Kristin Hannah knows what women want in fiction

BETHESDA, Md. – With her best-selling novels about strong women facing down whatever life throws at them, Kristin Hannah makes her fans cry. And they love her for it.

Toby Jorrin, for USA TODAY

Kristin Hannah's new novel, 'Home Front,' follows an Army helicopter pilot who must consider her duties to her family when she is deployed to Iraq.

Toby Jorrin, for USA TODAY

Kristin Hannah's new novel, 'Home Front,' follows an Army helicopter pilot who must consider her duties to her family when she is deployed to Iraq.

"Her writing literally makes me bawl," says Christy Enchelmaier, 29, a first-grade teacher in suburban Maryland. Hannah is one of Enchelmaier's favorite authors because "she doesn't sugarcoat things; she's very realistic."

On a recent frosty night in this Washington suburb, Hannah, 51, draws a crowd of nearly 100 like-minded women, hungry for the novelist's dramatic, issue-driven fiction, to a Barnes & Noble. It's the same female readership that has made Jodi Picoult a publishing superstar. Though there was the occasional husband in the audience, the crowd was overwhelmingly female and fanatic about Hannah, the author of 19 novels.

In her latest, Home Front (St. Martin's Press, $27.99), Hannah offers a heart-wrenching tale about a female Army helicopter pilot deployed to Iraq. The heroine, Jolene, is torn between her duty as a soldier and her obligations to her husband and their two young daughters.

Home Front made its debut last week at No. 7 on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list, the first time Hannah has cracked the top 10. (This week, the novel drops to No. 25. Hannah's last novel, Night Road, about teen drinking and a tragic car accident, reached No. 13 on USA TODAY's list.)

Mother is always right

During her 2½-hour presentation and book signing, Hannah alternately charmed, amused and moved her audience. She made them laugh when she described how she didn't change a word in the first draft of the first novel she attempted. In one of the many rejection letters she received, one editor wrote Hannah, "You may have talent, but frankly, I can't tell."

She answered questions about how she writes: longhand on a yellow legal pad, often sitting in a lawn chair near the water. (She and her husband split their time between an island near Seattle and Hawaii.)

She also described how her decision to write fiction emerged from tragedy.

When she was 25, she was spending her days in law school and her nights in a Seattle hospital where her mother, then 46, was dying of breast cancer. To pass the hours, they decided to collaborate on a romance novel — a genre her mother adored.

The story, set in 18th-century Scotland, was just awful, Hannah says. But what she saw as a distraction for a dying woman, her mother saw as a vocation for her daughter. "She said I would become a writer."

After her mother's death, Hannah put the unfinished novel away. Two years later, it was Hannah's husband who suggested she make another attempt at writing fiction.

By then an attorney in Seattle, Hannah was put on bed rest for five months while she was pregnant.

Her growing fixation on daytime TV shows such as The Price Is Right made her husband desperate, Hannah says. After her son was born, Hannah knew two things: "I wanted to be a stay-at-home mother, and I needed to write." (Today, their grown son works in Hollywood.)

Hannah eventually did publish a historical romance novel in 1991, A Handful of Heaven, set in the Yukon Territory in the 19th century.

But she says she truly found her creative footing once she moved into contemporary women's fiction with 1999's On Mystic Lake. Her best-selling novels include Firefly Lane, which revolves around two best friends, and Winter Garden, about a Russian woman who hides her painful past from her daughters.

'Much more patriotic' now

Later, over dinner, Hannah expands on why she told the audience earlier that Home Front changed her more than any other book. "I was woefully uninformed about the daily sacrifices people in the military make," she says. Spending time with a female Army helicopter pilot in Washington state left her "much more patriotic."

But while it explores hot-button topics such as mothers in combat and post-traumatic stress disorder, the novel puts its real focus on the heroine and the emotional bonds she makes and breaks — as a daughter, a wife, a mother, a friend and a soldier.

Says Hannah, "I'm endlessly fascinated by the relationships that define us."

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Review-a-Day for Tue, May 24: Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness

by Daniel Maier-Katkin A review by William T. Walker

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) were considered two of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century. Heidegger, author of Being and Time (1928), was the dominant philosopher of the era until his identification with Nazism and support of Hitler during the 1930s. While he retained his position at the University of Frieburg until his death, his reputation never fully recovered from his support of fascism and the Third Reich -- in spite of his subsequent explanations. Arendt was a German political theorist who was interested in all aspects of power, and, in particular, in totalitarianism and authoritarianism. As a Jew -- though not religious -- Arendt fled Europe in 1941 and arrived in the United States; she became an American citizen in 1950. Arendt taught at the University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University, and the New School of Social Research in New York. Among her numerous works were The Origins of Totalitarianism (1955) and Eichman in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). Arendt was Heidegger's student and lover when she attended the University of Marburg during the 1920s; while Arendt married twice, she maintained contact with Heidegger and later advanced a sympathetic explanation for his support of the Nazis. Heidegger was married and conducted at least one other affair in addition to that with Arendt; Heidegger's principal love in his life was himself -- everyone else, including Arendt, played supporting roles.

During the past year interest in Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger has been rekindled through the publication of two important and worthy books and a significant seminar at the University of Virginia on April 1, 2010. The seminar on "Reading Hannah Arendt for the 21st Century" included presentations on "The Promise of Hannah Arendt's Politics," by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, "Immanence, Plurality, and Politics," by Richard Bernstein, and "Reflections on Ruin," by Susannah Gottlieb; these papers suggest that additional major works on Arendt are in the offing. Michael B. Smith's excellent translation of Emmanuel Faye's acclaimed and controversial Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935 was published in 2009; it was a ringing denunciation of Arendt's 1969 explanation that Heidegger's involvement with Nazism was an aberration, it was inconsistent with his thinking and occurred because Heidegger had departed temporarily from philosophy and focused on public affairs. Faye has no sympathy for Arendt's romantic and baseless explanation for Heidegger's conduct and sympathy for Nazism.

In Stranger From Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness, Daniel Maier-Katkin explores the long-term relationship between Arendt and Heidegger. In thirty-five short but well-written chapters, Maier-Katkin traces the connections that sustained the relationship between these two very different intellects. More time and text is extended to Arendt and her growth as an intellectual and erstwhile academician than to Heidegger. The great Heidegger emerges as a rather static and manipulative figure who "blossomed" in his thirties and, after his support for Hitler in the early 1930s, spent much of the remainder of his life attempting to disassociate himself from Nazism. Without doubt Maier-Katkin is fascinated with Arendt; the chapters on her are the strongest in this book. In particular, his analysis of the struggling Arendt in America during the 1940s and his account of her coverage of the Eichman trial in Israel are noteworthy for the quality of the scholarship as well as the provocative analysis that he advances. Maier-Katkin's examination of the role and impact of Karl Jaspers on both Arendt and Heidegger portrayed Jaspers as an understanding and empathetic friend to Arendt who recognized her continuing attachment to Heidegger even though she herself discounted it. Jaspers believed that Arendt's acceptance of Heidegger's recanting of his support for the Nazis was at least due in part to her lingering emotional relationship with him; Jaspers was more knowledgeable about Heidegger's Nazi past and used his influence to block his rehabilitation during the 1950s and 1960s. Where Maier-Katkin appears to be less successful is in his section on Arendt's rather unsuccessful attempt to explain Heidegger's Nazi episode; if Arendt was to be applauded for the quality of her research and writing on the Eichman case, should she be permitted to defend or explain Heidegger with nothing more than speculation and weak and incomplete evidence? Regardless of any lingering emotional links that Arendt may have sustained, her arguments in support of Heidegger do not hold much weight; Maier-Katkin's sympathetic support for Arendt in this case appears unwarranted.

Nonetheless, Maier-Katkin is a scholar of repute and his study reflects a command of not only his subjects and their thoughts, but also the era in which they lived; the book's documentation is extensive and illustrates that Maier-Katkin is aware of the relevant scholarship on his topic. An important and valuable work that offers many unique insights into Hannah Arendt's life and thought, it is a substantive contribution to Arendt and Heidegger studies. It evokes aspects of an important life that needs to be known by a larger public and, perhaps, will also stimulate additional research and study from others.

The author of several books, William T. Walker is professor of history at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia.

This review was originally published in Cerise Press.

Cerise Press, an international online journal based in the United States and France, builds cross-cultural bridges by featuring artists and writers in English and translations, with an emphasis on French and Francophone works.

Co-founded by Sally Molini, Karen Rigby, and Fiona Sze-Lorrain in 2009, Cerise Press hopes to serve as a gathering force where imagination, insight, and conversation express the evolving and shifting forms of human experience.

To contact Cerise Press, please email editors@cerisepress.com.

The Spring 2011, Vol. 2 Issue 6 of Cerise Press features Smoking, Chongqing, a photograph by Steven Benson.

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