A hard road to strength
Kristin Hannah didn’t have it easy creating the Dust Bowl migrant heroine of ‘The Four Winds’
Kristin Hannah had spent a year researching and writing an early draft of her new novel when she realized she’d gone astray.
“The Four Winds” is set in the Texas panhandle during the Depression and the Dust Bowl environmental disaster. In the margins of Hannah’s story as she initially conceived it, there was the character Elsa, a young woman who’d grown up feeling unloved and unworthy, who found meaning as the mother of two young children.
“I wrote it for at least a year, and Elsa was kind of a peripheral character,” Hannah says. “She was Rafe’s wife, but she was not a viewpoint character, and it was not in any way her story.
“And as the novel sort of progressed, I became more and more interested in Elsa, and her sort of difficult journey from insecure and unloved to a woman finding her own voice,” she says.
And so, Hannah says, she steeled herself and made a fresh start.
“After a year I just sort of gave in and threw away most of what I had done,” she says. “And restarted the book as Elsa’s story.
“I think that’s when it really became the story I was meant to tell, and the story I want people to read.”
It is likely that readers of “The Four Winds,” which arrived Feb. 2, won’t be able to imagine this story told any other way, so strong a character is Elsa as she fights for survival and finds her own strength in a tale that reaches from the Dust Bowl to the migrant camps of California’s Central Valley in the mid-1930s.
For Hannah, that vindicates the decision to place Elsa at the center of the story, which — like her 2015 bestseller “The Nightingale,” a novel about the women of the French Resistance during World War II — focuses on an epic tale about women set against the backdrop of history.
“In my travels after that book and talking to people, I really began to understand how much that story of female courage and women’s lost history resonated with people,” Hannah says. “And I really began to want to write a quintessentially American novel about some story of lost history that I thought would be as emotional and as inspiring as ‘The Nightingale.’ ”
In her early research into the Dust
Bowl and the Great Depression, she realized that as a woman born in Southern California and raised there and in the Pacific Northwest, where she lives today, she didn’t know much about the struggles faced by people in that time and place.
“All of that hardship, it’s remarkable and it’s inspiring,” Hannah says. “I think that has real messages for today.”
Before she started writing, she did extensive research in order to be as accurate as possible about the history and the people about whom she planned to write. She visited Dalhart, Texas, the town where Elsa’s story begins, and later, after driving remnants of Route 66 west to California, spent time at the Sunset migrant camp near Arvin in order to see the conditions into which she later placed Elsa and her children.
Source materials at the University of Texas in Austin also helped, including the writings of novelist Sanora Babb and the memoirs of many who
lived through the Dust Bowl and westward migration, Hannah says. At the heart of many of those texts lie the twin passions for land and family that undergird much of the narrative of “The Four Winds.”
“In a very real sense, it’s sort of the core of it,” she says. “I’m a West Coast gal, and I’ve moved around a lot, so I don’t come from one of those families that are connected to a place sort of fundamentally.
“And so I’ve always been fascinated by this idea of the people who stay on land for generations and pass it down, and for whom that land is a big part of their identity. One of the things that was so amazing to me in doing the research was the vast majority of these families who had these Dust Bowl farms, they stayed in the area.
“The level of hope and resilience and love for the land that that shows to me is just inspiring,” Hannah says.
Reading “The Four Winds,” it’s impossible not to notice parallels between the fictional past and factual present. Climate disaster is a threat, then and now. The pandemic-fueled economic collapse is often compared to the Depression. Issues such as immigration, whether between states or nations, and income inequality are also in the mix.
“I started it almost four years ago, and obviously, I had no idea how timely and relevant it would feel to come out at this moment,” Hannah says. “What I keep hearing and what I believe to be true is that it’s a really good book for people to read right now.
“Because it’s a reminder of the strength of the human spirit and our ability to not only survive hardship but to ultimately thrive,” she says.
On Feb. 3, Netflix launched the series adaptation of Hannah’s “Firefly Lane,” her 2008 novel about best friends Tully and Kate, starring Katherine Heigl and Sarah Chalke. It’s the first of Hannah’s books to be adapted for American TV or film, though by the end of the year “The Nightingale,” starring Dakota and Elle Fanning as the book’s sisters, is expected to be released.
So far, there isn’t a Hollywood version of “The Four Winds” underway, though its sweeping backdrop and epic story seem tailor-made for a limited series, especially given the strength of a character such as Elsa.
Hannah hopes that readers will love Elsa as she does.
“She begins the novel thinking that she’s weak, thinking that she’s uneducated and unlovable,” she says. “And through her marriage, which turns out to be difficult, the embracing of her in-laws and motherhood and becoming a farm wife, she really goes through this journey where she becomes fearless and a warrior.
“She feels strongly enough in her opinions and in her sense of self to fight not just for her own children and herself but for others as well,” Hannah says. “I just found that journey of a woman finding her voice to be incredibly powerful.”
“One of the things that was so amazing to me in doing the research was the vast majority of these families who had these Dust Bowl farms, they stayed in the area. The level of hope and resilience and love for the land that that shows to me is just inspiring.”
— Kristin Hannah, author of “The Four Winds”