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| (photo: Kevin Lynch) | |
Kristin Hannah is an award-winning, number-one bestselling author with more than 25 million copies of her books sold worldwide. Her most recent titles, The Four Winds, The Nightingale, and The Great Alone, won numerous awards and her earlier novel, Firefly Lane, became a top series on Netflix. Hannah is a lawyer-turned-writer and the mother of one son; she and her husband live in the Pacific Northwest near Seattle. Shelf Awareness recently chatted with Hannah about heroism, the tumult of history, and The Women (coming from St. Martin's Press, February 6, 2024), a story of a young woman who goes to the Vietnam War, and the nurses who served there.
You were still a child when the Vietnam War happened. What was your impression of it at the time?
It had a profound impact on me at the time and over time. I was of the age that my friends' fathers were going to Vietnam. There was a lot of talk at the kid level about that. We were watching it as a family on the news in the evening. There were only a couple of networks, so it was front and center. I had a girlfriend from elementary school whose father was shot down in 1967. I began wearing one of those MIA/POW bracelets that we wore back then. They had the name of a military person, and when he was lost, you would wear this bracelet until he came home. I wore mine for years and years and years. Later, when I was older, it became apparent to me how the returning vets were treated, how the country felt about the war, and how the country felt about the warriors.
What historical perspective did you have when you started this project? What made you feel so strongly about telling the story of women in the war?
Writing The Nightingale was the first time I understood that I was drawn to women's lost histories in time and that, when we read about them, everything came from a male perspective. I began seeking out women's stories. It coincides roughly with me turning 50. I began to look at not only my life in retrospect, but the world in retrospect. I tried to figure out what I had to say to my daughter-in-law, to my granddaughter, and to kids. I first proposed this book to an editor in 1998. That's how long I have wanted to write it, but I always felt that I didn't have enough gravitas to look back at this time period that was so seminal for me and for the country. In the last few years, it's been impossible to ignore the great divide in American politics and the differing ways that people feel about our country. It brought up Vietnam to me, because that time felt very volatile, very turbulent. I thought, "Okay, this is the moment where I'm going to write this book that I've always wanted to write." It's terrifying, because it's a big topic. So many people that I am writing to lived through it, and are at an age to understand it better than I'm able to through research and interviews. Once I began to look at the Vietnam War from a female perspective, I realized this was an incredibly important story that needed to be told. I wanted to tell it while the nurses could still read it.
Why do you think the heroism and contributions of women are so minimized?
It speaks to a larger question: Why is the heroism and courage of marginalized people forgotten? It comes down to who was writing the books, who was telling the stories, who was looking for the stories. When I do research, the stories are out there. They just aren't picked up. I'm happy to be living in a moment when other stories and other voices are being heard and celebrated.
What gave you the ambition to tell a story with so much history and depth?
That was the struggle from the get-go. How do I take this huge, complex historical situation, which so many people remember, which had so many facets that didn't have the good and evil of, for example, World War II, that didn't have the clarity of some historical periods? How do I say what I have to say about the war--America, women, coming of age. The answer was the creation of this character, this one woman, and to look at the entire landscape through her eyes. I created characters like Barb and Ethel to expand her worldview and to open it up a bit and to teach her that there was more to the world than what she had grown up seeing in her sheltered family. It's one woman moving through history even as she is trying to grow up and find out who she is.
How did you develop the character of Frankie?
Frankie represents a large number of the nurses I spoke to. A lot of the women who became nurses and went to Vietnam voluntarily were very sheltered. This was the '60s. They were taught to be a certain kind of woman, a lady, and to look for marriage as their ultimate goal. I wanted to speak to that. She was a kind of woman that I understood deeply. I knew she would represent this story of getting to Vietnam and realizing, "I'm not in Kansas anymore, and what did I sign up for?" And then the story would go on through the evolution of her strength and her durability, and her breakdown, which comes in large part because not only was there little help for any Vietnam vets, there was no help for female vets. I've written about war from various perspectives, but something I feel strongly about is our country's responsibility to care for our veterans and their families in whatever manner they need.
For me as an author, Frankie finding herself, owning her own past and believing in who she is, and being able to stand up and say "I was there"--I'm proud of it. It felt like such an important and empowering arc.
What do you hope readers will take from this story?
I had a fascinating first read early on from a bookseller who wrote me a long letter explaining about her father who had been in Vietnam. He had stepped on a landmine and been badly injured. He came home, and his pain, his injury, and his service became a confusing and difficult time for her as a young girl. She said she spent her whole life working through her father's Vietnam service and what it did to their family. She said, "But in all those years, never once did I think about the nurses who saved him." I want people to recognize these remarkable women, eight of whom died, who put their lives, their youth, their patriotism, and their emotional health on the line to help others. Coming out of Covid and once again seeing the medical community paying such a personal price to help others, it's important that we all recognize this service and show gratitude for it. --Jaclyn Fulwood