Kristin Hannah Reveals She and Her Mother Started Writing a Book the Day Her Mom Died

Kristin Hannah is opening up about one of the last moments she shared with her mother before her 1980 death.

Speaking with Today host Jenna Bush Hager for her Open Book with Jenna podcast on Thursday, March 20, The Nightingale author, 64, shared that her mother always had a “premonition” that she would become an author — so much so that she asked Hannah to write a story with her, long before she became a published writer.

“This was the last, like, three months of her life. She was in the hospital,” Hannah recounted, speaking about her mother’s breast cancer journey. “And I was young, you know, I was in my third year of law school.”

At the time, Hannah was just 23, and her mother had been facing her illness while the author was making her way through law school at the University of Puget Sound in Washington. She told Bush Hager, 43, that she wishes she and her mother could have been more direct in their conversations about her cancer at the time.

“I think there were a lot of things that we didn’t wanna talk about. I wish now that we had,” the writer said, recounting how her mom even proposed writing a novel together. “But I let her sort of drive the bus, and she said, ‘Let’s do this together.’ ”

“So every day after law school, I would go to the library and stand in the stacks and read and and get information,” Hannah continued. “And I Xeroxed everything back in those days, because we decided we were gonna write — well, she decided — we were gonna write historical romance.”

Although Hannah joked that she was much more a fan of horror, historical romance was her mother’s favorite genre.

“So we developed this plot, and we just talked and created it. And we actually wrote the first nine pages the day she died,” the author said. “She didn’t get to read anything, but I did get to whisper, ‘I started our book.’ ”

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“And then I just put it all in a box, because I really didn’t wanna be a writer. I took the bar [exam] and started practicing [law],” Hannah added.

According to The Women author, she had no intention of taking up writing again until she was pregnant with her son, Tucker, in the late 1980s and was forced to stay home for an extended period of time.

“It wasn’t until I got pregnant with my son and I had a bad pregnancy, and I was bedridden from 14 weeks on,” she told Bush Hager, joking that she was watching a lot of All My Children. “There was nothing on TV. Erica Kane was also bedridden. And so I just thought, ‘I’ll try to write this book. You know, how hard can it be?’ ”

Eventually, her first novel would become Handful of Heaven, published in 1991. The book is a Gold Rush-era romance set in Alaska which tells the story of a woman who falls in love with a gruff shop owner.

Elsewhere in her conversation with Bush Hager, Hannah shared that her mom’s cancer experience inspired her 2008 novel Firefly Lane, which was later adapted for a Netflix series.

“Firefly Lane is the most autobiographical of my novels,” Hannah said. “It was the year I turned 40, and it was the year I finally was ready to look at my mother’s breast cancer, and her death, and try to understand it.”

“Because one of the things when you’ve lost your mom early and then you have, you know, children and you get married, you’re constantly wondering who she would have been, how you are related to her,” she continued. “So I wanted to go in search of her and to understand how did it feel to be 46 and have to say goodbye to your children.”

According to the author, Firefly Lane served as an opportunity for her to try and understand her mother’s perspective of her relationship with her children — and having to say goodbye to them at such a young age.

“I wrote this book that was set in my hometown about these two girlfriends who went to the college and got the degree that I did and all that, and one of them gets breast cancer,” Hannah recalled. “And I felt [my mom] with me the entire time, And I didn’t realize until after I finished the novel that I began it at exactly the age that she was when she was diagnosed, and I finished it at exactly the age she was when she died.”

“I did feel like, not only that I came to know her a little better, but I came to sort of, I guess, know my place within her because I was both daughter and mother in that book,” she added.

Hannah’s interview with Bush Hager comes amid the 10th anniversary celebrations for her beloved 2015 novel, The Nightingale. The New York Times bestseller tells the coming-of-age story of two sisters in France on the eve of World War II and their struggles to survive the German occupation of their country.

PEOPLE reviewed the book when it first came out and it was also named a Wall Street Journal Best Book of the Year. To celebrate the milestone, a deluxe edition of the historical fiction book is available wherever books are sold.