The Women by Kristin Hannah was all I cared about for an entire weekend

There's a reason this book has been on the NYT bestseller list for 41 weeks

One of the greatest gifts I’ve been given is the ability to read in the car. For Thanksgiving we had a six-hour car ride to visit my in-laws and I read The Women by Kristin Hannah the entire way. I closed the book only to get out of the car the two times we stopped and to fetch my kids a snack or help them access something else on their iPads. The rest of the time it was this beautiful book and me.

Talk about gratitude.

A minuscule way of explaining this significant book is that it is a fictional telling of the real American women who served in Vietnam.

“But women weren’t in Vietnam,” protagonist Frankie McGrath heard over and over upon her return stateside. “If you didn’t see a woman in Vietnam, you were lucky,” she’d say. It’s because their leg was never blown off. Their chest was never cracked open. They weren’t carried by two fellow troops for 30 miles for help, only to die on a wooden litter outside of the hospital.

Frankie was a trauma nurse in Vietnam, and The Women tells her story and that of the ~11,000 real-life nurses who served in Vietnam and who, upon return to the United States, were not provided any of the (perhaps paltry) support the men were given to help them re-assimilate. Because women weren’t in Vietnam, they’d said. Even Frankie’s patriotic parents didn’t recognize her service, feeling shame that she enlisted rather than become a wife, a homemaker, a cookie cutter of a woman.

In the author note, Hannah tells of the silver bracelet she wore as a kid, commemorating a prisoner of war who never returned. She came of age during the Vietnam war and says she’s been wanting to tell this story for two decades, but the timing never felt right. It was the pandemic, during which she saw how hard nurses worked, that propelled this story into being.

At the time of writing, The Women has been on the New York Times bestseller list for 41 weeks. Typically when I see a book has been on the list for more than 30 weeks I think, okay, time’s up, let’s make room for someone else. But when I opened Sunday’s Book Review, after a weekend of having my entire life revolve around Hannah’s book, I thought, she deserves it.

The audiobook is 14 hours and 57 minutes. It’s a sizable book, which makes its extended stay on the bestseller list even more impressive. There’s a reason so many people are spending all this time in Vietnam, though.

I agree with

Izzy

when she says it’s the best of hers she’s ever read. The Nightingale made me sob into my airplane tray table while reading it, yet The Women had an even stronger hold on me. Maybe it was the subject matter that got me, or maybe it was the piercing narrative voice.

Beatriz Williams says in the Book Review:

Hannah is in top form here, plunging the reader into the chaotic miseries of the combat zone. She deploys details to visceral effect, whether Frankie’s performing an emergency tracheotomy during a mortar attack or sipping Fresca in the O Club afterward, while an evocative soundtrack of the Doors, the Beatles and the Turtles plays in the background.

While helicopters were being shot down and Frankie failed to save bloodied men who got to her too late, there were enough moments of levity to not feel weighed down by the story. Like Williams says, the book comes with a soundtrack, and the lyrics were often a great contrast to the action on the page.

I learned very little about the Vietnam War in school. When I visited the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam in 2016, I learned more in that hour than I had in my entire life before then. I find the experience difficult to write about, an experience that started before I even entered the museum, with assumedly napalm-deformed descendants crawling toward museum-goers as if to say look what happened to us. (Was that hard to read? It is hard for me to share, but it was how I learned that people today are still affected by Agent Orange.) The photos on display inside the museum were no easier to look at, though those eventually blurred in my memory. The people in front of the entrance never will. And perhaps they shouldn’t. I presume that’s the point.

I mention this because there are things — like the children born to those who’d been deformed by napalm — that we don’t hear about, things that aren’t in the American history syllabus. One such thing is the women serving in Vietnam.

This book is about them. This book is for them.

November Reads

• Kate & Frida by Kim Fay | This book comes out in the Spring and I have a Q&A with the author that I cannot wait to share with you. A lovely, heartwarming book!

• The Sicilian Inheritance by

  Jo Piazza
  | I love Italy and will read practically anything that takes place there. I liked this book because Sicily was a fresh setting for me.

• The Christmas Cookie Wars by Eliza Evans | This was the first holiday romcom I read this season. It’s cute! Not a ton happens but it’s exactly what I expected and wanted it to be: a cozy Hallmark holiday movie in book form.

• Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld | Good lord I loved this book. It is smart and hilarious. It was my first Sittenfeld book and now all I want to do is read her work.

• Writing Blockbuster Plots by Martha Alderson and Writing the Blockbuster Novel by Albert Zuckerman | I put these together because they were similar (and similarly boring for anyone uninterested in novel structure).

• The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides | The twist at the end of this book! It really got me.

• The Women by Kristin Hannah | See above

What are you reading?

What I’m reading: Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld

Love,

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