement created by those who committed themselves to protesting the war.

The end result of Ryan’s investigations is a cogent synthesis of the vast narrative literature generated by the Vietnam War and its aftermath. Together those stories powerfully demonstrate how deeply the legacies of the war penetrated American culture and continue to reverberate still.

“What I especially like about The Other Side of Grief is the way it enlarges what most readers think of as ‘Vietnam War literature.’ By juxtaposing the canonical veteran novels and memoirs with those of women, former POWs, antiwar activists, and Vietnamese refugees, we gain a much richer and broader understanding of the impact of the war on the entire society.”

Christian G. Appy, author of Patriots: The Vietnam War
Remembered from All Sides

“This is a book that needed to be written. Maureen Ryan has done it, and she has done it professionally, thoroughly, and completely.”

Philip D. Beidler, author of Re-writing America: Vietnam
Authors in Their Generation

"The Other Side of Grief brilliantly explores the effects of the Vietnam War across an astonishing range of narratives, tracing the impact of war on the home front from its immediate aftermath through the present moment. In its scope and insight, it's a genuinely remarkable book."

Dr. Michael Mays

Maureen Ryan is professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi.

American History / Vietnam War / Literary Studies
352 pp.
$34.95 paper, ISBN 978-1-55849-686-6
$98.00 library cloth edition, ISBN 978-1-55849-685-9
December 2008

A volume in the series Culture, Politics, and the Cold War

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