Kristin Hannah’s "The Women" spotlights our complicated memory of the Vietnam War

Note: Text has been edited and does not match audio exactly.

Katie O'Connor: Hi, listeners. I'm Audible Editor Katie O'Connor, and today I'm honored to be speaking with Kristin Hannah, bestselling author of more than 20 novels, including The Nightingale, The Great Alone, and The Four Winds. Her latest work, The Women, centers on Frankie McGrath, a combat nurse in Vietnam, and details a history of the too-often-forgotten women who served in that war. Welcome, Kristin.

Kristin Hannah: Hi, thank you. It's just great to be here.

KO: I'm so excited to be speaking with you, although you have destroyed me yet again after listening to one of your novels. Just the tears that come, but also just the amazing satisfaction after finishing listening to one of your masterpieces. It did not disappoint.

KH: Oh, thank you.

KO: I love that in The Women you include an author's note, not just at the beginning but also at the end. And in your closing note, you reveal that you first conceived of this story back in 1997 but didn't feel ready to write it. Why did now feel like the right time?

KH: Well, when I first conceived of it, I was obviously quite a bit younger and earlier in my career, and I knew that this book had been in my heart for a long time even before that. And that, I think, comes from the fact that I was a kid during the Vietnam War, and I really watched what was happening around me. We were watching the news, seeing what was going on, seeing how divided the country was. I had a good girlfriend whose dad was missing in action, and so from the time I was about 10 years old, I wore his prisoner of war bracelet. And so I saw his name and it was just constantly in my thoughts for years and years, and then of course I saw how they were treated when they came home, the Vietnam vets. It just had a really lasting impact on me. But I knew that it was a really big, really important story, and I had to be able to really tell it well.

"If you read a book that teaches you something and makes you feel very deeply and makes you want to know more about that historical subject, I really feel like I've done my job as a novelist."

And part of that journey was me getting old enough to understand, in retrospect, what had happened. And part of it was really the country being ready to hear about Vietnam, because for many, many years, it was kind of a taboo subject, I think, in book and film. And it wasn't until, actually, March of 2020, I had just finished the final, final revisions on The Four Winds and turned it in, and we were in the midst of the COVID pandemic all of a sudden, and we were on lockdown. I was seeing how divided the country was, how angry people were. People were just really angry. And that made me sort of think about the Vietnam era.

And then I was watching our medical personnel, the doctors and nurses being sort of overrun in the hospitals and needing support and needing encouragement and all kinds of things from people that they weren't getting. And that was the moment, I think, when I went, “Okay, this is the moment where this Vietnam story can really feel relevant again. I'll tell the story of a nurse in Vietnam, and her story of what it was like to go to war as a naive 21-year-old, and to come home to a country that not only didn't value your service and didn't know how to deal with the trauma that you had endured, but wanted you simply to disappear into the landscape and forget about it.” So, it just felt like the right moment for that story.

KO: And I appreciate, too, that in that first author's note, you do thank the health care workers of the pandemic as well. I was actually going to ask this question a little later, but you just hat-tipped to it. As a listener, it certainly feels to me like there are many more World War II novels than there are Vietnam novels, and so do you think it's because, as you just mentioned, that it did feel too taboo for us to consume? Is it that there had not been enough time to collectively reflect? Is it the morally gray aspect to it, do you think?

KH: I think all of the above. And even when you read the book, I've heard a lot of comments, especially from younger people who didn't live through any of this, how shocked they were, and are, at the way our vets were treated when they came home. I think that there's kind of a collective sense that that was a bad error, that that was something really unacceptable, and some guilt there and some shame. I think it just took a while for people to be ready. And you're right, in the sense that World War II is a very sort of good-versus-evil landscape and the Vietnam era is much more difficult to sort of encompass and write about. I really wanted to do it justice on both sides, and to put forth this notion that protest can be a positive political act, as well as serving [in the military].

KO: Your novel The Nightingale, which I love so much, does take place during World War II. And you just said that with [there] being so much more good vs. evil in WWII, that it can be easier to write. Did you find that, personally, that writing about World War II was an easier feat than writing about the Vietnam War? Or is it almost more challenging in a sense, because there is so much out there and you're trying to tell a story that we haven't heard before necessarily?

KH: Well, I was actually fairly lucky with The Nightingale, because when I started writing that in 2013, there was actually very little World War II fiction that centered on women. And it felt very much like this in the sense that it felt like a lost historical women's story, and so I was able to sort of move into World War II and tell this very narrow story, like I did, I think, with The Women. The difference was that the landscape with The Women also required an exploration of the division at home and the disagreement about the war and the treatment of vets and all of those more modern questions, which were less apparent in World War II. It was very different for a veteran who came home to a ticker-tape parade and the end of the war that everyone was celebrating.

KO: The Women is so vivid, and even without listening to your author’s notes and your acknowledgements—which, just as an aside, I love that you read the acknowledgements. We don't often get it in audio, and I just so appreciated being able to hear them. I always love to flip to them when I have a physical copy on hand. But you do thank the people that you interviewed and you detail a bit about your research process, and you even give listeners some recommendations on what they can seek out if they want more information. Can you just touch on where you even started with your research? What was your first stop when you were getting ready to write The Women?

KH: In March of '20, when I realized that I was going to write about the nurses, that was sort of my entry point into the story, and that was a way to really funnel all of this massive amount of historical and geographic and political information that I needed to understand. I could sort of put it through a very narrow focus. I started with, of course, the sort of general political landscape, starting with the late '50s and what was going on politically with John F. Kennedy and the beginning of the Vietnam conflict and all of that. When I got to, "Okay, now we're into the nurses’ story, so I need to narrow it to the years that nurses were serving there," that gave me a real clarity, and I was lucky to find quite a few just fabulous nurses’ memoirs.

And, yes, I do give them a shout-out in the back of the book, because one thing I've been hearing a lot already with The Women, before it's even out, is that people are finishing it and then going to do additional research, which I heard with The Four Winds and Nightingale as well. And that's one of the best things that I think can happen. If you read a book that teaches you something and makes you feel very deeply and makes you want to know more about that historical subject, I really feel like I've done my job as a novelist.

KO: And, as we've kind of alluded to, yes, this is a novel of the Vietnam War, but when we talk about Vietnam, it is not just the war itself we have to talk about. It is the homecoming and the aftermath and the generation that was so profoundly impacted by it. And you honor that in your story, with Frankie's time in Vietnam given as many chapters really as her homecoming, as the aftermath. I'm curious, which was more challenging for you as a writer, diving into that wartime or diving into the homecoming in the years that followed? And did you write them in order?

KH: Yes, I am a very “write what's right in front of me” kind of gal. I write a book from beginning to end. It's not always the same beginning or the same end or the same middle, but I never jump ahead. I never write a scene ahead or go sideways in any way. I write the next scene every day. And absolutely, it was much more difficult to write coming home, because the Frankie who goes to war, I kind of do this setup where we show she's from this affluent family that is proud of their military service, as long as the one serving is a male. And she leaves this very bubble world of early-1960s Coronado Island and goes off to war and is thrust into just horrors that she couldn't imagine and that she is not trained for and that she's not capable of keeping up with.

"Frankie is probably my favorite character I've ever written."

And so those scenes were so visceral, and it was actually, as difficult as it was, it was really fun to write this woman becoming this just accomplished combat nurse. The coming home part was much more difficult, because Frankie was trying to be a good girl. She was trying to come back. She comes back to a world that is entirely different than the one she left. It's only been two years, but people are dressing differently, they're talking differently. There's no respect for the returning vets, and she is really wounded by the fact that here she thinks of herself as a patriot, and she comes home and she's treated as a pariah. She's trying so hard to do as she's told, to forget about the war, to move on, to pretend it never happened, and she just simply can't cure her own ills.

And so that was really difficult, because Frankie is probably my favorite character I've ever written. I just adore her and I really hated putting her through such dark and difficult times, but all of those dark, difficult times came from the research of what these women dealt with coming home. I felt like it wouldn't have been honoring them entirely if I pretended that it had been easier than it was upon returning.

KO: I love Frankie. I feel like I know Frankie, and as you were just mentioning, she was born with a certain amount of privilege and comes to Vietnam with a significant amount, I felt like, of more naiveté than her hooch mates who become her best friends, Barb and Ethel. In that decision-making of having her sort of be greener than they are, was that to show that juxtaposition of how far she veered from that Coronado Island girl, as opposed to a Barb or an Ethel who, yes, it was hard for them coming home, but they weren't as green going over there?

KH: You know, that's an interesting question. I always got the sense that Barb was never green. Barb had a background that had taught her hardship and injustice, and she came to war with a very different backstory than Frankie did.

Ethel, I'm not so sure. I think Ethel may have been as green when she landed as well, and certainly, according to the research, the vast majority of the nurses arrived in Vietnam in their early 20s, just out of college, with very little actual nursing experience. I think it was more Barb and Ethel were her guides to say essentially, "This is what you're going to become, this is what's going to happen." I make the point that, later on, naive nurses show up, and it is Frankie who takes them and helps them, so I think what it's all meant to show is the important force of female friendship and female mentorship. And I really think that with this novel, the real heart and soul of it, the real love story, is Frankie and Barb and Ethel, and this friendship that keeps them all afloat and remains throughout their life.

And yes, Frankie has a more difficult time than Barb and Ethel. She also experiences some real heartbreak and loss while she's over there that makes it even more difficult for her to return and re-enter, but it's her girlfriends that are always there for her.

KO: In one of your notes, you say that you tried to be as historically accurate as possible but that you originally created fictional towns and evacuation hospitals to, quote, "give yourself the greatest possible fictional latitude." But that your Vietnam veterans, your early readers that had been there, felt that you should actually name the places accurately. And I respect so much that it was important to them, and that you honored it. As a historical fiction writer in general, I'm wondering where you typically think that line is between artistic license and factual accuracy?

KH: Let's be clear; I always create a fictional town if I can, because that gives me, like I said, the greatest latitude. That way, I don't have to hear, "There's no apple tree on the corner of First and Main," or whatever it is that I've created, and so it's just easier. I get to completely turn on my imagination, create my town, and then populate it and move through it, but like you said, I wanted to honor them. I was slightly nervous about it, because this was at the ninth hour that this came through, and I was nervous, like, "Would I be inaccurate, would something be wrong?" so I kept asking them like, "Are you sure?" And the bottom line was, they kept saying, "We would rather have it feel real and deal with some slight inaccuracy than to spend our time trying to figure out where it is you're talking about."

"I really think that with this novel, the real heart and soul of it, the real love story, is Frankie and Barb and Ethel, and this friendship that keeps them all afloat and remains throughout their life."

KO: That makes sense. Julia Whelan does a spectacular job performing The Women, and she's recorded a few of your novels now. I saw that great message that you had recorded about her performances on Instagram. What is that creative relationship like? And what are your own emotions hearing your work performed in this medium?

KH: It is amazing, and she's amazing. The way she brings it to life, she creates this version of my book that belongs to her, and I just love the way she does it. I had lunch with her, I think when I was on tour a couple of years ago, and we were out for a glass of wine talking about all of this. And the way she prepares and reads everything is very actor-like, and she brings this great depth of understanding to the material. But then the challenge for her, I know, is to record especially the really highly emotional scenes that are really difficult to do with a strong and steady voice. She says a lot of times she has to do a couple of sentences and then leave her studio and go lie down for a minute to get through the emotions, and then go back in and try again. I just think she does a remarkable job, and I ask for her every time now, because I see what she brings to the work.

KO: It's funny you say that. I just saw another favorite narrator of mine comment on how you have no idea how hard it is for us as performers when our favorite side character dies and we have to keep reading. I was like, "Oh, my goodness, yes, yes." We feel these losses so viscerally, particularly in Frankie's story, and I don't feel like this is a spoiler, because it is a novel of war, there are going to be losses. It's Kristin Hannah [laughs]—

KH: [Laughs].

KO: —we know what we're setting ourselves up for. And you're right, Julia does that with a steady hand, but still with the emotional gravitas that the moment deserves as well. Her performances of your stories are always so wonderful and so moving.

KH: Absolutely.

KO: So, what is next for you?

KH: I wish I knew, Katie. I wish I knew. Honestly, this book feels as hard to follow as The Nightingale. These books feel very of a piece for me, The Nightingale and The Women. They feel like the same kind of big, emotional, important books that highlight lost women's stories. And this one has sort of the added bit, I guess, of the fact that so many of the women that I'm writing about are alive and available to read the book, and out there, and so it's really important to me, and it has been really important that this book rings true to them and that it honors them at the same time. It's become such an important book for them, and for me, that it is a little difficult to figure out, "Okay, so where do I go from here?" I'm not entirely sure.

KO: Well, wherever that ends up being, we will all surely follow you.

KH: Well, thank you. I appreciate that. I appreciate that more than you can know. It just means the world, really, the way readers respond to my work, and Julia's recording of it, is so humbling and gratifying, and just wonderful.

KO: You've earned it. It is so well-earned. And thank you so much for your time today, Kristin. And listeners, you can find The Women by Kristin Hannah right now on Audible.

KH: Oh, thank you so much, Katie. This has been just a wonderful interview, and I look forward to the next time.