If you want to understand a culture, look at the stories people tell.

Cara Hoffman (my client!) whose new novel Be Safe I Love You is just published, wrote a searing New York Times OpEd that ran last week. In it, she calls for another point of view in war literature: the voice of the female soldier and veteran.

You can read it here.

There are over 150 comments on NYTimes.com to the piece and many more on social media (it was wonderful to see the outpouring on twitter, even the great Martina Navratilova tweeted about it). The vast majority of comments are positive, but I am thunderstruck by the few people who weighed in that there are plenty of stories about women soldiers in war literature. I have to wonder what they are talking about. It’s true that there are memoirs and excellent non-fiction books, but among the thousands and thousands of stories by and about male soldiers – from Homer’s The Odyssey to Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried to Ben Fountain’s wonderful Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk – I was aware of exactly one novel about a female soldier’s war experience (Helen Benedict’s Sand Queen) and one short story before Cara’s new novel Be Safe I Love You was published.

This lack of representation in literature matters: If you want to understand a culture, you look at the stories its people tell. As Cara says in her OpEd:

“I can’t help but think women soldiers would be afforded the respect they deserve if their experiences were reflected in literature, film and art, if people could see their struggles, their resilience, their grief represented.

They would be made visible if we could read stories that would allow us to understand that women kill in combat and lose friends and long to see their children and partners at home. They would be given appropriate human compassion if we could feel their experiences viscerally as we do when reading novels like “All Quiet on the Western Front,” or seeing films like “The Hurt Locker.”

Society may come to understand war differently if people could see it through the eyes of women who’ve experienced both giving birth and taking life. People might learn something new about aggression and violence if we read not just about those fighting the enemy but about those who must also fight off assault from the soldiers they serve beside or report to.

Female veterans’ stories clearly have the power to change and enrich our understanding of war. But their unsung epics might also have the power to change our culture, our art, our nation and our lives.”

For more information, go to www.CaraHoffman.com