Now What? with Brooke ShieldsPolitician, activist, and writer Stacey Abrams talks to Brooke about her deep love for classic TV, how she's coped with difficult political losses, and why her psychological thrillers had to be masked as romance novels. Stacey shares a story from her childhood that underscores her drive to change the system, and why she thinks she ruffles so many feathers in Washington. Plus, the "Rogue Justice" author reveals how a bad breakup helped define her life philosophy.
What do you do when life doesn't go according to plan that moment you lose a job, or a loved one, or even a piece of yourself. I'm Brookshields and this is now What, a podcast about pivotal moments as told by people who lived them. Each week, I sit down with a guest to talk about the times they were knocked off course and what they did to move forward. Some stories are funny, others are gut wrenching, but all are unapologetically human and remind us that every success and every setback is accompanied by a choice, and that choice answers one question, now What.
I will tell you one of the best episodes of TIV that I always think about. You did an episode of Law and Order criminal Intent. I did along where you played the sort of metaverse of what people would have presumed as you, but you had there's this moment where you are so angry. It is one of the best, like five minutes of television. It's one of my favorite episodes. Whenever it comes on, I'm like, this is the Brookshields episode. I've got to watch it.
Oh God, well, thank you. That was so long ago, and that was one of the most difficult shoots I have ever been on. And it was four in the morning. It was freezing. I waited. They kept me waiting all day. It was funny that when I jump in the water, I had those little those chicken cutlets to fill out my bikini top. Oh, and I dove in the water and the chicken cutlet came out and floated to the top.
Oh my goodness.
The director was like, you might want to put that back. My guest today is Stacy Abrams. Stacy is a politician, an activist, a policy expert, and a fiction writer who's penned more than a dozen books, including her latest, Rogue Justice. I first heard of Stacy in twenty eighteen, when she was the groundbreaking Democratic nominee in Georgia's governor's race. Since then, I have watched her become a national political figure, an essential voice in the battle against voter suppression, and a true inspiration to millions of young people. She's had massive wins and a few very public losses, but her resilience, intellect, and dedication to her beliefs are undeniable. I am so happy she agreed to join me, and hope that you enjoy our conversation as much as I did. Here is Stacy Abrams. Well welcome Stacy Abrams. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
I am honored. This is really a privilege.
Oh my goodness. I think the privilege is really, really, really really mine. I always like to just start with how you see yourself and how you would describe yourself. So who is Stacy Abrams?
I've once described myself I am a reality show waiting to happen. So I've had this extraordinary opportunity to try most of the things. I imagine my mom said, she said, you don't want to be a jack of all trades and a master of none. And when she said it, what she intended was Stacy kind of picked two or three things. What I heard was master everything. That's what stuck with me. So I've spent my life really trying to learn as much as I can to do the things I want, but not to just glancingly do it, to really dig deep and be good at it. I think of myself as a problem solver, someone who regardless of what the problem is, regardless of the field, regardless of the issue, with the exception of dating, because I haven't figured out how to solve that problem. I see myself as someone who can find answers, and answers are rarely in the first place you look, and so you've got to be open to and able to look in multiple places. And so that's how I see myself.
What was your childhood like? What kind of a child were you? In addition to that.
I grew up in southern Mississippi. I am the second of six kids. My oldest sister is three years older, so we're all very close, and we lived in a small house, so we were all physically very close. My mom was a librarian, my dad was a shipyard worker. We didn't have very much in material resources, but my mom and dad were always very intentional about us never feeling a lack of and the corollary to that was that they also raised us with a very strong sense of obligation that your job is to serve that no matter how little we had, someone had less. And so the lights might be off at home, but my parents would take us to a soup kit to volunteer, or we didn't have running water, but they were going to have us volunteering at a nursing home because they never wanted us to see our material space as justifying our lack of obligation and commitment to others.
Wow, and that's so. I mean, it's one thing to tell your family and your kids to do this or make them go somewhere, but to instill it in them by example as well. Were they a religious Were you in a religious household? Oh?
Yes, So my parents were both from very strong religious backgrounds. And indeed, when I was fifteen, my parents accepted their call to the ministry and we moved from Mississippi to Georgia because they both did their Masters of Divinity at Emory University at the age of forty to become United Methodist ministers. Working full time with six kids, my older sister was the only one who was out of high school, and so we never had the excuse of not doing stuff because my mom were like, we went to grad school at forty, so shut out.
You're a slacker. What about your peers now, your peers at that time, where they did they struggle financially? Yeah?
So where I grew up in Mississippi, absolutely, we lived on South Street. But the way I describe it as we lived on South Street and North Street, they got really exotic names. The further the closer you got to the middle class side of town, the fancier the names got. So. But again, when you grow up in a middle class community, lower income community, you're usually surrounded by people of similar circumstances, which makes those circumstances regular. But I what I credit my parents for was that they never again, they never permitted us to wallow. It was never a question of what we had or didn't have. It was a question of what were you willing to do, what did you work for, what did you need?
Well, it's also that the type of you know, there are people that define themselves as victims and it starts to set the precedence for who they are. But kids aren't born with that. So if they see there was affluence because there was love and support and safety and joy and education being truly a key to a future.
Absolutely. I mean for my parents it was very much. We had three jobs, go to church, go to school, take care of each other. I don't I will say it this way. I know there are those who understand their victimization and they hold to it. I don't think it's inappropriate to know that you have been victimized or targeted by a system because If you don't know, you can't try to change it. The issue is do you stay there? Do you stay clinging to the victimization as a justification for not taking action, or do you use it as a galvanizing force. My parents grew up as teen during the Civil Rights movement, and they saw it as a call to action. They were denied their citizenship. My dad was arrested when he was fourteen for registering black people to vote, and my grandfather was conscripted into the army for the Korean War and World War Two, but never allowed to vote in an election. When he came home from fighting abroad, his kids couldn't go to the colleges where he and my grandmother worked, and so they had every right to acknowledge their victimhood and their victimization. But what they refused to do is let it define how they would shape their lives, other than using it as a galvanizing force and sometimes a roadmap to what they wanted for the next generation.
When do you think that you actually really saw the system for what it was.
Oh, I was very young. I was in first grade. I was already reading, I was fairly advanced, and I was bored. I was bored to tears in my class, and they wouldn't I get in trouble for reading too much. And it took another teacher to tell my parents I was being held back because they were waiting for two young white girls to catch up with me. And it wasn't because they were worried about my socialization. I was first grade, second grade and saw the same thing. It was they didn't want the precedent of moving me and not moving these other girls.
That's unthinkable, but it was, you know.
And I was. I was aware of the fact that I was chastised. I didn't know the politics of it. My parents found out and I was then very quickly moved into the second grade. It was very scary because no one told me what was happening. The principal came and got me from class and took me outside because we had trailers, and you know, only the big kids went outside to the trailers. I'm the first grade, and so I walked out to this trailer and I'm fairly certain I'm going to die. I'm like, I don't know what happened out here, but it's not what I'm supposed to see. And then the trailer door opens and there's this tall, beautiful woman who looks like an angel, and the sun is beaming down because it's Mississippi and it's you know, the fall. And she smiles at me and her name is Missus Blakesley, and she invites me into the trailer and I'm like, oh, thank God, I'm not going to die. But that was how I moved from first grade to second grade.
That's incredible. I mean, you're you're clearly extraordinarily intelligent and very smart, and you incredibly astute even as a little person, and you've become a real role model for so many women in particular and particularly young women. Did you have any people that you really looked up to or icons when you were a child that you.
Taught you not necessarily? I mean they're my mom, of course, my dad, my grandmother and grandfather, my paternal grandparents we were very close to. I got a chance to know my grandmother, my maternal grandmother well, and my great grandmother. We called her Moomoo, who to me was the most resilient human I'd ever met. She used to joke that we would when we would be visiting her house, we would watch baseball on the radio because she couldn't afford a television. She was the daughter of sharecroppers, and even though she had a television, you only turned the TV on for like special occasions. But we would sit in her front room and watch baseball on the radio, which.
Was it's kind of amazing.
It was just it was it was exciting and it was fun. But I grew up surrounded by people who believed that they were entitled to more, believe they were responsible for working for more, and believe they should create a path for others to get more. I knew about the icons of the civil rights movement, icons and politics. I you know, I watched a lot of Dynasty in General Hospital as a child, so you know.
Those covered your bass I did.
But what I extracted from it, and I think, you know this, what you extract from your experiences, it's filtered through your sense of self. How do I use what I'm learning? How do I use what I'm doing to solve problems either problems that I have, problems that others have, problems no one knows about. And there weren't a lot of people who looked like me who were talked about in that vein when I was growing up and That's one of the reasons I've been so assertive about where I stand and what I want because I didn't have people who looked like me or came from my experiences who could do so.
Was there a seminal moment in which you decided to pivot towards politics and how did that come about in your life?
I saw it less as a pivot and more as an evolution. So if you go back to solving problems, I think poverty is a moral I think it is economically inefficient. I think it is solvable. And if you look at all the pieces the facets of my life, whether it's being a tax attorney or a writer or an organizer, everything I've done in my mind is shaping how I can tackle this problem because it has a corporate side to it, has a public sector side to it, has a non profit side to it. So I've always tried to operate in all of those dimensions. But I reached sort of a plateau where the next set of changes that I needed to see, I did my best to get other politicians to do it for me. I was their lawyer, I worked on their campaigns. Many of them did what they could, but there were there are institutional and structural impediments, especially in the South, to exercising political power. And while I could get young people to vote and worked on voter voter rights and democracy, I could work for politicians and draft legislation. All of those things had me as a supplicant to others trying to get them to do and so standing for office myself, whether it was when I stood for office in the when I was a student at Spelman, or when I ran for office in two thousand and six, it was because I'd reached the inflection point where I could no longer ask someone else to do it. I needed to be the one to do it myself. And being the candidate versus being the campaign manager or the supporter or the lawyer was just the shift in where my role was. It was never a shift in what my goal was.
Oh wow. And then so in twenty eighteen, when you first round for governor in Georgia, there was a lot a lot of the narrative really centered around the novelty of you just as a candidate. But you'd had a very long career before that. Were there any experiences that you felt were extremely formative?
When I stood for a leader in twenty ten, and I ran to be the minority leader or the leader of the Democrats in the House days after we'd lost every state wide election. We had fewer members in the House than since reconstruction, and we were at the lowest ebb of political power in our one hundred and thirty in like one hundred and thirty years. And so I'm like, hey, I want to be in charge of all this. I want to be at the top in the nator. But for me it was so critical because no one thought you could do anything when you feel so exhausted that possibility is almost extinguished. That to me is the prime opportunity to figure out what's next, because you don't have a choice. And coming in the caucus was in debt, the party was in debt. The following year, when redistricting was done after the census, we lost even more seats, and so I presided over an even smaller caucus than I started with. And so it made me take all of these lessons that I'd learned as an entrepreneur. How do you take the little money that someone's willing to invest in you and stretch it, as you know, as far as you can how do you use the rules that they've written to stymy you to your advantage. So I would find rules that were written, you know, on the capitol. I was known because I read every bill and I knew what we could do and what we couldn't do. And so every year as leader, I would find some you know, hidden gem and use it to bolster our visibility. The very next year they would change the rules to eliminate it. But by doing that it was so important because as an entrepreneur, I need to do that. I needed to do that. As a writer, I could craft a vision for what I thought should happen, and I could write our story. As a politician, I knew how to talk to people and get them to buy in to what seemed like an impossible task. And as an organizer, I realized that you can't win elections if people can't vote for you. So I work to make certainly got more people registered to vote.
Well, I mean talk about not taking no for an answer. It's just it's miraculous that you know, what's that scene when it's like dumb and dumber or something, and my one it's like, I would never date you if you were the last person on the face of the earth, and you had and he's saying, so you're saying, there's a chance, a chance, there's a chance. You know, you just find that I'm just are yours are shocked that more people don't think like you do. No, I don't.
I actually I really don't think about things that way. I focus on what can I control, what can I do. I've always jokingly called myself a stoic, and then I've done more reading. You know, I've read Marcus Aurelius's meditations. I've given more thought to stoicism, and one of the principles is that you can only live your life. You can't do You can't make anyone else do or be anything. I can't make people vote for me, I can't make people like me. I can't make them hire me, I can't make them date me. I can't make them read my books. But what I can do is put out the best product, be the best person, do the best work, and trust that my efforts are sufficient for what I can do, and then after work as hard as I can to convince them that their choices could change if they only knew more information.
So when you did not become governor in twenty eighteen, which was shocking. And we'll get to the bigger issue about voters. But with that attitude, how did that attitude apply to what it felt like with that loss? What did you say to yourself.
That I didn't get the job, but the work still remained. You're not entitled to win an election, but you're responsible for the work you said you were going to do. And the work didn't suddenly end because my campaign ended. And so I pivoted and created fair Count or sorry for a fight, which was on democracy. Fair Count, which actually focused on the census, because that harkened back to when I became leader. And the reason we've lost so many seats was that we had an undercount and the census of communities of color, and so I made certainly created an organization to improve the census. And then all of this is because people want better policies for their lives. So I created an organization called the Southern Economic Advancement Project or SEEP, and so I created this constellation of groups to do this work. And that goes to my point about the way I approached things. Yes, we have different sectors, the corporate sector of the public sector, of the nonprofit sector inhabit all three sectors, and it's disconcerting to people who think, well, you should be here or you were there. No, our lives are intersected by those sectors. Why shouldn't If they can come and affect me, why can't I affect that? Well?
Well, also, you can't act. You can't live in a silo and act in a silo because it's not as effective at all.
And there are lessons to be learned from all of those places. There are lessons to be learned. There are ways that things intersect and connect and influence that may not be visible but are valuable. And so after twenty eighteen, yeah, I mean I was angry for I like to say, you know, I did the stages of grief and I really enjoyed anger. I hunkered down for you. But then I was like, Okay, what can anger do for me? Anger can galvanize you or can paralyze you? And I use the platform. I mean, it angered a lot of people that I use the platform of failure to proclaim a victory. But for me, victory is not about the people who get what they want. Victories about the people who don't know that they are entitled to more, that they have the right to more. And so you know, I would go and talk to voters who were denied the right to voter communities, who felt disenfranchised. I'm like, look, we won. We made them talk about this, we made them fight. That's a victory. It may not be the seminal victory we sought, but it is a valuable one, nonetheless, because if we only measure our success by one ring or one championship, we disregard all of the things that happened in between. And for most of us, we're never e get that thing, so that thing can't be the only metric of our progress.
Now about voter suppression. That became a very impertinent fight for you, and rightfully so, you were directly affected by it. But how pervasive is voter suppression in this country?
It is wildly, remarkably and stubbornly pervasive. Voter suppression is this, can you register and stay on the rolls? Can you cast a ballot? And does your ballot get counted? That suppression anytime the state takes action to impede one of those parts. That is the definition of suppression. Now we are used to in our historical understanding to see suppression as someone physically blocking you with guns or billy clubs or hoses. But voter suppression was also denying women the right to vote until the nineteen twenties. It was denying young people the right to vote until nineteen seventy six. It was denying black people the right to vote. It was denying Native Americans their citizenship in this country until the twentieth century. It is close a precinct in a county that is twenty miles wide when you don't have public transportation. It is telling people that they can only vote if you are a student. If you happen to have a form of ID, you can't get because the laws won't allow you to secure it. I don't have an issue with and people often reduce voter suppression to voter idea, but let me use that as an example. Voter identification has always been the law. The question is not do you have to have ID? It is what ID do you have to have? And is that ID reasonably accessible to the vast majority of the population, or are there rules being put in place to limit that access to exclude certain communities. If you are a disabled person in the United States of America. You face voter suppression in every single election. If you are a person of color, if you are young, if you are poor. There are pediments, and our mission as a democracy should be to remove those impediments. I want you to vote for my party when you get in the booth, but my job is to get you in.
I'm going to ask my girls to what extent they are cognizant of all of this. You know, I don't hear it in there in the conversation enough, and it's making me feel sort of ignorant about that because it's very easy to maintain that ignorance.
Well, it's designed that way. The system is not designed for easy access. Let's remember, at the inception of this nation, only white men who owned land were actually considered voting citizens. Every other group that has gotten access to the right to vote has never actually had a constitutional right to vote. We simply can't be excluded because of who we are, what we look like, where we're from. Part of the success of suppression is to make it so complicated that you just get exhausted thinking about it, to make it seem overwhelming so you don't think you can fight it, or to make it so insidious you think it's your fault. The other side is going to say, well, it's not as bad as they pretend, and these are just common sense rules. Anytime someone starts with its common sense, it's because they want you to get distracted and they want to bring down your temperature. I don't let my temperature come down because someone tells me I don't have the right to be riled. But I'm also not going to be so angry that I lose the ability to think about what comes next.
You are also, I want to just switch to this other, very prolific career, which is your writing. You have always written, you said, and you wrote a number of books, including several under the pen name Selena Montgomery. I'd love to know how you picked that name, but also how did that career come about writing?
I've always loved writing, and I wrote my first novel when I was twelve, called A Diary of Angst. My mother is the only other person who's ever read it. She had it bound for me when I was in my thirties as a Christmas present, just to remind me of just how obnoxious I was as a twelve year old.
Diary of angst come on, like, kosis doesn't even work. It was not even enough genius.
I believe, I believe the word is insufferable. But so when I was in law school, I wanted I was writing a novel based on my ex boyfriend's dissertation. He was a chemical physicist. I'm like one of five people other than his board that read it, and I was like, ooh, he could do all of these really interesting things. He discovered these chemical properties, and I was expounding on what it could what could happen. He was like, oh, can't do any of that. He's like, that's just far fetched. I'm like, you have no imagination. This is why we broke up. It was a bad breakup. So in the book he's actually in prison for the rest of his life. That was my petty revenge. But this goes to your point early about not taking no So I wanted to write a spy novel. I used to I loved espionage. I used to watch James Bond and you know, I mentioned General Hospital, Anna Davaine and Robert Scorpio, and I really wanted to do a spy novel. But women at in the late nineties, publishers did not believe that women wrote or read spy novels, so there were no espionage authors and I was told no, and so I thought, well, if you're not going to publish it as a spy novel, I'll just make my spies fall in love and call it a romance novel. And so I wrote Rules of Engagement as a romance because instead of taking no, I was like, Okay, I'm going to write this book. Someone's going to read it. I just have to give it a name. And when I decided to write Romance, it was the same time I was writing a treatise on the operational dissonance of the earned income tax exemption, which, yeah, nobody cares about that. So you can publish romance under a pseudonym. You cannot publish tax articles under a pseudonym. And no one wanted to read Romance by Alan Greenspan, so I had to come up with a pseudonym. And I was watching an A and E biography of Elizabeth Montgomery at like two in the morning, and I loved her last name, and you know, her evil alter ego I'm bewitched was Serena, her cousin Samon Serena. I was like, I don't like Serena, but I like my l so I became Selena Montgomery, and that's how Selena was born.
I love that, Oh, I love that so much. So in your new book, Rogue Justice, this is the second correct it's the second story that's following the adventures of Avery Keen. Now, how much of yourself is in Avery.
Avery's a lawyer. Avery has a really good memory. Avery's family grapples with drug addiction, which is something that my family has dealt with and is an important conversation for me. I do love chess, and I do like poker and card games. I have never been responsible for Aupreme Court justice in a comatose state, and I have never been the center of international intrigue and pursued by a nemesis. So we diverged there. Although some might say some of my elections have had.
Some elements a nemesis, I would think it falls under that category.
Now I love best about Avery. She has these So Avery solves problems, she uses what she has, she finds others who can add to it. And so she's got this group of friends who are emblematic of friends that I have. And she knows that it's not her job to fix everything, but it's always her job to do something that's great.
I mean, it's a great character, and it seems to me the way you approach your life. And now it has been optioned already the two books, probably right, how much of that, I mean, people don't know this. I have a little bit of an idea of it. But how much of of the process or will you be involved in?
So I'm a producer, I'm actually right now we're going through the development process. So I read the notes when it comes back from the studio. I'm not the writer. The writer is an exceptional young woman. She allows me to interfere, but I'm respectful of the fact that I'm not the screenwriter, not the teleplay writer. But I am the architect of the story in terms of Avery is going to live for a while. She's got more stories to tell, and so part of my job in this process is to both help shape backstory but also to really think through what is her arc look like? And it may diverge from the books, but I just want to make sure that the character on the page and the character on the television screen come from the same person.
I always like to ask our guests this because the show is called now What, and it's about those sort of now what moments that make you stop in your tracks and really say like, oh God, now, how what do I do? Are there any now what moments in your life that stand out?
Most people would assume a now what moment for me would come from not winning an election, but those, while important, you're not entitled to win, and you always have to prepare yourself for not getting the job. The one for me that was more seminole was it happened when I was in college and I broke up with Oh, I broke up, I broke up nothing, he broke up with me, and the rather aggressive insults to me about why we were breaking up, mainly that I was too ambitious and.
That's all about him.
Well, but it's stun because you know, you're eighteen nineteen and the guy you think you've woven all these fantasies around telling you you're not enough. And so I went into a computer lab and did this spreadsheet. And people talk about the spreadsheet because of what's on it, But what always matters to me was that in that moment, instead of buying into his narrative, about who I was. I decided to write a narrative about what I could be, And whether I get all of the things that I am visioned for myself is not the point. Then, Now, what moment for me is the moment I realized I didn't have to be shaped by his sense of my deficits, that I was going to be shaped by my sense of my possibility, and that all of the things I do, whether I get them or not, is not the point. The point is do I give my best effort? Do I try? And to your point about imagination, do I imagine such an extraordinary world that these things could be true?
That was the incomparable Stacy Abrams. If you're looking for a good read, do not miss her latest book, Rogue Justice. As for me, I'm taking a few weeks to wrap up some exciting projects and spend some time with my family, But I'll be back soon with another batch of new episodes, So keep an eye out on your podcast feed, and as always, thank you for listening. Now. What with Burke Shields is a production of iHeartRadio. Our lead producer and wonderful showrunner is Julia Weaver. Additional research and editing by Darby Masters and Abu zafar Our. Executive producer is Christina Everett. The show is mixed by Baheed Fraser.
