Author Helen Benedict discusses her novel 'The Soldier’s House,' the middle volume of her Iraq War trilogy, in a recent interview. Drawing from her nonfiction research on women soldiers' experiences, Benedict uses fiction to delve into the unspoken traumas of war. The book centers on American veterans and Iraqi refugees navigating life after conflict.
Helen Benedict, whose 2009 nonfiction book 'The Lonely Soldier' exposed sexual abuse faced by women serving in Iraq from 2003 to 2006, has turned to fiction to capture the internal stories left unsaid in interviews. 'Almost all the many women I interviewed... had been relentlessly sexually harassed or assaulted by their own comrades,' Benedict said, noting how silences, tears, and jokes during those talks inspired her narrative approach. Her work influenced the 2012 documentary 'The Invisible War.'