The Women: A Novel
The Women: A Novel
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Kristin Hannah on The Women: A Novel
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A bracelet she wore for decadesThe book began with a physical object worn by a child. Hannah’s best friend’s father was shot down over Vietnam in 1967, and she carried the weight of his absence long before she had the words to write about it.
The Vietnam War cast a big shadow over my childhood. When I was in elementary school, my best friend’s father was MIA; he’d been shot down in 1967. I remember wearing his POW bracelet for decades. As a result, his name was burned into my memory.
Knowing a subject and being ready to write it are separate things. When Hannah first brought this book to her editor in the late 1990s, she was turned away, and she accepted the verdict.
I first pitched this book to an editor in 1996 or 1997. My editor said, ‘I don’t think you’re ready for this. You’re not old enough, you need a lot more life experience and a lot more writing experience to write about this time in America.’
More than twenty years later, it was the COVID pandemic, not a plot breakthrough, that finally broke the impasse. Watching nurses and doctors work through lockdown in 2020, Hannah saw the Vietnam story she had been circling suddenly become urgent.
For me, this is about the nurses. This is about the women who went to war and what they experienced. I thought, I can’t put this off anymore. It’s time for this book now.
How she wrote it
One woman, one viewpoint, five characters’ worth of materialThe Vietnam War era spans a decade of political rupture, two continents of combat, and thousands of individual stories. Hannah’s first structural decision was a radical narrowing.
I realized that the only way for me to handle this huge era was one woman, one viewpoint.
To build that one woman, protagonist Frankie McGrath, Hannah said she generates enough biographical detail for five characters and then strips it down until only the essential backstory survives.
The research took Hannah to primary sources: memoirs by Vietnam-era nurses, interviews with Red Cross workers and a decorated helicopter pilot, and a close working relationship with Diane Carlson Evans, who spent ten years lobbying to have the Vietnam Women’s Memorial placed near The Wall in Washington, D.C. That proximity to real veterans turned the writing into something Hannah felt she could not afford to get wrong.
The most difficult part of this book, in the writing, was the fear I felt that veterans of the war would be reading it, and the seriousness of my ambition to do right by them, to tell their story in an honest, accurate, and unflinching way. I am proud to say that the word of mouth on the book from Vietnam veterans has been the highlight of my long career.
Combat scenes and field hospital sequences are not where Hannah found herself most stuck. The obstacle was a moral one, located inside the character she had built with such care.
You’ll probably be surprised to hear that the most difficult aspects of this story for me, as the writer, centered on the love story. At her core, Frankie was a patriot and an idealist. I always knew that. And I loved that about her. So, when she broke her own moral code for love, I had a lot of trouble following that path, making her walk it.
On what’s at stake
Women written out of their own historyHannah frames the erasure of women from war narratives not as an oversight but as a structural problem in how history gets recorded and taught. For her, fiction is one corrective.
I think when it comes to women’s stories, it’s just important to put us back in the historical narrative. All too often our service and courage and grit have been overlooked by the people who wrote the history books and taught the classes.
The argument extends beyond Vietnam. Attending the 30th anniversary Veterans Day commemoration at the Vietnam Women’s Memorial, where she stood with Diane Carlson Evans and watched nurses who had served together reunite, sharpened for Hannah the question of what society owes anyone it asks to go to war.
I just think it’s so important that if we’re going to ask people to go off and serve their nation and put themselves in harms way for us, that we care for them when they come back. And so I keep coming back to this issue that means a lot to me.
Hannah opens the novel with a quote from former Idaho Senator Frank Church about Vietnam threatening to pull the country apart. She chose it looking at the present, not the past.
It’s a volatile world again today, and I think the book speaks to that. We were at this stage then, and we came out of it and came back together. We healed and moved on. It makes me hope there’s a path forward for that now.
What she wants us to sit with
The friendship at the center of a war storyHannah spent years researching battlefield medicine, political protest, and the homecoming trauma that Vietnam nurses endured. When she names the book’s true subject, she points away from all of that.
The beating heart of The Women, for all its wartime drama and peacetime conflict, is really the friendship of the female combat vets.
That friendship is also the one thing the war gave Frankie McGrath that it could not take back. Hannah returns to this in her own assessment of what the character earned by surviving.
I think female friendship is one of the most powerful forces on earth. When we women come together in love and friendship, we are unbreakable. That was the silver lining of Frankie’s wartime experience: she met the best friends of her life, women that would be at her side come hell or high water.
The book Hannah finally wrote after twenty-plus years of waiting is, in the end, less an argument about war than an account of what women build for each other inside it.