Author Kristin Hannah.Kevin Lynch
The Women, Kristin Hannah’s harrowing novel about the mostly forgotten story of the American nurses who served in Vietnam, has had extraordinary word-of-mouth buzz since it made its debut in February. For Hannah, a former lawyer who’s written more than 25 other novels, many of them bestsellers too, this one feels like the biggest book of her career, and the achievement of a lifetime.
“I felt that way from the very inception,” she says from her home in the Pacific Northwest. “I was well aware that this was a special idea, and that if done correctly, it was important as well. It could make a difference in people’s lives and start a conversation that I felt was long overdue.”
In some ways, this is a story that has been with Hannah since she was in elementary school in Washington State, growing up against the backdrop of the Vietnam War – the protests, the friends whose dads came home to a country that treated them like criminals rather than heroes, the silver bracelet with a shot-down pilot’s name on it that she bought as part of a fundraiser to raise awareness about the prisoners of war being held captive. (Colonel Robert John Welch never did come home, but he does appear as a minor character in The Women.)
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In 1997, she first pitched the idea of a book about Vietnam to her editor.
“That was the time when it was really felt very strongly that no one in America wanted to talk about the Vietnam War, to read about it, to revisit that time,” she says. “My editor said that it was better to wait – and it turned out to be great advice, because I was too young. I needed a few more circles around the sun to be ready to take on a topic of such complexity.”
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It wasn’t until 2020, in the early days of the pandemic, that Hannah finally felt the time had come. Hannah talked to The Globe and Mail about watching the unrest in America which reminded her of the Vietnam era again.
This could have been a straightforward history of nurses in the Vietnam War, but you chose fiction. Why?
The strength of fiction is to take history, and really personalize it, plunge the reader into it and allow them to step into the shoes of historical characters in a very fully engaged and emotional way. The hope is that reading fiction, especially historical fiction, creates empathy with those characters and makes you understand them. One of the most gratifying things about this book has been the number of veterans and their families who have come to one of my events or written letters to tell me how much it means that this book is allowing them to tell their stories again.
That makes me think of someone who I saw post about this book on social media, who wrote, “I never understood why my mom would cry every time something about the Vietnam War came on the news or on TV – but now I get it.”
What a gift for a novelist! That makes me so proud, but mostly just happy for the vets, you know.
Do you feel like this book is changing anything in a tangible way?
We know that these veterans are aging, and as we lose them, we lose their stories. Hopefully people read this book and ask themselves about the treatment of veterans from the Vietnam War and all wars. It’s a universal truth that if we as countries are going to ask people to risk their lives and make the sacrifices that men and women and military families make, we really need to care for them fully when they come home.
Is there something about our particular geopolitical moment that makes this book feel quite immediate and pressing for a lot of people?
Readers are making the same link, and having the same sense that I did, which is that with all of this chaos and turbulence in America and in the world, it’s a reminder that we’ve been here before. These protests are not a new thing.
When you sit down at your computer …
I actually write longhand! I originally started working on a computer, and then more than 15 years ago, I went back to my lawyer roots and started writing on yellow legal pads with a gel-tip pen. I just found that I enjoyed the writing process so much more when I wasn’t sitting at a computer.
What do those legal pads look like? Are they all full of scratched words, crossed out paragraphs?
Of course there are scratched out parts, pages ripped out, but for the most part, the pen and the pad allow me to bypass the seductiveness of the delete key and I can get into the flow of just plain storytelling. I throw a lot of stuff away, so for me the first draft is really just about finding the story, finding the characters, the plot. The more I can get out of my own head, and the more I can silence my inner critic, the better and more fun the process is.
I remember when I first picked up the book I thought the war chapters would be the toughest to read, but when Frankie, the main character, got home it would all be fine. But it was the reverse.
That’s what I thought when I went into the story. I realized in the writing of this that the war experience is one thing, but then coming home and dealing with what you’ve seen and done, layered on with the fact that you’re back from an unpopular war where there’s no gratitude for your service and there’s no one out there to help you. And as a further layer, now you’re also a woman and you’re invisible. I came to realize that actually, Frankie was not going to be broken by the war. She was going to be broken by coming home.
As a reader, this book really got under my skin, had a real emotional impact. What was it like for you, sitting with this material day in and day out?
The hardest part for me as a writer is not recreating this or writing these scenes. It’s reading the memoirs of the people who actually went through it. I had such respect for them, and I wanted to be authentic and realistic in order to show the world what they had been through. I had to make those scenes as visceral as they were because these women came home, and over and over again, they were told that there were no women in Vietnam, and how can you have trauma if you weren’t in combat? It was important for me to show that this is combat, whether you’re carrying a gun or not.
How do you follow a book like The Women? Are you scribbling away on a legal pad as we speak, or are you just letting yourself breath for a bit and enjoy this?
I’m enjoying it for a minute, but I’m also ready to be looking at something else. But you’re right. It is difficult to follow up a book that has had a reaction like this.
Maybe you don’t? Maybe your next one is a light rom-com set on a beach.
I keep threatening to write a fantasy novel, so who knows?!