What you end up getting is this really sort of classic American pioneer and sensibility. It’s the classic kind of homesteading where you go out to some place where nobody else is and you have several years to prove up your land and then you own it. In addition to that, up until the mid-70s you could still homestead in Alaska. Was that something that resonated with you?Ī: In the ‘70s, there was the whole get back to the land, get back to nature kind of movement going on. Q: There’s an element of extremism in your book, as there is now. So I don’t think I was alone in noticing that connection. It’s interesting because in terms of popular culture and art, there’s a resurgence of the ‘70s right now. Q: What about the turbulence of the ‘70s did you find interesting?Ī: When I started writing it a few years ago, the ‘70s suddenly felt very relevant again in terms of what’s happening in America right now. I was able to bring that to the novel as well. I think my opinions about all that really informed the character.Īdditionally, my family moved around a lot so I was always the new girl in school.

I had a lot of friends whose dads didn’t come home or came home changed. She’s coming of age at basically the same age I was coming of age in a time that was socially and politically turbulent. The narrator is a 13-year-old girl and the book takes place in 1974. Q: Did any of your family’s experiences make it into the book?Ī: A little bit. Personally, it’s just the people and the beauty of the land itself. So it really allows me to put my characters in the middle of this remarkable landscape and tell a story that I felt hadn’t been told before, in a setting that most people are unfamiliar with. Everything about Alaska is harsher and more beautiful and more dangerous than most ordinary places.

Q: What do you like about it personally, and what do you like about it as a novelist?Ī: As a novelist it is just a larger-than-life canvas.

The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah