The Women

I really wasn’t supposed to read The Women. It wasn’t for me.

I’d spent the last few weeks buried in LLM research papers, Bashevis Singer anecdotes, and Terraform tutorials. I wanted something light. Something that wouldn’t shake me up.

But the algorithm got me. It showed me the cover, reminded me Kristin Hannah had written The Nightingale and Firefly Lane, and just like that—I was in.

The great irony of the book is that the pain doesn’t come from gunpowder or the front lines.

What truly hurts are the human relationships: the friendships that go cold, the guilt that remains unspoken, the love that never quite arrives.

A (poorly) buried story

The Women isn’t a traditional war novel.

It doesn’t follow soldiers, doesn’t glorify strategy or heroism. Instead, it enters through the back door—through the nurses, the women, the ones who went to the frontlines without regulation uniforms or permission to be heroes.

In this case, Frances “Frankie” McGrath, who leaves her life in Coronado, California, to join the Army Nurse Corps during the Vietnam War.

“It’s all about the men,” Gwyn said. “Did I tell you I tried to join a Vietnam vets talk therapy session in Dallas? It’s always the same thing. ‘You don’t belong. You’re a woman. There were no women in Vietnam.’”

— The Women, Kristin Hannah

The line reads like fiction, but it could’ve come from dozens of real testimonies.

In fact, it did. In an interview with NPR, Hannah says the novel began when she learned that over 11,000 American women served in Vietnam, most of them nurses—and that when they came home, their country ignored them. Or worse: erased them.

The most painful part wasn’t the war. It was coming back.

Trauma, body, memory

Formally, The Women blends the emotional intensity of a private journal with the scale of a historical epic.

But what struck me most—disturbed me, in the best way—was its almost physical approach to trauma.

Kristin Hannah writes in simple prose, without unnecessary embellishment, and yet you feel the bodily pain, the mental rage, the existential nausea.

In that sense, the novel resonates with recent studies on PTSD in female veterans.

For example, Street, Vogt & Dutra (2009) analyzed how women often experience PTSD differently than men—more guilt, more shame, more social isolation.

Hannah doesn’t quote studies, but she channels them as if she’d handwritten them in the margins of her manuscript.

“It wasn’t the blood that haunted me. It was the forgetting.”

— Frankie McGrath

And that’s where the book becomes political—without ever raising its voice.

Because telling a forgotten story is, in itself, a form of resistance.

The inevitable comparisons

While I was telling a friend about The Women, she said it reminded her of The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. That stayed with me.

She was right: that book also explores Vietnam, the weight of what soldiers carry—physically and emotionally.

But there’s something that had always nagged me about books like that, and reading The Women made it click:

In those stories, women aren’t really there.

Or if they are, they’re writing letters, appearing as sexual fantasies, or serving as the soldier’s reason to survive.

Never to tell their own story.

Kristin Hannah changes that—without turning them into icons or symbols.

She gives them fear, doubt, courage. She makes them real.

While reading, I started digging around, trying to see if anyone else had written about this kind of silence.

And I stumbled upon an essay by Rebecca Solnit. She says the historical silence around women isn’t an accident.

It’s a strategy. A method of control.

I hadn’t thought of it that way.

But after reading The Women, I have to admit—it makes perfect sense.

Sentimental, real, and necessary

Now, The Women isn’t flawless. There are moments when the emotion gets syrupy.

Some of the dialogue sounds more like Netflix than Saigon.

And yes, if you’ve read Rachel Cusk or Jesmyn Ward, you’ll probably notice a few narrative shortcuts.

But honestly—so what?

Sometimes, like our aunts say when crying over This Is Us, corny things are true, too.

It’s the kind of story that leaves a lump in your throat and makes you want to call your mom without really knowing why.

And me? I picked up the book thinking it was “something for my sister.”

I ended up recommending it to every guy I know who once thought war stories were a men-only genre.