Reading Group Gold
In Her Own Words
A Conversation with Kristin Hannah
Cultural Perspective
Interview with Chief Warrant Officer 5 Teresa Burgess
Greek Culinary Traditions and Recipes
Keep On Reading
Recommended Reading
Reading Group Questions
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A Conversation with Kristin Hannah
The prologue really jostles the reader into dispelling any thoughts of “pretty daffodil borders”; this story is about battle, for love and everything else that truly matters. How hard was it for you to begin writing this book?
I began this book as I begin all of my novels, with a combination of absolute fear and boundless enthusiasm. Usually I know with some clarity where my stories will go and who will populate them. Although that original road map always gets revised along the way, this book, more than most, consistently messed with my head. The book I envisioned and researched simply didn’t work. When I first began to write Home Front, it was about two estranged sisters brought together by the deployment. It took me a long time to really grasp that Jolene’s story—and to me, she was always the heart and soul of the story, the one character who never changed—needed to be part of a bigger tapestry, that of a marriage that was tested to the limit by the wife’s deployment. I literally threw away hundreds of pages before I gave in to this new version of the story. Once I created Michael and let the marriage be center stage, I knew I was on my way. The story unfolded beautifully…until I hit the ending. It took a surprising number of drafts for me to “bring Jolene home” the way I wanted to.
The prevailing themes in Home Front delve into perhaps the most controversial and demanding issues you’ve explored in your writing so far. What inspired you to take this on? And how were you, in turn, inspired in the writing of it?
Quite simply, this story was inspired by the nightly news. As the war in Iraq went on, I watched the stories—night after night—of soldiers lost or wounded in battle, and the stories of their families left behind, waiting for them to return. As a mother, I was heartbroken for the men and women and their families. So many of the young soldiers on the news were the same age as my own son, and that hit me really hard. As an American, I was grateful, and as a woman, I began to wonder what it must be like to go off to war and leave your children behind. I can’t imagine anything that would be more terrifying and difficult. I realized that I had never read that story, and I wanted to. I wanted to explore the idea of a woman torn between love and honor. So I decided to write it.
I never thought about the potentially controversial nature of the themes in Home Front. I simply set out to write a story about a female mother and soldier who went to war. Although Michael is fairly anti-military and anti-war, the book is ultimately less political and more personal. I didn’t set out to take a stance on the war itself. This was really about supporting and understanding the troops and realizing the extent of the sacrifices they make.
How was a typical day spent while writing this book? On a good day? On a bad day?
Fortunately for me, I have a lot more good writing days than bad ones. I’m really glad about that because a bad writing day is an ugly thing. Usually, a bad day means that either: I can’t think of what to write about （which means that something major is wrong and I need to go back to the beginning to diagnose and correct the problem）， or I write a scene that I end up throwing away before I even finish it.
A good day writing is a beautiful thing. It’s a day when the words and ideas flow from the end of my pen and collect in a gorgeous swirl of blue ink on yellow paper. Yes, that’s right—I write my novels longhand on yellow legal pads. I do this because I can write anywhere—on the beach, in a deck chair, in my living room. A typical day, of course, is somewhere in between. With Home Front, I had to stop often to do extended research, and that was often frustrating. I wanted to write a scene, knew what it was, but I needed the facts to get it all correct.
You’ve said that you’ve never had such a difficult time writing a novel. Why was it so difficult, and how did you ultimately find your way to the emotional end of this story?
There were two difficulties that this book presented. First was the burden of authenticity. It was important for me to capture the spirit of the true American soldier in my portrayal of Jolene and Tami and their colleagues. Because I knew so little about the military when I began, creating these characters, and indeed the world they inhabit, was often an uphill battle. And then, as the writing continued, I fell so in love with Jolene—she has become my favorite character of all time—that I really wanted not to “ruin” her by doing anything wrong. Second, I was fairly undone by the emotional component of this novel, and honestly, even though I have often written about difficult, heartrending situations, no story has ever affected me personally so deeply. No novel of my own has ever so consistently brought me to tears. It was difficult to maintain my balance as a writer in this one.