WHO'S NEXT?
Nobody is safe when author Kristin Hannah is at the helm
Why am I doing this to myself? The thought occurred to me as I reached the bottom of page 20 in Kristin Hannah's new novel, The Women. Barely three chapters in, and already protagonist Frankie Mcgrath was learning that her charming, mischievous older brother had been killed in action in Vietnam. “Shot down ... in a helicopter ... No remains ... all hands lost.” If you've read Hannah's historical novels, you know that this development will be but one snowflake in a blizzard of tear-jerking tragedy that will inundate you over the next 450 pages.
Reading Hannah's books may be a masochistic pastime, but it's also a hugely popular one. The Nightingale, The Four Winds, The Great Alone, Firefly Lane: Her books are such reliable bestsellers that her publisher is betting big on The Women with an initial printing of one million copies. If Kleenex doesn't come up with a tie-in campaign, it's leaving money on the table.
The tragedy that befalls Frankie is multilayered, though all of it can be traced back to the moment she impulsively volunteers to be an Army nurse in Vietnam. Before she knows what's happened, she's 2nd Lt. Frances Mcgrath, arriving at a 400-bed hospital near Saigon. Battling stomach distress and sporting a positively medieval “regulation panty girdle,” Frankie has no understanding of what horrors await her. Her first full day in-country, after helicopters swoop in carrying dozens of injured men, a medic hands her a boot and, when Frankie realizes a foot is still inside, she vomits and then tells anyone who will listen that she's made a huge mistake. “I shouldn't be here,” she gasps.
A Hannah fan knows this part is nothing to worry about. This is the part in The Great Alone when Leni first moves off the grid to Alaska and comprehends the true meaning of the term “harsh winter”; it's the part in The Four Winds when Elsa heads west with her son to escape the Dust Bowl and realizes that California is not, in fact, a welcoming oasis. It's the in-over-herhead phase that comes right before the theme song from The Greatest American Hero starts playing.
Eventually, Frankie will be the kind of nurse who can work during a blackout with bombs dropping around her and a flashlight clamped between her teeth. Still, the thrill of newly acquired expertise can't forestall the queasy certainty that, at any moment, the other shoe will drop. I read The Women while hugging an emotional-support pillow and trying to divine which characters would be sacrificed. Hannah's protective instincts toward her protagonists are on par with George R.R. Martin's. But even if Frankie made it out alive, I knew there would be many more who wouldn't.
Would Frankie's closest friends, fellow nurses Barb and Ethel, survive their tours of duty? How about Jamie, the dreamy doctor with the “kind, sad blue eyes”? Or her brother's best friend, Rye, a pilot with more than a passing resemblance to Paul Newman? Maybe there's some kind of formula: If character X has Y amount of charm, he is 10 times more likely to die. When the goofy kid from Kentucky is wheeled in, cracking jokes about the shrapnel lodged in his backside, a warning flashed in my brain: Don't get attached to this one.
Which returns me to my original question. What is it about Hannah's tragic tales that keeps me coming back? It's a doubly interesting query, I think, given reading trends since the start of the COVID pandemic. In 2020, interest in romance novels skyrocketed. Suddenly, readers, reeling from the uncertainty of simple existence, flocked to the guarantee of a happy ending.
Some of that popularity arose from Booktok — the bibliophile's corner of Tiktok — a platform that helped novels by Ali Hazelwood, Sarah J. Maas and Elissa Sussman become bestsellers.
But Booktok is also a place where young women go to feel big, messy emotions — to read heartbreaking works by such authors as Colleen Hoover while filming themselves weeping. It seemed like a strange practice to me until I started to interrogate my own inclinations. I wasn't prepared to show the world my tear-streaked face, but was there something to the idea of being part of a group that wanted to really feel something? Hannah certainly makes that happen. (True story: I once teared up just describing the scene in The Great Alone when Leni's mother kills a man to save her daughter's life. In my defence, and to paraphrase contrite men everywhere, I am the mother of a daughter and the daughter of a mother.)
Hannah got her start writing romance novels — A Handful of Heaven (1991) has one of those shirtless-man-embracing-a-windswept-heroine covers — but even as the pandemic made readers hungry for happily-ever-afters, she kept serving up stress and sadness. The Four Winds came out in early 2021 and was an immediate bestseller.
I remember reading the book during that bleak, isolated time. And while it destroyed me, it also awoke something that was — and continues to be — in short supply: empathy. It gave me a new appreciation for what everyday people from the past endured; it also gave me perspective for how my own micro-tragedies fit into the larger framework of history. Hannah tells the stories of real but unsung heroes, and when you consider that, the price of a few sobs seems relatively small.
So where does The Women land on the Kristin Hannah Cry- O -Meter? Is Frankie's fate as tragic as French resistance fighter Isabelle Rossignol's? Is there a single line — “Not my Leni” — that will get the waterworks going years after reading it? I would love to tell you, but my screen is getting inexplicably blurry.