Stacey Abrams and Michael Connelly on Plot, Persistence, and Passion
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Stacey Abrams, who solidified herself this past election season as one of the most powerful women in American politics, has another job: She’s a writer. And not just about politics. She’s a master of fiction, with eight romance and suspense novels written under the name Selena Montgomery. Now she’s back to Stacey Abrams, with While Justice Sleeps, which is both her first novel written under her real name and her first legal thriller. Abrams hopped on Zoom with veteran thriller writer Michael Connelly, author of The Lincoln Lawyer and the Harry Bosch series, to talk shop.
Michael Connelly: Thank you so much for doing this. Maybe two years ago, I was on a plane and you were sitting across the aisle from me. And I spent the whole flight, four or five hours, thinking, I want to say something to her, to thank her, but I just didn’t want to screw it up. After, I thought, Man, I missed my chance to say something to Stacey Abrams. Now here we are together, and it’s a real honor for me to say, first of all, thank you for everything you’ve done for our world, our society, our country.
Stacey Abrams: I’m so sorry I didn’t know that you were sitting near me, and hopefully you saw that I was happy to talk to anybody who reached out. My mission is going to be for us to be on a plane together again and have a rousing conversation!
MC: [While Justice Sleeps] is very much of this moment, with contemporary thoughts about what’s going on in our world and where our world is going. So it leaves me with the big question: How the heck did you have time to write such a complex and accomplished book?
SA: I actually started writing it years ago. I was having lunch with a partner at the law firm where I used to work. She mentioned this question she had about what would happen if a Supreme Court justice could no longer do their job, because Article III of the Constitution is silent on it. So I thought about it and sat with the idea, and on the way home I was listening to some story about someone in a persistent vegetative state. And I thought, Oh my God, what if a Supreme Court justice was in a coma and you didn’t know whether they would ever emerge?
I wrote this initial scene in 2008, then I put the book aside because I was involved in trying to save the Democratic Party in Georgia. I became the Democratic [minority] leader of the Georgia House of Representatives and also started a company. I finished the book between 2011 and 2012, but no one wanted it. I [sent it out] to agents, and essentially they said, “Well, the Supreme Court is played out and there will never be a president who is involved in international intrigue in this way.” They just dismissed it.
Then, in 2019, I was talking about some other books and I mentioned While Justice Sleeps. The person I was talking to said, ‘Wait, you’ve written this already?’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, it’s pretty much done.’ I mean, it was started back before smartphones [really took off]. So I was going to have to do a little tweaking. But the spine of the story was there.
MC: With trying to save the Democratic Party in Georgia, and I would probably expand that to the United States, what’s a writing day like for you?
SA: I have to schedule time to write, but I have also learned to write pretty quickly. I make time in the day to write, because writing is part of the core of who I am. But also, I write really well on deadline. I’m not one of those regimented writers who wake up at 7 a.m. and write for a certain number of hours. It gets in where it fits in.
MC: You mentioned that writing is a part of your core. What was your experience? How did storytelling and reading inspire you?
SA: Until I was 15, my mom was a librarian. When we moved from Mississippi to Georgia, my father complained that with six kids and two adults, we had more boxes of books than boxes of clothes. We would later throw out a box of clothes, but books were sacrosanct—you could not touch them. We grew up with my mom just always encouraging us to read and literally having the run of a library to find the works that we wanted to read.
My dad is dyslexic and was undiagnosed until he was in his thirties, but he loves storytelling and he has this rich imagination. So he would tell us these very complicated stories every Friday when he would put us to bed. They would get more and more fantastical and elaborate because he had to meet the needs of six different kids asking for something. It was the cleanest version of Game of Thrones you’ve ever seen, but it was just this rich storytelling. The two combined when my parents became Methodist ministers, because part of their job is to really help people think about their present, think about their past, but also think about their future.
MC: I’m one of six kids as well. In my memory, I always see my mom with books. She was always passing on books to me, and I think that’s possibly why I do what I do. I spent a lot of time in libraries, because I grew up in South Florida. And so I went there initially just to cool off, but I started reading books there. And here we are talking about legal thrillers. Can you talk about Avery Keene, the protagonist of While Justice Sleeps? Where does she come from?
SA: Avery was an amalgamation of folks I went to law school with who didn’t have the traditional experience where you go to a great college, a great law school, and you sail into where you want to be. My sister, Leslie, is a federal judge. She clerked right after law school. And I know our story—I know that Leslie has this amazing résumé—but we did not have the easiest upbringing in terms of economics and access. I also brought in part of my brother’s story. I have a younger brother who has really grappled with drug addiction. So often when you have stories, especially in this kind of fiction, the narrative is so stark. You’re either a villain or a hero, and there’s a complicated nature to addiction. There’s a complicated familial relationship that develops, and you don’t cease to be a good person because you make mistakes, but you also don’t get to be a good person without having to work at it. So, for me, it was, “What could happen if you have a parent who is so challenged, but you don’t have the capacity to walk away?”
MC: Was there a first villain or a mystery you read that made you say, “I want to do this someday?” And I’m talking about mystery, thriller, whatever.
SA: So, I grew up reading. I love The Count of Monte Cristo. I love sagas where you have a villain and a hero and everyone is more complicated than they seem. I also loved Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden. So those are your precursors. And the two books that really centered me in the thriller writing space, John Grisham’s The Firm and The Black Ice [written by Connelly]. I keep hearing the word “propulsive” used to describe what I was able to do with While Justice Sleeps, but it is so important to me that you can enter a book and not want to leave that world.
MC: That word propulsive—we live for that. This is a unique question to you. You inspire many, many people, everywhere you go and with everything you do. Where do you find inspiration yourself?
SA: Thank you for that; that’s a very generous compliment. I have two of the most amazing people I’ve ever known as my parents. My mom grew up in abject poverty. She is the only one of her seven siblings to finish high school, let alone go to college and graduate school. At the age of 40, she became a United Methodist minister and went to graduate school. She raised six children, and she did it with a partner, my dad, who struggled with being underestimated his entire life. He grew up in a segregated school system in Mississippi, and his inability to read was dismissed as a lack of intelligence as opposed to a lack of access. He, too, became a United Methodist minister and attended graduate school. Imagine going to graduate school at the age of 40, having really only learned to functionally read 10 years before then.
Together, my parents are this couple who believe in good people; they believe in service, they believe in being there. And they gave me five brothers and sisters who are some of the most extraordinary people I know. And even as we grapple with and try to navigate challenges, there’s never a moment where we doubt that my parents are the people we can turn to and that the family they created is a safe space for us. And so they inspire me.
MC: Now I’m going to pose a really simple question: When you’re writing, what’s the one thing you have to have with you? Is it music? Is it a cup of coffee? Is it a favorite lamp that has to be turned on? Which thing helps get you into the groove?
SA: Music is usually the most important part for me. When I wrote my first novel [Rules of Engagement], I was listening to an extraordinary guitarist. He actually is a writer; he’s a journalist now [and new CEO of The Atlantic], and his name is Nick Thompson. Since then, it’s just been really important to me to have music in the background. I want it to be so mutable that no one cares. I see something that really keeps my cogs going and gives me my own little soundtrack for the story.
MC: The book was 13 years in the making—stops and starts, some rejection. You kept coming back to this book. How come?
SA: The first time I wrote the original full draft, I actually gave it to my siblings to read, and they liked it. And they are not kind people in that way. We’re critical in the sense that we want to help make one another better. They weren’t going to just give me pablum compliments. It was my siblings who asked me about the book, who said, “Where is it? What did you do with it?” When you’ve got someone who can tell you that you’re not hallucinating, that what you think is good actually does make sense, it’s easier to hold on. But, also, I’m Southern. There’s this moment where you realize that sometimes what you want has gotten here sooner than you’re able to use it.
MC: In While Justice Sleeps, what was the question you were trying to get the reader to consider?
SA: I wanted a heroine who made the affirmative decision to face hardship, to face the danger, to face the challenges, and not because she didn’t have a choice, but because she made the decision that it was worth the risk. We sometimes avail ourselves of the excuse that we didn’t have a choice. It’s that decision to do it anyway, to act anyway, to risk failure, to risk loss. Sometimes we just have to choose to act, never knowing if it’s going to work or not. We have to act.
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