Women, writing and wartime: Kristin Hannah comes to Segerstrom Center Monday

With more than two dozen titles to her name, noted author Kristin Hannah knows when a book is ready to be born.

Some seem to leap from the tip of her gel point pen onto the yellow legal pads she famously uses to capture first drafts as they scratch their way into miraculous being. Others must be coaxed, sometimes through months of fastidious research, before their characters begin to speak in words clear enough to convey.

Her latest work, “The Women” — about 20-year-old Frances “Frankie” McGrath, who in 1965 enlists as a nurse in Vietnam with a head full of ideas about patriotism and heroism but later comes home to find herself, and the nation she served, forever changed by the experience — had a particularly long gestation period.

Hannah will appear Monday night at the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa, where she will talk about her work and writing and where the first 1,000 attendees will receive a free signed copy of “The Women” a day ahead of its official release Tuesday.

Kristin Hannah’s new novel “The Women,” published by Martin’s Press, comes out Tuesday.

(Courtesy of St. Martin’s Press)

The ticketed event, which begins at 8 p.m., is the third in a seasonal “In Conversation” series hosted by Segerstrom Center for the Arts, which features distinguished authors discussing their own literary journeys and exploring the power of storytelling.

It will be a sort of homecoming for Hannah, who was born in Huntington Beach in 1960 and lived in Garden Grove until the third grade, when her father, desperate to escape Southern California crowds and traffic, packed up the family in a Volkswagen van with flowers on the side and drove to the Pacific Northwest, where she still lives today.

Hannah recalled in an interview with the Daily Pilot growing up during the Vietnam war and the political divisions it sowed among Americans. The fathers of her own friends had served, died or gone missing in the conflict. They returned stateside to find new battles laid before their feet.

“I first pitched a version of this back in 1997 — that’s how long I have wanted to write this book,” Hannah said Thursday. “For a while, Vietnam was sort of a we-don’t-want-to-talk-or-read-about-it thing. [So] I just shelved it until I decided I was ready to write it.”

It wasn’t until March 2020, when Hannah had just finished writing what would be her widely lauded historical novel “The Four Winds” and was, like many others, watching the world unravel under the pressure of a global pandemic, that she felt called to pick the Vietnam story back up.

Something in the veritable breakdown of American civility reminded her of that earlier, fraught era.

“The country was so deeply divided, and there was so much anger and political division, I was thinking it’s so much like the Vietnam era all over again,” she said. “That’s when I think it all just came together for me.”

Hannah, whose novels often feature resilient female characters placed into incredible circumstances and then forced to fight their way out or through to find their voice, decided to tell a story of Vietnam through the eyes of women who saw and survived the same combat as their male counterparts but whose valor is rarely talked about.

To be able to competently speak on the lives of women who’d experienced combat as nurses on the battlefields of Vietnam, the author said she spent a full year in research for “The Women.” That process led her to Diane Carlson Evans, who herself served in the Army and later founded the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Foundation.

Through that association, Hannah had the opportunity to deeply embed herself in the memoirs of Evans and others like her and to travel to the foundation’s Vietnam Women’s Memorial on the National Mall of Washington, D.C. She thanked Evans for helping her tell the story of women who served.

“With regard to women there’s a long history in the military of sort of saying, well, you weren’t in combat, therefore you can’t suffer the kinds of traumatic after effects we see in men who were in combat,” she said.

“I honestly think if you read ‘The Women’ and you see what it was like for these women in these combat hospitals in Vietnam, I think you will agree with me that that was combat,” she continued. “[Frances] is my version of the kind of woman who went to war. Her story is hers and it is fictional, but it is certainly based on true accounts from the women who were there.”

“In Conversation with Kristin Hannah” takes place Monday at 8 p.m.at the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall. Tickets start at $39 and can be purchased at scfta.org/events/2024/kristin-hannah. Unsigned copies of “The Women” will be available for purchase at the event through Lido Village Books.