Kristin Hannah gives her voice to ‘strong women’
Kristin Hannah’s new novel, The Great Alone (St. Martin’s Press), is the story of Leni Allbright, a teenager whose inner strength is tested when her father, a volatile former Vietnam War POW, moves his family to a remote frontier town in rugged 1970s Alaska. Hannah is the author of more than 20 novels, including The Nightingale, her 2015 blockbuster about two sisters and the French Resistance during World War II. Hannah spoke with USA TODAY’s Jocelyn McClurg in New York as part of a #BookmarkThis author chat on Facebook. Here are highlights:
Question: The main character in The Great Alone is a 13-year-old girl when we first meet her. Did you draw on your own life for her?
Hannah: I’m basically the same age Leni would be, so I was able to use a lot of my own memories. My dad was an adventurer, I moved around a lot as a kid, and books were really my friends. Books like The Outsiders and the books that Leni reads are the books that I was reading. Also, because I came of age in that era, the Vietnam War really shaped me. I wore a POW bracelet for my friend’s father who never returned. At some point in the writing of this book, the social and political unrest of the ’70s started feeling relevant again. It’s a turbulent time in the world again. It’s a turbulent time in America; there’s division, and I think it’s interesting always to look back historically and see how we came out of things, what we learned from them and how we go on.
Q: Do you have a mental checklist as far as what you want your novels to contain? Page-turner, check?
Hannah: Yes, and I guess if I had to ditch everything else — obviously it’s a long list of things I hope are in my novels — but if I had to pare it down, it would definitely be page-turner. I want to write a book that you can’t put down.
Q: What do you have in the pipeline right now? Are you working on a new book?
Hannah: I am about 25 pages into a new historical novel, and I guess all I can say right now is it’s another novel about an indomitable woman facing really difficult odds and discovering who she is against the backdrop of history.
Q: Do you feel women’s stories are overshadowed and overlooked? How can fiction correct that oversight?
Hannah: Yes, I do, and it’s become sort of a passion of mine to bring them to the forefront. I think that’s the gift that Nightingale gave me, and I think it’s why readers are responding to the book so much.
Q: You wrote a novel after The Nightingale that you abandoned, correct?
Hannah: Yes; it was a wholly different version of The Great Alone. It was always set in Alaska, but it just took me a while to find this story. It was complex, it was emotionally layered, and I was not quite sure after Nightingale who I was as a writer. When you’re writing for years and years and then all of a sudden you have a book that changes who you are as a writer and your perception and how many people are reading you, I felt a great pressure to write a better book. That was very daunting. Because it felt like: “Wow, maybe I should just retire. Maybe this is as good as it’s going to get.” It took me a while to just realize: “Wait a second. Do what you do. You write about strong women, you write about interesting times, you write stories that you can’t put down. Just keep doing that.”
Q: The Nightingale is in production at TriStar Pictures, which also has optioned The Great Alone. What can you tell us?
Hannah: The Nightingale is supercool. We have a fabulous female director (Michelle MacLaren). We have a female screenwriter, a female producer and a female studio head. So I have really high hopes for a modern, female-driven World War II movie, which I think would just be awesome. So, fingers crossed.