Kristin Hannah, THE FOUR WINDS

[1:19]Zibby Owens: Hi. I'm Zibby Owens and you're listening to Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. This thirty minute podcast features a new author interviewed by me every single day, three hundred and sixty five days a year for about thirty minutes. I am also the publisher for Zippy Books, which publishes 12 books a year in fiction and memoir. Our books are already out now. You can check it out on zippybooks.com. And we have a magazine called Zippy Mag where we have lots of wonderful essays and lifestyle features. That's at zippymag.com. We have classes at zippyclasses.com. And I recently opened a bookstore in LA called Zippy's Bookshop at 1113 Montana Avenue at 11th Street in Santa Monica. I hope that you are able to enjoy some of our other offerings. But this here podcast is the basis of all of it and started in 2018. And no matter what I do, this is basically my favorite thing. Enjoy.

[3:04]Zibby Owens: who is most recently the author of The Four Winds. But as you probably all know, is an award winning and best selling author of more than 20 novels, including the international blockbuster The Nightingale, Winter Garden, Night Road, and Firefly Lane. Her novel, The Nightingale, has been published in 43 languages and is currently in movie production at TriStar Pictures, which also optioned her novel, The Great Alone. Her novel Homefront has been optioned for film by fourteen ninety two films, which produced the Oscar nominated The Help with Chris Columbus attached to direct. And as you also probably all know, Firefly Lane recently came out on Netflix and is like number one there, and The Four Winds has also just come out. Kristen is a former lawyer turned writer who lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband. Her novel Firefly Lane became a runaway bestseller in 2009, a touchstone novel that brought women together, and The Nightingale in 2015 was voted a best book of the year by Amazon, BuzzFeed, iTunes, Library Journal, Paste, The Wall Street Journal, and The Week. Additionally, the novel won the coveted Goodreads and People's Choice Awards. The audiobook of The Nightingale won the audiobook of the year award in the fiction category. And by the way, I am actually home with COVID. When you listen to this, it will be, let's see, I think day eight of my having COVID. And at the very beginning, all I was doing was laying, staring up at the ceiling and listening to the audiobook of the Nightingale. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. I was thrilled and honored to have interviewed Kristen, especially before I got sick. Welcome, Kristen. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Thank you. I am honored to be here. Oh, this is such a thrill, and I have loved, like, holding on to your book the last, like, couple months. I feel like this is, like, the major coup is, like, getting your book early. I was like, okay. I've made it. Anyway, congratulations on the four wins.

[5:01]Kristin Hannah: Wow. How do you feel with this finally coming out? Oh my gosh. You know, it's it's all sort of surreal, you know, because it's it's Firefly Lane, the series coming out the day after the four wins the book. And, you know, it's gosh. It's been fifteen years, you know, for Firefly Lane, and I've been working on the four winds for almost four years. So it's just this amazing confluence of, I don't know, just excitement all in one place.

[5:28]Zibby Owens: Oh my gosh. Everything coming together at the same time. It's amazing. Oh my gosh. Well, let's talk about Elsa, by the way. Did you know that the character in Frozen was named Elsa when you named your character Elsa?

[5:41]Kristin Hannah: I must admit that I did. Yes. Okay. Alright. I don't think I think it was before Frozen was quite the cultural

[5:49]Zibby Owens: phenomenon that it is now. But yeah. Okay. Well, I just had to I just had to wonder. There is a part in the four winds well, there are many parts where Elsa's love of books sort of pervade the entire narrative. And there's one quote I just wanted to read to you because I'm about to put it on my bulletin board. Books had always been her solace. Novels gave her the space to be bold, brave, beautiful, if only in her imagination. I love that. Talk to me about books and and how books have given you solace or how writing books have given other people solace or at you as well. Well, I mean, you know, you certainly I don't I don't think anyone gets to where I am having, you know, written 24 novels

[6:33]Kristin Hannah: without being, you know, a voracious reader your whole life. You know, that's really sort of the beginning. And so I don't it doesn't matter which of my books you read. You could read The Great Alone and Lenny in the seventies or Firefly Lane and Kate in the seventies and eighties. Books are always the place that my characters go when the world bruises them or when they need to sort of recharge or regroup and just, you know, to enjoy themselves. And I think that's because that is something, a, that I understand because it's a big part of my own life. But also I think that it's just important to show people reading as much as we can. And a lot of these books, I mean, you can go through your life and say these are the touchstone books. Know, I was reading the Lord of the Rings when I was here. I was reading the Thorn Birds when I was here. You know, these books are the mile markers of our lives, and so I love being able to remind readers of that. Well, very important and just amazing. And I love how Elsa would always try to bring books with her and how leaving books behind when she traveled west was

[7:48]Zibby Owens: such an ordeal and which books to bring from her parents' house. And I could just see her like, ah, how do you pick? Oh my gosh. Wow. There's also, of course, this whole narrative of Elsa being a mother and what would a mother do for her child, which I think is also another theme of yours. And there's the one scene which has stayed with me so much when Elsa is pushing Ant to the hospital and her thing you know, her the skin on her palms is gone. And, you know, she's about to collapse, but she that she's pushing this wheelbarrow. And then finally, you know, her her in laws come to rescue her, and she's just like, I'm just. And then her mother-in-law says, a mother.

[8:27]Kristin Hannah: And it's like everyone has their limitations. Tell me a little bit more about that scene. Well, I mean, Elsa is far and away my favorite character I've ever created. I think she's just, you know, she she has a tough beginning, but she's one of those characters and and represents one of those people who throw themselves all in for whatever it is they're passionate about, whatever it is they love about. She doesn't love a little, she loves deeply, dangerously, unreservedly. And it is of course motherhood that teaches her that because I think for a lot of women, certainly for me, the moment they put your child in your arms, you understand that there's a different dimension to love, that it can be bigger than you ever imagined. And so I'm very drawn to this idea of the whole the mother who can lift a car to save her child, know, and that kind of stuff. I really like to not only explore and dramatize that, but to I guess to remind people that it's there and how important it is. Have you had a moment with your son, for instance, where you felt like you needed your superhuman strength and maybe it didn't. I don't know about superhuman strength. There was a couple of years there we're trying to keep up with him skiing and being certain that I needed to keep him safe when clearly he was out skiing me. There was a lot of that sort of stuff. But I don't think I've ever needed superhuman strength. I have needed superhuman emotional strength deal with the teen years for sure.

[10:07]Zibby Owens: Yes. I feel like there's not enough of that to go around perhaps. We all need those regular doses. I've read that you

[10:16]Kristin Hannah: depend on your morning run to work out. Is that still true? Yes. You know, I'm since we're in lockdown here, I'm in Washington state, and so I haven't haven't been able to travel much. So now my morning run is a little more difficult because it rains here a lot in the winter. So now I'm sort of moving on to an elliptical, but it's pretty cool actually. Allows me to like watch all these movies. I'm currently watching Notting Hill that I just haven't sat down and watched for a long time. So it's fun. Excellent.

[10:52]Zibby Owens: I know I used to think that my workouts on the elliptical were like a joke but now I'm like, wow, If only I could get back there. That would be like a that would be great. Yeah. So much for that. Well, tell me a little bit more about, like, your writing process and how you come up with the ideas for really for your main characters and then all the settings for what they go through. I know you've written over

[11:16]Kristin Hannah: 20 books at this point. There's a lot a lot of books and and my process has changed a lot and I can talk about if you're interested, you know, the various stages of it and the various processes that I went through at the various times of my life. But at this particular moment, the way it works is I come up with sort of the bones of an idea. And I then begin researching. It takes me for these historical novels, it takes about a year of research to both read everything I need to read and interview people and travel hopefully, and then come up with the actual story and begin to write. In this particular book, I did all of that work and I started writing, and I was about three fifty pages in when Elsa appeared as a walk on character. And I felt this connection to her instantly. And interestingly, part of it was that she came as a reader, you know, and so that was what she had brought into the Martinelli family originally. And so I, you know, I kept working and kept writing and got to the end of that draft. And by the end I did, I realized that I had mistaken what my plot needed to be and who my characters needed to be. And I was writing this big sweeping love story. And what I really needed to be writing was about a woman's resilience as she fights to stay alive in this environment. And so I basically threw all of that away and started over with Elsa as my viewpoint character. And that's when I think the book really came to life. So like, what does that afternoon look like when you come to a realization like that? It's not pretty. Let me tell you, it's, you know, it's a lot of wine and whining with girlfriends, a lot of staring at the wall, a lot of thinking, no, I can fix it. I can I don't have to go that far, you know, and a lot of conversations with yourself about throwing the baby out with the bathwater? But for me personally, once I not only see an error, it takes two things. I have to see a fundamental error, which is that I felt I was writing not the strongest book about the depression and the dust bowl that I could, and I need to have real clarity on how to fix it. So when I decided to make Elsa and Loretta mother and daughter and make this a book about motherhood essentially and the fight for survival, once that occurs to me, I just can't look away. I can try, but it's all wasted time. So I find that the most important thing for me for writing the book I ultimately publish is clarity of purpose. And sometimes that just takes a while. You have to write yourself to it. You can't necessarily know it ahead or I can't. Wow. Well, at least you're sort of comfortable with that process. It's not good.

[14:37]Zibby Owens: Well, I feel like in this book, the descriptions are so vivid, the dust storms and that one black storm and the chickens, like, laying there, like, listless because it's so hot. Yeah. I just felt like and I have to say, I was reading it, and then I went in to make breakfast for the kids because I get up really early. Anyway, I was reading it, and I went to, like, open up the egg carton to make eggs. And I was, like, holding each egg, and I was like, I really need to appreciate these eggs because in the book, you know, they were like, maybe one egg will pop out. So, anyway, you completely put the reader back in that framework of desperation and hopelessness and yet commitment to the land. So it was like such a so just tell me about how you did that. I mean, couldn't possibly have put yourself in dust storms as research, right? No.

[15:28]Kristin Hannah: You know, I mean, that's what I love, love, love about writing. You know, really it's our job to take all of the information that we can gather. So here's what everything I can find out about the dust storms through the words of the people who lived through them, through the newspaper clippings, through old photographs, you know, all of that sort of stuff. And then it's my job to take all of that information and turn it into words that make you actually feel what's happening as opposed to simply being aware of what's happening. And, you know, from a writing standpoint, it's really mostly for me about specific detail and emotion. You know, it's important to me that the reader feel what it feels like, you know, to wake up in the morning and have your body covered with dust and outline. You know, when the dust hits and the centipedes come climbing out of the walls because they are trying to get away too. You know, all of these things that that you would never think of on your own and then sort of, you know, put you through that. And then I, you know, I tend to add extra layer, which is, and you're responsible for another human life on top of it. It's not just saving yourself. You have to save your children. I think it's the best way to learn, whether it's historically the Dust Bowl or whether it's to broadcast journalists in the eighties. It doesn't really matter when it is set. It's about, again, clarity and how good I am at painting a word portrait.

[17:13]Zibby Owens: Wow. Well, you were like the Picasso of the word portrait. Not not to just try to butter you up or anything, but I'm you were the most vivid descriptions. I felt like I needed to take a long shower and I hear this a lot. Yeah. You do. Oh, no. I hate saying things people hear a lot. Alright. Well, anyway, I felt like I needed a hot shower after this book, but that's okay.

[20:29]Zibby Owens: And I feel like perhaps having read The Great Alone before this book, you go from, like, cold climate to hot climate.

[20:37]Kristin Hannah: So I'm wondering, like, where are we gonna go next? I feel like I'm with you on all these different temperature zones. You know, I don't know. Me as a writer, the hardest part of this process is the idea. I have a lot of friends who are writers and they have like file cabinets full of, oh, Sunday, I'm gonna write this book and this book and this book. I don't do that. I am I'm lucky to come up with one idea that I care enough about to spend two or three years on. You know, I have to really love what I'm doing. And so I and during this pandemic, I've been like a lot of people, you know, not quite as productive as I'm used to being and not quite as creative. So I am just as excited to see what I'm gonna do next as anybody else.

[21:24]Zibby Owens: I always feel a little bad asking what are you gonna do when like you've just done something amazing. Right? So forget that, I'll be honest. So what do you do? Like, let's say after you hand in a big book like this, it's taken you years to write and research and edits and two almost completely different books and you hand it in, you send it off to the publisher, like, then what do you do? Like, what is that night? What does that feel like?

[21:51]Kristin Hannah: Well, the way I work, which you may have gleaned from previous answers, I'm a very editorial writer and I'm a very collaborative writer. I really like input and I really like fixing things and rewriting them. So between me turning the book into my editor, which is at the moment when it's as good as I think I can make it. However long that is, that's when I turned the book into my editor. And she has learned and we have learned the way we work together best is to be sort of not only brutally honest, but always forward looking. I'm trying to figure out how to say this. So she doesn't necessarily only edit what's on the page. She edits what she thinks could be on the page. And so, for example, when I turned this book in the first time to her, Elsa and Loretta were sisters in law, and the book went on for another 300 pages after this end. So it was this huge sweeping epic that went through the forties. And, you know, she said, I don't think this last 300 works. I just I think that the dust storm and and California and that that is all so big that going on just diminishes that. And so, you know, so I gave that a lot of thought and tried to figure out how to focus on that part of the story. And so that was when it became Elsa and Loretta as mother and daughter. And so that's then another six months while I'm doing that. And then finally when my editor says you're done, that is the champagne moment. That's when I like pop the cork, I mean I pop the cork all the way through, I'm not going lie, I'm constantly celebrating, oh, that's a good sentence. I need champagne. But that's when really when she tells me I'm done, that's when I really kind of take a deep breath and to the best of my ability, walk away emotionally and stop obsessing

[24:08]Zibby Owens: about how to make it better. And so then how does the film world work with your putting to bed of these titles when you have now adaptations in the mix and all of that?

[24:19]Kristin Hannah: Well, this week is my first I mean, I've had a lot of things optioned. I've had a lot of things in development. Nightingale is supposed to start filming again in this month, think, or next month. But Firefly Lane is the first thing that's actually made it to the screen. So this is my first experience with seeing something that is my world and someone else's world at the same time. So it's kind of this merging of ideas. And I have to say, I mean, I think that the friendship between Tully and Kate, which is the core of that novel, it is everything that that novel is about. I think they've done an amazing, amazing job with. I think Katherine Heigl and Sarah Chalk are just amazing and their chemistry is great and all my girlfriends are in love with Ben Lawson who plays Johnny. So it's very exciting. I mean, it's exciting. It's really awesome.

[25:21]Zibby Owens: I love hearing about you talk about your girlfriends because you can tell how important they are. And even the relationship with Jean and Elsa in the book, it speaks to this bond of female friendship and what you wouldn't do for the other person you love. Like, you love them like family. Tell me about some close friends or how your little your friend group works, like the importance of friendship in your life? Well,

[25:43]Kristin Hannah: I mean, friendship is always important. And I think we women have always formed, especially in our teen years, very intense, very bold friendships. And I think if you're lucky enough make the kind of friend that can go through life, it means a lot of things, you know, because I think that a friendship like a marriage takes work, and it isn't always perfect, and there are bumps in the road. And so it's all about, you know, being honest, taking care of each other, loving each other, and getting each other through good times and bad times. And I know that of all the times in my life, the two times I needed my friends the most were when my mother was dying of breast cancer when I was young, and during my son's teen years. And you know, he was a great kid, you know, and yet still, that whole teenage thing. There were a lot of times when I called my girlfriends and said, we got to have a glass of wine, somebody has to tell me that this is normal, that we're going to be okay. And that's what we did for each other, and I love it.

[26:56]Zibby Owens: Did your son, like, get over that? Like, for people who have teen sons right now or teen daughters and are despairing hearing your description of this, does it get better? Well,

[27:06]Kristin Hannah: to be fair, he was a boy, and girls, I think, are tougher on their moms than boys are. But maybe I'm wrong because I don't have a daughter. I know I was tough on my mom. I do know that my son read Firefly Lane as an adult and called me when he finished and he said, wow, mom, I'm really sorry for all those sleepless nights when I was trying to sneak out of the house or whatever.

[27:32]Zibby Owens: What was it like giving your mom a hard time and then having to cope with her loss? I mean, there are obviously themes that pervade this.

[27:41]Kristin Hannah: Well, it's in my work all the time. Mean, I think, not to be overly psychological about it or anything, but clearly I lost my mom when I was 24, and you know that loss just, it sort of permeates you. And I had not grown up enough to be the daughter that I wanted to be, that I would want to be now, you know, and I was what she raised me to be, which is opinionated and powerful and strong. When that's what you learn, the first person you turn that on is your mom. I mean, it's just sort of a natural course of events. And so, you know, that's probably the only regret in my life is that, you know, we didn't sort of get tons of time after all of that. But I know she is somewhere with a martini and she is very happy and very proud of me. Is there anything you wish you could say? Oh, I I would say I'm sorry. I'm sorry that I thought I knew everything in the world. Maybe you did.

[28:53]Zibby Owens: Pretty sure not. Let's give you the benefit of the doubt. You never know. You never know. Well, I'm so sorry for that loss at such a young age and it's also such a tough time because it's right in the crux of sort of developing your adult identity too. You know, I don't know. I mean, there's no good age, but I don't know. I feel like that's such an impressionable point where your life can go off in so many times. But what advice would you have to aspiring authors?

[29:19]Kristin Hannah: You know, I mean, I guess the bottom line is I personally believe that this is learnable and it's teachable. So I'm not one of those people who believe that writing is magic and that you either have talent or you don't. I believe that, you know, like you can become a lawyer or an accountant or a pediatrician, you can learn to become a writer. And it requires you to have a lot of belief in yourself, even when the evidence tells you not to, as you're failing along the way. And I think you have to really devote yourself to it. Know, there's a lot of people who want to write a novel and believe they're talented, but never actually get around to it. The key to being a writer is you have to write because you can't think your way into becoming a novelist or to writing a book, you have to write your way there sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, year after year after year. And the thing that's amazing about that is you get better. I mean, you know, it's like anything else, you practice that and you get better. And, you know, I think you can learn obviously by reading, I think finding a really good, really honest critique partner, someone you can, you know, work back and forth with is very important. And, you know, taking classes or conferences or anything like that that you can do. And then set goals for yourself. You know, as published novelist, you have to turn books in. And one of the best ways to get to that stage is to set goals and meet them and learn how to write on a schedule. Excellent. Alright. A lot of lot of calendar apps and things.

[31:14]Zibby Owens: Anyway, well, with all of this excitement going on, what are some, like, final thoughts of how you can take advantage of this? Or, you know, after all this work, like, you finally are getting to this place of, like, having a moment, having not that you haven't had it with Nightingale and Great Alone and everything, but, like, right now, you're just, like, having a moment. Bottle that up for us. You know, I I

[31:39]Kristin Hannah: I don't even really know quite how to process it. You know, it's just it's so big. It's so much bigger than anything I ever dreamed for, hoped for, wanted, expected. You know, it's like this gift moment from the universe is all I can say. I mean, I've been doing this for over thirty years. And, you know, the the really great part about all of it it's not that I'm here at this moment, is super exciting and we're all having a lot of fun with it, but the real joy is that I have been lucky enough to be a working writer for thirty years. You know, to be able to be the at home mom that I wanted. Now I'm able to travel if I want to, you know. So what I really, I guess, am most grateful for is just the life

[32:31]Zibby Owens: that writing has afforded me and given me. Well, I'm grateful for you taking us into all these other lives. Right? Each of your novels is just so immersive, and you get all these different places and emotions and people and scenes, and it's also visual and memorable. So as you have spent thirty years sort of riding away, we've all been, like, you know, on plane, you know, following you along around the world on our own little travels. So, anyway, it's such an honor to talk to you. Congratulations. Thank you for this amazing immersive book. I will feel dirty forever. Even just holding it in my hands, I have to, like, dust it up. So thank you for all of it. Well, and thank you so, so much for your support of writers and our work.

[33:25]Kristin Hannah: And I'm assuming you're a writer and so good luck with everything and enjoy the journey. Thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you. All right. Right. Take care. Take care. Bye bye. Thanks

[33:39]Zibby Owens: for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram Zibby Owens and momsdonthavetimetoreadbooks. Also sign up for my newsletter at zibby owens dot com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the sound editing, and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this intro and outro music.