Kristin Hannah Reinvented Herself. She Thinks America Can Do the Same.

Growing up in California and the Pacific Northwest, Kristin Hannah never wanted to become a novelist. It was a career for dreamers, she thought, kids who took creative writing classes and scribbled stories from the time they were 6.

“I just wasn’t that person,” she said in a video interview from her home outside Seattle. “Until I was in my third year of law school and my mother was dying of breast cancer. Every day I would visit her and complain about my classes. One afternoon, my mother said, ‘Don’t worry, you’re going to be a writer.’”

This was news to Hannah. The two decided to write a romance novel set in 18th-century Scotland. “That was her choice,” Hannah said. “I would have written horror. But it gave us something to talk about.”

In 1985, the day she wrote the first nine pages — her inaugural foray into fiction — she received a call from her father, telling her she needed to get to the hospital. There, before her mother died, Hannah, then 24, had a chance to whisper, “I started.”

But she put the book on hold and resumed her original plan, practicing law at a Seattle firm — until, she said, “a few years later, I went into labor at 14 weeks and was bedridden until my son was born. I realized that I probably wouldn’t have more children and I wanted to be home for the first few years. So I thought, I’ll try writing a book.”