The idea to write about nurses in combat zones in the Vietnam War came easy, novelist Kristin Hannah says.
The writing? Not so much.
“The Vietnam War was such a shadow across my childhood,” Hannah says of her earliest inspiration for her new novel, “The Women.” “My friends’ fathers were serving, and in fact, my best friend’s father was shot down and lost.
“I didn’t understand all of the complexities, but I knew that the country was angry and divided,” she says. “You know, we were watching the aftermath and what was happening in the war on a nightly basis. So it just made a really big impact on me.”
So around 1996, after half a dozen or so novels, Hannah decided to base her next book on women who served in the war.
And then: “The truth was, I just wasn’t a good enough writer at that point,” she says. “Because I knew this story was really important, or at least I felt it was important. and I really wanted to be able to write it to the best of my ability.”
She was a new mother at the time, too, so when her editor urged her to set it aside until she felt ready to write it, she did. And there it sat, surfacing occasionally for new beginnings, only to be put aside again until 2020 when the pandemic arrived.
“I had turned in ‘The Four Winds,’ actually the week that Seattle went on lockdown,” says Hannah, who lives on Bainbridge Island in Washington, referring to her previous novel. “Here we are, trapped in our homes for quite some period of time. And I was watching the nurses and the doctors in the medical community, and the price that was being exacted on them by this pandemic.
“Somehow this confluence of being trapped and being reliant on the medical community, and seeing the cost that they were paying to help us, led me back to the Vietnam female nurses,” she says. “I thought, ‘OK, I can’t go anywhere. There is no excuse for me not to write this book now, because it feels even more relevant. Our country is divided once again, and so it all felt very familiar.”
“The Women,” which has already been optioned by Warner Bros. for development as a movie, arrived in bookstores on Feb. 6.
The protagonist of “The Women” is s “Frankie” McGrath, a 20-year-old Southern California nurse who in 1966 decides to follow her older brother Finley to Vietnam. She ends up in a busy evacuation unit with frequent mass casualty events and, despite the hardships, she flourishes and ultimately signs up for a second tour. When she finally comes home, reintroduction to civilian life is tough.
“It wasn’t solely nurses in the beginning,” Hannah says of her earliest idea for the novel. “Then, once I read the memoirs of these women and understood what they had lived through, and how heroic and tragic their stories are, I just thought, I cannot believe that this story hasn’t really been told.”
The decision to focus on Frankie, a daughter of privilege from Coronado in San Diego, rather than her fellow combat nurses Ethel, a farm girl from Virginia, or Barb, a young Black woman from the South, came partly because the Southern California background matched the early life of Hannah, who was born in Garden Grove.
“I felt comfortable with that world, Southern California,” she says. “I sort of understood it, and I understood the naivete that comes from a bubble world like Coronado. You know, I live on an island in Washington. And I wanted this nurse to go over as starry-eyed and naive as possible.
“In of the research, the lion’s share of the memoirs I read were very much young women who had just finished their nursing degree and went over for adventure or patriotism. Or following someone,” Hannah says. “Because they volunteered. They couldn’t be made to go and so they chose to go.”
Those real-life s also included stories of nurses who suffered from PTSD and the difficulties they encountered when they returned home from the war.
A generation of men was devastated by the war in Vietnam. A smaller number of women who served came home with their own traumas. All of them, as Hannah writes in “The Women” and underscores in conversation, deserved all the help they needed, and often didn’t get, once home.
“That is something that I just want to be front and center on people’s minds all the time,” she says. “Because I think if we ask our military people to go to war, we have to care for them when they get home.”
“The Women” by Kristin Hannah (St. Martin’s Press, 2024; 480 pages)
Larsen writes for the Southern California News Group.
