Winter Garden
By Kristin Hannah
Published February 2, 2010 (Hardcover) St Martin’s Press
Kristin Hannah and I talked for more than a half-hour today, about Winter Garden and about writing and relationships, while locked up in the inner chambers of a Barnes and Noble bookstore in a Portland, Oregon suburb. We went deep, we dove in together, and we didn’t come up for air, until that thirty-minutes was up. I’ll let you know when the show airs on Open Book with Diana Page Jordan. We taped, because Kristin won’t be in town on a Monday when my show is live, and if an author comes to Portland on tour, I’d rather do the interview in person than on the phone.
Kristin, her blond pageboy gently swaying as she answered my questions, was wise and wonderful. She says Winter Garden is both least like her than any of her nearly twenty books, and it is her favorite. And, the lead character, the old Russian woman, Anya, will stay with her forever, Kristin believes. Anya faced impossible odds as a mother. The novel has clung to me – you’ll see why if you read yesterday’s blog about the book itself, and if you read Winter Garden.
How lovely to sense Kristin’s connection with her material.
The only personal, is that her own mother died when the author was only twenty-six, and there were so many questions she didn’t ask about her mother’s life. And, Kristin researched the book, studying World War Two, and visiting Africa, weaving in the misery of the embattled mothers into her novel.
Kristin has two strong threads going – the Russian fairy tale that Anya finally tells her grown daughters, and the present story of the three women, and their men. The men, Kristin smiles, are very understanding. She says that when love is real, you can leave in search of yourself, and return home, confident that someone will be there waiting. I tell her how I found my family in this story – it’s in yesterday’s blog – and her eyes got shiny with tears.
We know, by reading her novel, why Anya was so cold to her daughters. I want to someday interview my mother – alone, apart from my stepfather – to find out what formed her, what would allow her to drink instead of intervene when her husband raped me and beat my little brother. I only know that she was angry when she was five and her little brother was born, that he sucked up all the parental attention – and she disowned him, as she would later disown me, for taking my biological father’s name back. Kristin says some people are so broken, you cannot allow them in your own life, lest you be likewise broken.
My favorite moment came as we talked about her writing. Kristin has the most wonderful — faith-filled — way of viewing her novels. She believes the books are fully formed in her subconscious, and as she writes, her mind dusts off pieces of the plot, the characters, the motivations – like buried dinosaur bones – until the entire story is laid bare on the page.
I completely comprehend why Winter Garden is her favorite – the novel is one of my favorites, as well.
