Beyond The Abortion Debate, Author Joshua Prager Explores ‘The Family Roe'

As the U.S. Supreme Court recently overturned its 1973 decision, Roe v. Wade, that case that legalized abortion may be cemented even more as the most divisive case in the court’s history.

Joshua Prager’s book, “The Family Roe” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction and received broad acclaim for Prager’s painstaking research into the life of the Roe v. Wade plaintiff — Norma McCorvey in real life and “Jane Roe” to the court — and many people connected to her, including the daughter born to her before abortion was legalized. Prager discovered the story centered on sex and religion as well as gender and class.

Prager has written notable features for The Atlantic, Vanity Fair and The Wall Street Journal, where he was a staff writer. He’s been a Harvard Nieman Fellow and wrote a previous book, “The Echoing Green.” He spoke about his latest book with ReligionUnplugged.com executive editor Paul Glader on the site’s podcast recently. The following transcript has been edited slightly for brevity and clarity.

Paul Glader: So, Joshua, before we talk about your book, I feel like we need to acknowledge the context of this week (as leaks surfaced that Roe would be struck down). And I'm curious what your life has been like, the kind of questions you've been hearing and fielding, and the odd dynamic of this book coming out during this time (of abortion rights being curtailed).

Joshua Prager: Yeah. You know, it's a very strange thing, the timing of my book, and this week, and this year. I worked on this book for 11 years. When I started on it, Obama was in his second year in office and Roe seemed nice and secure. When Trump was then elected, I didn't think it was going to be overturned. But I knew that abortion was going to be at the forefront. And then when Justice Ginsburg died, I actually knew where we would end up. It just seemed, my goodness, he now has three justices. And you know, this is actually not a huge surprise to me. And in fact, during oral arguments in the Dobbs case a bunch of months ago, I just sort of listened to two people in particular — Justice Cavanaugh and Justice Barrett — and it was pretty clear from what they were saying that they were going to overturn Roe if they have the opportunity.

So for me personally, as someone who's just paid very close attention to it, this doesn't come as a shock. And yet, of course, it does. You know, I'm 51 years old. I never thought in my life that we would be here. Setting aside my own feelings — being a journalist and an author, and working on something for so long, and having it come out at exactly the time it came out in September, obviously, but now having it be there for people at exactly the time when I think it's important to separate fact from fiction — it also actually feels like a great opportunity for me to speak openly and directly to the issues at hand. There's an enormous amount of misinformation that is, frankly, put forward by both sides. And I think what's turned out to be my role — even though my book is very much about people, and that's how I've always looked at things, through people rather than politics. What I keep being asked to do is to provide sort of an honest recapitulation of how we got here and looking back at the last half-century.

And so that's what I've been doing and providing. It's been very gratifying and surprising because people on both sides of the issue — evangelical leaders to Linda Greenhouse at The New York Times — have given my book very good reviews. And I think it's because they see that it really is honest. I didn't write this book as an activist. I wrote it as a journalist. And so that has been very gratifying. Just so you know, in terms of my fairness, it begins even with just what to call both sides. I use “pro-life” and “pro-choice,” whereas other people don't do that.

Glader: Yeah, I think its fairness, as you called it, is just remarkable. And I've heard from people on both sides who said the exact same thing that you're hearing. This book is a really good case study on how to do deep-dive reporting that is intellectually honest and fair. What was the spark, where you realized, “Hey, this is a great story that hasn't been told. I want to do it.” Did you realize it was going to take 10 years?

Prager: I want to just say one thing about fairness. You know, it's not even something I aspire to. It's just sort of a natural outgrowth of what I think is the most important role for a journalist, and it's to write about people with empathy. I really tried to get to know these people. And so I think fairness is sort of a byproduct of writing about people with empathy.

But in terms of how I got into it, I was in France 12 years ago now. I was living there for a year reading an article in The New Yorker by Margaret Talbot about gay marriage. It was a very good article, and it mentioned in passing that some plaintiffs are not great for the causes they represent. In this case, it mentioned Norma McCorvey, who was Jane Roe, because she famously switched sides from pro-choice to pro-life. And then it mentioned that — again in passing — that she'd actually not had the abortion she sought because  a case takes longer than the gestation of a baby, and this big lightbulb went off in my head. I've written a lot about secrets and secrecy, and people connected to history. And I said, “Oh, my goodness! That means someone — somewhere, there is a human being whose conception begat Roe v. Wade, and I just read that this child had been placed for adoption. And I just was sure that somehow he or she would have known who they were, who they had been born to — the fact that they were, as the pro-life called them, “the Roe baby.”

And so I wanted to find that person. I had that sort of epiphany. It was in January or February of 2010. And I reached out to Norma. And she basically told me to screw off unless I was going to pay her. I said I'm not allowed to pay people for the stories I write. And that was that. I started to learn about her. And I then reached out to a woman who had been her partner. Norma was gay, with a partner for many years, a woman named Connie Gonzalez. And Norma had left her after Connie had a stroke only the year before. And I then went to visit Connie.

On my second trip to Connie in January of 2011, she said something amazing to me, the kind of thing that every journalist hopes to hear. I was there with her and her caretaker, her niece. And she said to me, “This is the home I lived in with Norma for many years, the home is about to be foreclosed on, and Norma's private papers are in the garage. They're about to be thrown out.” And I said, “Oh my goodness! Do not throw those out! Can I please have them?” And so we piled thousands of papers into garbage bags, and I put them into the trunk of my rental car. And that night when I went through it, at 3 a.m., I found what I was looking for. In one interview, Norma had mentioned the date of birth of her youngest child, the Roe baby. And it was literally one more month until I found who she was.

At that point, I did not reach out to her directly — the daughter, the Roe baby — because I said to myself, if she doesn't know who she is, that would upend her life unfairly. So I reached out to the woman who raised her, to her mother. And she said, “You know what, thank you for reaching out to me.” And she said, “We do know about Norma.” And she said, “My daughter does not wish to speak.” And the daughter then told me that.

So what I then did was I reached out to find her sisters, the other children, her half-sisters. Norma, though she was gay, had occasional relationships with men, the other children Jane Roe had given birth to. It was about one more year before I found them and brought them together. They'd always been looking for each other. At that point, I got back in touch with Shelly, the Roe baby, and said, “You know what, just so you know, I found your sister's here or there. Here's their information.” And she then said, “You know what? I would like to participate in your project.” Well, that was the very beginning. It then grew from the children to Norma McCorvey, to Roe v. Wade, to the whole of abortion in America. And by that time, I was so deep into it that I just said, you know, this is a big story. I need to tell it right. And it took me a decade.

Glader: I was curious how the literary agent and editor were hanging in during that process of the book evolving? Where they OK with it?

Prager: I'll tell you what happened. I had initially thought I would just be writing an article about finding the Roe baby. So I didn't even approach an editor yet. And so by the time I did approach an editor, I sold the book in 2014, after having written a 100-page proposal. By then, I knew what I was proposing. And what I was proposing was really looking at the whole of abortion in America. And I can tell you, in order to do so, Jane Roe was this incredible window into abortion in America. I had her private papers. She eventually agreed to participate with me and came to be a very active participant and eager participant.

And I surrounded Norma and her daughters with three other central characters who enabled me to tell this much bigger story. One was a leader on the pro-choice side, a doctor named Curtis Boyd. Everyone was from Texas. My whole book was based in Texas, which obviously turned out to be perfect for what's going on now (with Texas leading a roll back of abortion rights). He was a doctor from a very religious family in Texas, who started providing abortions pre-Roe, and then post-Roe he becomes the largest provider of third-trimester abortions in America after his friend, Dr. Tiller's, murder. And he's a remarkable window into the world of the pro-choice. On the pro-life side, I chose someone named Dr. Mildred Jefferson, the first Black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School, who then becomes the architect of the pro-life movement. No one knew anything about these people. She was a hoarder. I found an FBI file. People looked at her on the pro-life side as sort of a saint who had left the heights of medicine to go to cater to the unborn, as they said. But really the reason she did that was that she had suffered intense racism and misogyny and was not able to practice surgery if she wished to. And then the last person was Linda Coffee, a remarkable character, the lawyer who first filed Roe and represented Jane Roe. No one knew anything about her because her co-counsel, Sarah Weddington, had taken all the credit. But it was really Linda who was the matriarch of this case. And I found her. She was living in a home without heat, living on food stamps in East Texas. Remarkable people.

And so these people, seven people — Norma, her three daughters, and the three people around them — enabled me to tell this larger story. The thing with Norma was, the very same things that made her life so complicated also made abortion so difficult. It's basically this seeming irreconcilability of sex and religion, seeing sex as something illicit and dangerous and wrong and sinful. She was from a very religious home. This was the larger story I was telling.

Glader: You had several scoops or new revelations in the book, which you just described, but the one about Shelly and the identity of Baby Roe, was that the biggest scoop? And the fact that you tracked all these family members down?

Prager: Yeah, I would say in terms of your first question, almost no one, myself included, realized that there was a Roe baby. She was a sort of point of fascination for some on the pro-life side, because they saw her or him — they didn't know where the child was — as the sort of living incarnation, the argument against abortion. They could say, “Hmm, you know, if Roe had been law back then, you would have murdered this human being.” (That’s a) very powerful thing to say. But aside from them, no one really realized this — even I spoke to the clerks on the justices who wrote Roe on the Supreme Court, and they didn't realize there was a Roe baby. It's sort of a simple thing when you think about it. Hey, of course, there was one because a case takes longer than a pregnancy. But until I sort of came across that mention and had that idea and went to look for it, I don't think people realized this. And she was a very powerful way into this story. So I do think that was the biggest scoop, you know, to answer your question — it got a lot of attention.

But there were a lot of scoops along the way. Basically, Roe is by far the most well-known case the Supreme Court has ever heard. I quote a constitutional scholar saying that Roe is undoubtedly the best-known case. They've had like 30,000 cases in 200-plus years. But for all of its renown, and all of its divisiveness, nobody knew anything about the central characters in the case. And that, to me, was crazy. And when I realized that, I said, “Wait a minute, I need to go find these people, humanize something that affects a majority of our country, because there have been 50 or 60 million abortions performed since Roe. And, obviously, it's not just the woman or girl who has one. It's also her partner and her family. We're all connected in some ways to someone who had an abortion, whether we know it or not. It's so stigmatized to talk about it. But to realize that I can sort of humanize the story and can bring the people behind it to life? That was a very exciting revelation for me. I'd like to think it's actually not very complicated reading. It's a real narrative. And you know, Norma is this central focus. And through her life, little by little, you just start following the story as it becomes bigger and bigger and bigger.

Glader: Talk for a second about Norma as a character. And as we learned in the book, it looks like there was a film made about her? And she wrote at least one book? And so why was she ripe for a new profile and deep dive?

Prager: Yeah, it's a great question. You know, she's the most complicated person I've ever written about. I haven't said that before. But I realize it's true. Because in addition to everything else, how complicated her life was, she was a compulsive liar. So the two books that she wrote or, you know, had ghostwritten for her on the pro-choice side and on the pro-life side, are complete and utter fiction. Everything she says is nonsense. She basically was trying to come up with a story that befitted her famous pseudonym in some dramatic story. So to give you examples, I mean, she says that she was raped four different times. She says her child was kidnapped. She says she was beaten. She says, over and over again (that) she was raped by a nun (in Catholic school). Well, the truth is that she had a consensual experience with a woman who was going to become a nun. She says her mother kidnapped her child from her. The truth was she was so desperate not to mother this child that she begged her mother to adopt the child. She says that when she wanted to have an abortion, she went to a clinic. And it had just been shuttered, and it “reeked to death,” and there was dried blood on the floor. The truth was that she found the clinic, but she simply couldn't afford it. It was $500. And she didn't have that money. She couldn't afford to fly to California for an abortion either, where abortion was legal at the time. And in all of these things she was reimagining herself, not as a sinner, as someone who wanted to have an abortion, someone who had sex with a woman, but as a victim. And that went back again to her childhood.

Why was she so compelling? Well, aside from the fact that her story is unbelievably dramatic — I found out she was a prostitute; she was a drug dealer; she was, you know, all of these dramatic things. But then sort of banal day to day, things were so moving and poignant: a person overwhelmed by life who was raised in this incredibly difficult home who had these children and gave them up, relinquished them to adoption, and then basically just was desperate for abortion and couldn't have one. And using her documents that I found, going back and finding hundreds of people to interview to bring her past to life and corroborate everything, she then helped me herself. And she was this unbelievable sort of remarkable window into this enormous national problem that we have, this war. And because she had switched sides, her life involved the leaders on both sides. It's unbelievable. And so I was able to sort of hold both sides to account and tell the story honestly. So she was a remarkable person for me to find. I was with her for four years, 2013 to 2017, with her when she actually died. And her family, the children, took me into their lives. And it was a remarkable experience for me.

Glader: You mentioned earlier the role of religion. And since this podcast is about religion, maybe talk a little bit more about her religious journeys, and forays, what some readers will discover?

Prager: Her whole family was defined by these things: sex and religion. So when I discovered Norma and had this idea, I said, “Well, we need to understand where she comes from.” So I started looking back in her life and her previous generations and her family. And I showed that Norma was the third consecutive woman, third consecutive generation in her family, to be a woman who at age 17 has an unwanted pregnancy. And because they were from very religious families — first Catholic then Pentecostal, then Jehovah's Witness — you see what an unwanted pregnancy in these families does, what they did to these women.

So just as we go back one generation, Norma's mother, Mary, is 17 years old, gets pregnant. And this was not even known by most of Norma's family. And she lives in rural Louisiana. And her family is so upset that they make her leave the town. She has to go to the big city of Baton Rouge, give birth to the child. Then they take the child from her and pretend that that child was theirs. And she has to go back to her little house across the river from where they live and pretend that this child is her niece, not her daughter. Well, that has devastating consequences for Mary. She becomes an alcoholic. She ends up getting married and has endless sorts of partners. The home is a broken home, the home that Norma is being raised in. And then, you know, they become Jehovah's Witnesses for a time. Norma’s father is hoping that this will help the mother, Norma’s mother, repent in many ways, but it doesn't work out that way. And Norma is in this very depressing home.

She then struggles, and chafes against all the rules of being a Jehovah's Witness. She renounces God when she's a kid. She's sent to a home for “delinquent children.” She's caught having a sexual encounter with a young girl. You know, she herself was a young girl — they were both like 12-13. And then she ends up going to Catholic school. She gets married to a man when she's 16. Just everything starts going wrong. And it really starts three generations back with the incompatibility, again, of sex and religion. At the same time, religion was a great comfort for Norma. She ends up finding her way. First, she was born again in 1995. She's born again through an evangelical minister. She then becomes a Catholic. She's comforted by the patron saint. She's comforted by the rosary beads and things like that. But the strictures of religion are very hard for her. And eventually, when she becomes a born-again Christian, not only is she embraced by the pro-life movement, but she's made to renounce her homosexuality. That's an incredibly difficult thing for her. Sex and religion really were the — I think I describe the two like a double helix, the helical strands of her life. And I think that same thing can be said for abortion in America.

Glader: How many times did she switch (in faith and politics)? And where did she end up at the end of her life? And what's your take on her as a figure who is undulating between these two groups?

Prager: So she gets pregnant in 1969, becomes the plaintiff 1970, case is decided 1973. And she doesn't have anything to do with anyone involved in the abortion debate on either side until 1981. She goes to a gathering of pro-choice women in Dallas. She ends up really becoming an advocate or wanting to become an advocate in the late 1980s. Gloria Allred, the celebrity lawyer, brings her to California, and from 1989 to 1994 she sort of fights on the pro-choice side. But they really marginalized her. They didn't give her a seat at the table. She becomes a born-again Christian in 1995, baptized by Flip Benham. And he trots her out as really a trophy of the pro-life movement. And she just sort of adopts what he's saying. “Abortion is murder,” etc. She then becomes a Catholic in 1998. And it's about five years after that that she starts to resist being a puppet really of either side. And she ends up dying in 2017, having spent the last almost decade of her life kind of removed from the issue, really having pushed these people away because she was sick of being used.

You know, despite the fact that when she was a pro-choice advocate and a pro-life advocate, despite the fact that she parroted the leaders on both sides — so when she's pro-choice, she's saying abortion ought to be legal for viability; on the other side, abortion is murder from conception — she actually had a very strong personal opinion. She knew where she stood. And I can tell you what's remarkable about her: Not only did she represent the majority of Americans, as I say, in terms of this seeming incompatibility of sex and religion that I think is really the foundation of the root of our problems with abortion in this country, but she also came to a similar conclusion.

So a great majority of Americans — the enormous majoritarian middle ground is that people feel abortion ought to be legal but only through the first trimester of pregnancy. Support for abortion dwindles by each trimester, but there's an overwhelming percentage of support. It's in the 60s, people who feel that abortion ought to be legal through the first trimester. And this was exactly what Norma herself thought, and I know this because she said it at three remarkable times in her life. The first time she says it publicly is during the first interview she ever gives, a few days after the Roe ruling in 1973. She was interviewed by a little Baptist newsletter. As an aside, it's remarkable. Linda Coffee, the lawyer who represented her, was a religious Baptist. Bu, back then, the Southern Baptist Convention was pro-choice. No one realizes that, so she was able to be at home in her church even while she was, you know, helping to legalize abortion. Well, Norma says that she feels strongly that abortion ought to be legal but only through the first trimester. Then, after she becomes born again, she's on “Nightline” with Ted Koppel, and to the horror of all of her new friends in the Operation Rescue side, she says the same thing on national TV. She says, yes, I'm now a member of Operation Rescue, but I believe abortion ought to be legal through the first trimester. All of her colleagues say, “Oh, she's a baby Christian. She's not super comfortable. She doesn't know what she's saying.” But she knew exactly what she was saying. And then, of course, she's giving talks and is paid to give talks. And she stopped doing that. And then the last time she says (that), it’s over and again with me at the end of her life, when I was with her in the hospital, literally leading right up to her death. And she felt very strongly about this. She said, “Yes, I don't feel that abortion ought to be a means of birth control,” but she felt that abortion (should be) legal through the first trimester. And, in fact, that is often the law in countries in Western Europe, for example, where the cut off is much earlier than it is here in this country with Roe.

Glader: Back to the present. Obviously, we have this week, a leaked opinion from Justice Alito, that suggests that the Supreme Court is going to overturn Roe v. Wade. As you noted, for 50 years this has kind of defined those of us in Generation X. This case, more than any other, has kind of defined our lifetime in terms of law and culture shift. So if Roe is overturned, how does it change, Roe’s legacy in our minds?

Prager: You know, there's an argument among people on both sides of this issue about whether Roe is to blame for the situation we find ourselves in. Did it poison our politics as so many people contend on the conservative side? Well, it's complicated. The people who say that it's Roe's fault can point to the fact that pre-Roe — to give one example — Ronald Reagan, who was the pro-choice governor of California at that time, signs (a) law liberalizing abortion, and it has broad bipartisan support, his law. People on the other side can say, hey, it started to get politicized, and Republicanized opposition to abortion pre-Roe: Patrick Buchanan, who was an adviser to Nixon, tells Nixon in 1971 that you have a policy right now where abortion is legal in military hospitals; you need to sort of bite your lip and look into the camera and say that you've been giving it thought and you've had a change of heart. And the reason you wanted him to do that was there were votes to be won among left-leaning Catholics. So he does that. So it is true, absolutely true, that Roe galvanized those who are opposed to it, and it did inflame this issue, but also the seeds were planted pre-Roe.

But, anyway, I mentioned all that, because it now is like you said, the issue of our generation. It’s the thing that politicians — most have to come out on one side or another. It determines which justices are picked to go to the Supreme Court. It has really poisoned our politics. It's become an enormous issue. And it's the tail wagging the dog. It's a big problem. And it was, you know, the overwhelming goal of those opposed to Roe to overturn it. And for 50 years, they have fought in a million ways to chip away at it at. First they wanted to overturn it in one fell swoop: There was an idea to introduce something called a “Personhood Amendment,” which would recognize a fetus as a human being, which would then make, of course, abortion illegal. That didn't work. And so, little by little, they chipped away at in a million different ways. And now because really of Donald Trump and his greatest or his most horrible legacy, depending on how you look at it, is our Supreme Court. He appointed three justices. It was obviously the debacle with the Merrick Garland situation and then when Justice Ginsburg died, he had this third pick. It was simply a numbers game. And unfortunately, you know, you only need five justices to be able to change a law. And that is exactly what has happened here. But what is going to happen now is that the law, the issue of abortion is going to go back to each state for that state to decide for themselves.

But if people think that this is now going to be, you know, somehow less fraught in our country, they're crazy. Yeah, as polarized as we are, now, it's going to become insane. And as is always the case, which is so sad, it is the poor, and often women of color, who are going to not have their reproductive rights. People who had money just back in pre-Roe, they were able to get an abortion — go to California, go to Mexico, go to some private clinic. People who don't have money won't have that luxury, and it's going to become a truly, truly divided country.

Glader: Do you think a reversal of Roe will last very long at the federal level? And if it does, you mentioned things will get ugly, but I'm wondering like, blue states become bluer or red states become redder? I wonder what we start to see, what ugliness looks like at the state level. Will people start moving to various states where we see huge tectonic geographic shifts?

Prager: I think this is now going to remain the law. It's very complicated to change things on a legislative level — you know, one side does it, the other side will do it. I don't see that happening. I think there will be efforts to try. What I do think will happen is what you said, blue states becoming bluer or red states becoming redder. You already have, in effect, what they call these trigger laws: You're going to see that the moment Roe is overturned, a dozen states saying that abortion is illegal from the point of conception, no exceptions for rape, incest — I mean, truly extreme. It's the states. It's going to be almost exactly divided evenly, half and half. Now, what's going to happen is, you're going to have states where abortion is legal that are going to be setting up clinics, let's say right on a border next to another state. But there are enormous efforts already underway by those who oppose Roe, to make it illegal — as crazy as this sounds — for a woman to leave her state to go get an abortion in another state. There are efforts underway to make it illegal for a woman to get pills to have a medical abortion, you know, up until 10 weeks of pregnancy. Women are going to end up being prosecuted. It's going to be crazy. And it’s going to become really divided. The divisions that are now in place are going to only deepen. I'm very pessimistic about this.

You know, abortion is the same everywhere in the world, for all of your listeners in different countries. Women have abortions there too. But it's only in our country that it has truly created a civil war. And there are reasons for that. There are these American traditions of feminism and individualism. And of course, again, to get back to it, the conservitizing of sex and the sort of evangelicalism here that we have. Everything has become politicized, and I don't know how it ends. It's a very depressing situation. And, you know, just to say one thing, people now just say, oh, religion opposes abortion. Well, one of the things I pointed out in my book is actually it wasn't always that way, even with the Catholic Church. It was only 1917 that the Catholic Church said that all abortion, you know that any woman having an abortion is excommunicated, that abortion is completely forbidden from conception. For all of the previous 700 years, there was a division the church recognized between abortions pre- and post-quickening point, at roughly 16-17 weeks, when you can start to feel the fetus moving. I mentioned that because we think everything now is just sort of the way it's always been. But, no, the problems in our country were the result of choices and decisions that human beings made. They seized upon this issue for their own gain. And now we are paying a deep price.

Glader: My last question about the book is how are Norma's three children doing and other key characters since your book has come out? And how are the humans that we learn about? How are they doing?

Prager: Just as Roe galvanized those opposed to it, overturning Roe is going to galvanize those who believe in a right to choose. So that is an important thing. And in some ways, I think the pro-life don't know what's coming. They might not care. But it's going to be seismic, the reaction to this.

In terms of the people in the book, Norma died in 2017. There were three children. Shelley, the Roe baby, went on television on CBS. She talked about how she was glad to no longer be carrying this secret. And she has become close with one of her two sisters, with Janet, the middle child. She was very clear in that interview that she does not want to be used as a pawn by either side. All three of the daughters were pro-choice to a point. They've had very difficult lives. They had difficult genetic inheritances from their mother. And it's difficult also to be born to Norma McCorvey, to Jane Roe. But I believe that the book for her, in particular, was very good to sort of get this out. Melissa, the oldest one, is the only one of the daughters who really wishes to sort of have her voice heard. She's the only one who knew Norma, and she's doing interviews. She also feels like this is her story too. She has a lot to say. And so, for example, all those papers that I found, they ended up at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard. And she asked me to have copies made first so she can have them. She sees this as not only a national issue but as her own personal story.

Curtis Boyd, the abortion provider — I mean, my God, he's sort of at the heart of the storm. His clinic in Texas is going to be shuttered, but he still has his clinic in New Mexico. And I think he will remain really one of the fathers of the pro-choice movement. The most moving sort of thing for me is looking at Linda Coffee. This is a woman who was a true recluse. She hadn't been interviewed in a generation when I found her. And she's had a difficult life. She's very poor, and history forgot her. And in the last week, she has given various interviews. She wrote an article for The New Republic. She has been taken out to dinner. She has been seen. And I find that very moving, that she's able to take pride in what she sees as the great achievement of her life.

Glader: Now, are you working on any new projects you want to talk about?

Prager: Yeah, so I'll tell you, this book so exhausted me. The people in it were so difficult to write about. The issue is so complicated and fraught. I said to my wife, like, I am never doing this again. It killed me. Of course, though, I'm a journalist — I love my job. And in recent weeks, I've been thinking about what else I might do. And I'll tell you three things. So first, I wrote an article that I've been wanting to write since 1999. It’s connected to affirmative action. The Supreme Court will be probably getting rid of that. There's a case that has to do with affirmative action and Harvard. And I found a beautiful story that has to do with affirmative action of Harvard Law School during World War II, and I'm telling that story. That's one thing. The second thing is, I have been thinking about subjects for my next book. And I am finding myself drawn despite myself to another very complicated subject, with a fascinating protagonist I won't mention right now. But that has to do with genes and race. And then the last thing is, I'm doing something I never do, which is writing about myself. I am a journalist who feels very strongly that journalists and authors insinuate themselves unnecessarily into their work. I'm only in this book when I have to be, where it would be disingenuous for me not to be — like when I bring the daughters together, for example. But there's a tiny little book that I wrote years ago that was just an e-book that has to do with disability and identity. I was in a bad bus accident years ago. So I walk with a cane, and I'm adding to that little book, a few chapters, and it's going to come out I think next year.

Glader: Well, wonderful to hear and Godspeed on all those projects. We look forward to reading those as well.

Prager: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.