The Great Alone
By Kristin Hannah
My husband grew up in Minnesota. A clean sidewalk and driveway post-blizzard was a matter of personal pride for him. For the thirty years of our marriage, I don’t remember ever shoveling snow, though we lived in Colorado. Since he died, every time it snows I get a serious attitude. I feel sorry for myself. I get angry. I remind myself that I shouldn’t have to be doing this. Then I read The Great Alone. And I read about women in Alaska who dealt with a whole lot more than a few inches of snow on the driveway. Yesterday when I woke to inches of snow, I remembered those women. And I said to myself “hey, if they can live through an Alaskan winter in the wild, I can certainly shovel a little bit of snow. That’s how stories work for me. The characters don’t even have to be real for me to find a kindred spirit within a story.
The Great Alone is the story of Leni Albright, just fourteen years old in 1974 when her vagabond parents moved her to a remote peninsula in Alaska. Leni’s is a story of coming of age in some of the harshest conditions imaginable. And Leni’s ability to, not only survive, but to ultimately thrive, is Hannah’s great victory in creating her character.
Completely unprepared for the conditions of winter in the remote wilderness, Leni’s family was forced into daily adaptations, from using an outhouse, to growing their own food; from protecting themselves and their small collection of livestock from bears and wolves, to navigating the tight knit community around them and the interminable darkness of frigid winter months. These daily challenges occurred amidst the dark shadow of her father’s PTSD, a condition he could not overcome, remnants of his service in Vietnam.
Leni’s resilience in the face of each trial she confronted led me to look more deeply at the tools she created along the way which sustained her. I stepped into her shoes and pondered where my breaking point might have been. I thought about what kept her going. Often times, as we find in life, she kept going because she had to. Because she was a child, living with parents who had no choice. And yet, I watched, Leni’s resilience building over time. She grew into a new and painful understanding of her parents, as many adolescents do. She grew into new awareness of her own capabilities, as she killed her first hare, navigated her first moment of terrified disorientation on a dark road, and found her first love.
The “resilience builders” in her life included her relationship with her mother, her wisdom to engage the support of her community and a friend outside of her isolated family. But I would like to suggest that books were also vital contributors to her growth. They provided the mirrors in which she saw her experiences reflected back to her and made sense of them. Here’s an excerpt about her first experience with a death in the community.
She saw how death impacted people, saw the glazed look in their eyes, the way they shook their heads, the way their sentences broke in half as if they couldn’t decide if silence or words would release them from sorrow.
Leni had never known anyone who had died before. She had seen death on television and read about it I her beloved books (Johnny’s death in The Outsider had turned her inside out) but now she saw the truth of it. In literature, death was many things – a message, catharsis retribution… Death made you cry, filled you with sadness, but in the best of her books, there was peace, too, satisfaction, a sense of the story ending as it should. In real life, she saw it wasn’t like that. It was sadness opening up inside of you, changing how you saw the world.
And in her understanding of the new awakening she felt as she opened her heart to love.
Yearning. She knew what it felt like now. Yearning. An old word from Jane Eyre’s world, and as new to Leni as this second.
In this story Leni experienced love, rage, loss, shame and forgiveness. She navigated the disillusionment which precedes maturity. She learned what it meant to be lost and what it means to return home.