The Great Alone
The Great Alone
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Kristin Hannah on The Great Alone
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
Alaska was always the answerThe novel didn’t begin with a plot. It began with a place Hannah had been visiting for decades, one her family had helped build from scratch in the late 1970s when her parents moved north and eventually co-founded a sport-fishing operation on the Kenai River.
My family has a long history there. In the late ‘70s my mom and dad went up and fell in love with Alaska. They met a woman and her daughter who were homesteaders there. Afterward, they decided to join in to build a fishing lodge on the Kenai River. Flash forward three generations and we are still running it.
The title came from a childhood ritual: her father reciting the Canadian-American poet Robert Service around a campfire on trips into the backcountry. It lodged so deeply that she didn’t choose the phrase so much as recognize it when she needed it.
I grew up with my dad reciting Robert Service to us around the campfire when we were out in the middle of nowhere. And ‘the Great Alone’ is just one of those phrases that really sticks with you … It has sort of been in my subconscious my whole life…
She was still a teenager in 1974, the year the novel opens, and the Vietnam War was not historical background for her. It was a fact of daily life she wore on her wrist.
I came of age in the 70s. I’m the same age as the primary narrator Lennie, who is 13 years old when the novel opens. And I really remember the Vietnam era as a 13 and 14-year-old. I wore a prisoner of war bracelet, a missing in action bracelet for my friend’s father who never came home. [paraphrased from audio]
That bracelet, and the man whose name was on it, are the emotional seed of Ernt Allbright, the volatile Vietnam veteran whose unraveling drives the novel’s danger.
How she wrote it
Starting over with only a setting and a girlAfter 18 months of drafting, Hannah had almost nothing she could use. She stripped the manuscript back to its two surviving elements and rebuilt entirely, which is why the book readers know bears almost no resemblance to what she started writing.
The first drafts of the novel were set in the modern day, with an unreliable male narrator in Alaska who was trying to uncover the truth about a decades-old crime involving a girl he once loved. In the final draft, the novel was about a young girl coming of age in a dangerous family in Alaska in the 1970s. The thing that stayed the same: the setting and the girl, Leni. It was always a novel about the beauty and danger in Alaska and a look at the kind of people who choose to live there.
The research challenge was the opposite of what she had faced on her previous novel, where documentation was abundant. For a story set in 1970s homesteader Alaska, the archive was thin, so she turned to people instead of libraries.
For *The Nightingale* there were literally thousands of books to read. In this one there weren’t as many sources, library books, and newspaper articles, so I did a lot more interviews, and it helped, of course, that I grew up in this era.
Domestic violence cycles by nature, which made the novel’s central conflict almost impossible to dramatize without numbing the reader. She worked through many structural versions before arriving at a solution grounded in what Leni, as a child inside the family, could actually perceive.
I liked the question better than the answer. Did PTSD cause this? Is this what he was like before? Is Cora a reliable assessor of his character? How much of this is true? I thought all of those questions were really interesting.
Keeping those questions open required refusing to settle the most obvious one: whether the war made Ernt violent. She held her own private opinion but kept it out of the book, leaving readers to sit with the same uncertainty Leni lives with.
Once the structural question was resolved, there was still a tonal one. Writing a character who terrorizes his family while keeping some humanity visible in him was the craft problem that took the longest to solve.
The real trick for me as a writer was to show this with the honesty that I wanted to show it, and have compassion for Ernt’s situation — even though obviously he becomes incredibly dangerous — and to balance all of that so that it wasn’t a book that was relentlessly grim. It was really important for me that this also be a book about the joy that Leni finds in discovering who she is, how she wants to live…
The personal thread
The mother-daughter story she had been avoidingThe women who shaped Cora weren’t invented. Over years of visiting Alaska through the family lodge, Hannah watched a specific pattern repeat itself among the women who had stayed after the relationships that brought them there fell apart.
A lot of them, interestingly enough, were like Cora, and came to Alaska because it was their man’s dream. The relationships didn’t go anywhere, but the women stayed. They forged this new life, where they’re now doing stuff like driving carpool in between moose hunts.
Writing Cora and Leni’s relationship forced Hannah to examine a pattern in her own work she hadn’t consciously recognized. When she did, the reason became clear, and the novel became something she could not have written earlier in her career.
I lost my mother when I was young and didn’t realize for a number of years that I never wrote mother/daughter adult relationships. Either they were difficult for me to imagine or so painful that my subconscious was protecting me.
What she wants us to sit with
The curtain, and what it revealsHannah built physical danger into the novel at a granular level: 18-hour winter nights, temperatures well below zero, and the statistic she put directly into the narrative that 5 out of every 1,000 Alaskans go missing and are never found. The environment was meant to make abstract risk feel bodily. But the world the novel opens up is not only a landscape.
For me, the best books part a curtain and reveal a world that people do not know exists. This is what I wanted *The Great Alone* to do for Alaska and its people. It is a complex look at love and survival that are competing forces in the novel.
The book appeared in 2018 alongside the #MeToo movement, and Hannah noticed that domestic violence sat at the edge of that conversation rather than its center. She thought the novel’s questions had earned their moment.
As I suggest in the book, it’s a difficult topic, because it’s hard for other people to ‘save’ you.
That difficulty is what she left in the book unresolved: why people stay, what safety actually costs, and what a person owes herself when leaving is the most dangerous moment of all.