Winter Garden
Winter Garden
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Kristin Hannah on Winter Garden
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
The Velcro idea she couldn’t ignoreHannah had spent years deliberately staying close to home. Her novels ‘True Colors’ and ‘Firefly Lane’ were set in the Pacific Northwest, and she was comfortable there. One offhand comment from a friend broke that commitment open, sending her toward a subject she knew almost nothing about.
This idea was Velcro. It started with a friend’s offhand comment about women during the siege of Leningrad. I knew very little about modern day St. Petersburg, next to nothing about Leningrad, and absolutely nothing about how the city fared during World War II.
Before she had a plot or a setting, she had a single sentence. That sentence carried enough pressure that she could spend months building outward from it, and for ‘Winter Garden’ it arrived as a question about family silence rather than history.
In Winter Garden I started with, ‘What if your mother had a secret life about which you knew nothing?’ It’s usually one sentence like that—the heart and theme of the novel—that intrigues me enough that I can go and search for the answers.
The book took shape as she recognized that three separate interests could be fused into one project. She describes this method of combination as the thing that keeps her committed through the long months of writing a novel.
in Winter Garden, I joined a sister’s book, to a mother’s secret book, to a historical novel—all things that interested me.
How she wrote it
A year inside Stalin’s LeningradThe research calendar for this book was unlike anything she had taken on since early in her career. A full year of reading preceded the drafting, and the scope of that reading kept expanding beyond the siege itself into the decades of political terror that made the siege possible.
Winter Garden was obviously a book that took a lot of research time. I spent probably a year all together reading about the war and Leningrad and Stalin. It was a real challenge to put it all together.
Stalin’s regime shaped every decision the novel’s characters make, and Hannah knew she could not write those choices credibly without understanding what life under that regime had felt like before the German army arrived. Her research ranged from the Great Reign of Terror to the show trials to the culture of disappearances.
To write Winter Garden, I had to research not only the effect of the war on Leningrad, I had to become completely familiar with the people who lived there before the war. I read dozens of books about Stalin’s regime, the Great Reign of Terror, and the disappearances that terrified everyone. It was really important for me to understand the Communist mentality because it informs the choices that people made.
Diaries and letters from survivors pressed closer than any secondary source could. The scarcity of those records, itself a product of Stalinist repression, became part of what the research revealed.
The most difficult facet of the research was definitely reading the first hand accounts of the survivors. Diaries, letters, interviews. Unfortunately, the records of this time are not as extensive as they should be. It is yet another example of Stalin’s repression.
The novel moves between a contemporary Pacific Northwest family and wartime Leningrad, a structural choice Hannah traced to a specific literary model she had encountered in the years just before starting the book. Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s ‘The Shadow of the Wind’ is a novel set in postwar Barcelona that weaves a present-day narrator through a hidden wartime story.
The book that has influenced me most in the last couple of years is The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. That was a fairly direct inspiration for Winter Garden, because it was a combination of contemporary and historical stories. I love the dual narrative of that book.
Anya, the distant and withholding mother at the novel’s center, resisted Hannah’s instinct to soften her. The challenge was less technical than emotional: staying true to a character whose behavior Hannah found painful to inhabit.
The most challenging was probably Anya in Winter Garden, because I just kept wanting to shake her and say, ‘Snap out of it, treat your children better.’ It was very difficult for me to create a mother who kept her children at arms’ length.
The ending, too, slipped out of her control. She had planned a different resolution, but the story arrived at something she had not foreseen, a reminder that Anya’s world refused to be managed even on the page.
The personal thread
What daughters don’t ask in timeHannah lost her mother at 26, before she had thought to ask the questions that would later drive her fiction. She returned to this fact in a 2015 Goodreads interview, speaking in the context of ‘The Nightingale’ but naming the pattern as one that runs across all her work, with ‘Winter Garden’ as its first full historical expression.
You’ll find that a theme in my books is trying to know your mother deeply and know her story. I lost my mom when I was 26. I am keenly aware that your mother has stories that you’re often too busy to listen to when you should.
Proximity to her material usually gave Hannah some professional protection. She knew in advance when a book would be difficult and could prepare for it. ‘Winter Garden’ was the exception, and the grief arrived before she recognized it was coming.
The only book to date that has actually made me cry while reading it was Winter Garden. Firefly Lane was a very difficult and very personal book, but it never blindsided me emotionally the way Winter Garden did. I went into Firefly Lane knowing how difficult the topic was going to be for me and guarding against it, whereas Winter Garden crept under my skin.
What she wants us to sit with
Imagine how you would have faredThe siege of Leningrad, in which roughly a million civilians died over 872 days, is a historical event most Western readers know only as a statistic. Hannah’s stated purpose was to close the distance between those numbers and a reader’s own imagination.
In writing Winter Garden, it was my goal to take this epic, tragic event and personalize it as much as possible. I wanted to give you all this story of survival and loss, horror and heartache in a way that would allow you to experience it with some measure of emotion. I am not a historian, nor a non fiction writer. My hope is that you leave this novel informed, but not merely with the facts and figures; rather, I want you to be able to actually imagine it, to ask yourself how you would have fared in such terrible times.
The research confirmed early that the survivors’ accounts, not the historical overviews, were the material that would do that work. Once those accounts reached her, the project stopped feeling like research.
Once I read my first account of the siege, I was hooked. Big time. The survivors’ stories literally clawed their way into my heart and there they remain.
That phrase, ‘there they remain,’ is not rhetorical. The question Hannah puts to readers at the novel’s close is the same one the survivors’ diaries put to her: what would you have done, and what would you have become?