Hannah Kohler on the books of the Vietnam War

Hannah Kohler, author of The Outside Lands, on the books that inspired her portrayal of 1960s America and the Vietnam War.

Hannah Kohler, author of The Outside Lands, on the books that inspired her portrayal of 1960s America and the Vietnam War.

People often say you should write about what you know. I believe you should write about what you love. When you're writing a novel, you go to bed with it, you wake up with it, it's with you when you're in the queue at the supermarket and when you're in the shower. So you have to fall in love with it. You have to fall for the subject matter.

My novel, The Outside Lands, is set in 1960s San Francisco, against the backdrop of the Vietnam War. I'm not American—I'm British—and I was born after the end of the conflict. When I started the novel as part of a Creative Writing MA, I was advised to switch focus and write something closer to home. But my imagination was hooked by sixties America, and I couldn't unhook it.

My interest in post-war American history was sparked at school, in the sixth form. Many of us can name a teacher that made a permanent impression on our imagination, and for me it was my American History teacher—opinionated, passionate, and with a flair for characterization, he brought the post-war era and its players to life in full, indelible Technicolor. I was particularly gripped by the Vietnam War: because of its scale, the vividness with which it was reported in the media (the first “television war”), the poignancy of the draft, and because of its historical proximity. This fascination didn't leave me, and when I did a Masters in American Literature several years later, I wrote my thesis on American literature of the Vietnam War.

Most Vietnam War narratives, fiction and non-fiction, are, unsurprisingly, voiced by men. From the ferociously brilliant Dispatches by Michael Herr and Tim O'Brien's beautifully written The Things They Carried and If I Die In A Combat Zone, to the hard-hitting, unforgettable memoirs by Ron Kovic (Born on the Fourth of July) and Ronald J. Glasser (365 Days), these narratives of the war are told from the point of view of men in or near the theatre of conflict. Each of these books was instrumental in helping me to build an imaginative picture of the war. But I wanted to tell a story of the war primarily from a female, domestic point of view—domestic in the small and large sense: the home, and the home front. And so The Outside Lands is about a young woman, Jeannie, and what happens to her and to her family when her younger brother, Kip, enlists to fight in Vietnam.

A few months ago, I was listening to an excerpt of Steven Boggan's book, Gold Fever, on the radio, and my imagination was lit. In that moment, I knew I'd found the setting of my next novel: the California gold rush. Once again, it's a time and place that's a long way from where I am—which is usually at my kitchen table in the outer reaches of London. And that's my favourite thing about fiction writing: that it's an escape hatch, a time machine, a chance to live another life.