In this episode, host Kate Carpenter interviews historian Dr. Heather Ann Thompson.
Heather is the author of three books. The first was Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City, which was first published in 2002. Her second book, published in 2016, was the astonishing Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. Blood in the Water won far more honors than I can list, most notably the Pulitzer Prize in History. And her newest book, which came out last week, is Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage. It’s already drawing lots of well-deserved praise, and in this episode we’ll talk more about how Heather learned to bring gripping accounts of historical events to life. In case that wasn’t enough, Heather is a professor at the University of Michigan, the co-editor of two books series, and regularly writes for public outlets. She served as the consultant for the Academy Award-nominated documentary ATTICA, and is a co-founder of History Studio, a consulting firm that aims to connect historians and the entertainment industry. Honestly, if I kept telling you all the cool things she has done we would never get to the interview, but you can see why I’ve been eager to learn more about her work. You’re going to love hearing about it too.
Mentioned in this episode:
- Heather Ann Thompson, Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage
- Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy
- Heather Ann Thompson, Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City
- Evernote
- The Fear and Fury audiobook, narrated by Erin Bennett
- Heather Ann Thompson, “How the Bernie Goetz Shootings Explain the Trump Era,” The Atlantic, January 26, 2026
- Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
- Elliot Williams, Five Bullets: The Story of Bernie Goetz, New York’s Explosive ’80s, and the Subway Vigilante Trial That Divided the Nation
- Isabelle Allende
- Arundhati Roy
- W. E. B. DuBois
- Kimberlé Crenshaw
- Elizabeth Hinton
- LaShawn Harris, Tell Her Story: Eleanor Bumpurs & the Police Killing That Galvanized New York City
- Bench Ansfield, Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City
- Jonathan Mahler, The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990
Note that bookshop.org links are affiliate links that generate a small commission to support the show if you purchase books using these links.
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Transcript:
Kate Carpenter 0:01
Hey there. Welcome back to Drafting the Past. I'm Kate carpenter. I have been a fan of today's guest for a decade, and she has been on my list of potential podcast guests since day one. So when I saw that she had a new book about to come out, I reached out to see if she might be up for joining me as a guest, and I did a little happy dance when she said yes. Today I'm thrilled to host historian Dr. Heather Ann Thompson.
Heather Ann Thompson 0:25
So glad to be here.
Kate Carpenter 0:27
Heather is the author of three books. The first was Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City, which was first published in 2002. Her second book, published in 2016, was the astonishing Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. Blood in the Water won far more honors than I can list, most notably the Pulitzer Prize in History. And her newest book, which came out last week, is Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage. It’s already drawing lots of well-deserved praise, and in this episode we’ll talk more about how Heather learned to bring gripping accounts of historical events to life. In case that wasn’t enough, Heather is a professor at the University of Michigan, the co-editor of two books series, and regularly writes for public outlets. She served as the consultant for the Academy Award-nominated documentary ATTICA, and is a co-founder of History Studio, a consulting firm that aims to connect historians and the entertainment industry. Honestly, if I kept telling you all the cool things she has done we would never get to the interview, but you can see why I’ve been eager to learn more about her work. You’re going to love hearing about it too. Here’s my conversation with Dr. Heather Ann Thompson.
Heather Ann Thompson 1:46
I was actually before anything, I guess, a graduate student in history. And the funny thing is that we, I don't think, are trained to think about ourselves as writers per se. We are researchers and we are investigators in the into the past. But the whole thing about writing and being a writer, I don't think I actually thought about writing as its own thing until much, much later, and certainly by the time I was knee deep and working on a book on the Attica uprising, I had to think about writing a lot because I wanted to not just tell the past, or not just recover the past, but to write a book that I hoped my own family would read. My grandparents would read, the people in the most random place in America might read, which meant really thinking about writing and how do we tell a story in such a way that people might really take themselves there or feel that they're there? And so then I just really started to read again, a lot, you know, read novels, read, think about writing as a craft, which, again, like I said, it's kind of sort of an interesting thing that we we weren't really thinking about that as much in the way I was trained.
Kate Carpenter 3:04
That's amazing to me, because you're such a powerful writer. Did you really, I mean, did you just teach yourself by going back to read things? What was your approach?
Heather Ann Thompson 3:13
A funny story is that when I wanted to write on Attica, I did a book proposal, and I can remember back then the book agent said, you know, this is a really interesting story, but you know, I just need more. Like, tell me, one of the key characters is the guy who had the moniker Big Black. And she said, You know, I need to know more about him. You know, tell me, like, what does he look like? What does he sound like? And I just froze and I said, Well, I don't know. Because, of course, as a historian, I'm like, I don't have a footnote on that. I don't have an archival source on that. And finally, she just said, have you seen a picture of him? Have you heard him talk on any video? And I thought, Yes. And she said, then just describe it. So it wasn't so much, even that I I couldn't imagine doing it. It was, it never had occurred to me that I had the license to do it, or that that description mattered as much as it did. So in that sense, you know, yeah, I guess it was sort of, it was more just like realizing it was, it was a possibility to do. And then, of course, you know, again, reading and reading and and realizing things like really good writers, they don't, they don't use a lot of adjectives. They evoke things, right? You don't know that something was terrible because you're told it's terrible. You just know it's terrible from the way that it's described. That was much harder for me to think about how, how they did that, or how they pulled that off.
Kate Carpenter 4:45
Okay. Well, I want to start with some nosy questions about your writing process. When and where do you like to do your writing?
Heather Ann Thompson 4:52
Oh, my goodness. Well, that too has evolved. When I was, you know, first really getting into this, now more than 15 years ago, I still had young kids at home, and so my writing was always super late at night, and in coffee shops were, actually, weirdly in the lobbies of hotels, because they had lots of hustle and bustle, and it felt safe and it felt like a place to go, where I could, you know, write in a corner somewhere. And then, you know, more recently, now that my kids are out of the house, I, you know, I just tend to hunker down during the day. And I'm definitely someone that once I start writing, I need just uninterrupted time to just bang, bang out pages. My husband, for example, is really good at writing that perfect paragraph and then being able to walk away and make lunch and do something else or this-- not for me. It's like in the zone or not in the zone.
Kate Carpenter 5:50
How do you like to organize your research?
Heather Ann Thompson 5:52
That, too, has really changed. You know, when I was first starting off, I would do all of the research for a book, and a lot of that, I mean, really, back in the day, was on note cards for every source, and then, and then it was on the computer in every source. And then I would start the writing. For this last book that I did, I did it quite differently, actually. I first of all, relied on technology a lot more. I use a program called Evernote to set up notebooks and really organized my research on it, and I used, I was able to scan more documents so I could actually search them in a way that was just not possible before. That was really helpful. But mostly I did the research differently. I did research for very discrete chapters in the book first and then, while it was fresh and felt really pressing and kind of poignant to me, I would, I would draft that chapter. And then, you know, of course, at the end, it all had to be torn apart and put back together again. But it was, rather than waiting for everything to be researched. And I found that really helpful, because sometimes I'll be honest, you know, you do all the research, and then you look back and you could overwhelm yourself, like, how in the world can I make sense of this at this point? So I think from now on, I'm gonna, I'm gonna try this approach.
Kate Carpenter 7:11
How did you figure out which chapters then you were going to focus on first?
Heather Ann Thompson 7:15
So that's another interesting thing. I know that some people, their structure of the book unfolds more as it goes. And I have to say I am someone that just needs more organization than that. So I usually will start with, I have to, I have to know enough about it to imagine how, how many chapters do we need to really get there? What would those chapters try, what would they have to do to tell the story? So I always begin with a really pretty clear framework. But of course, again, that just evolves. So I think in this book there might have originally, sort of, I was thinking about it as six chapters, and I kind of thought I knew what each of those were about. And then ultimately, you know, it became whatever it is, 50 chapters because I decided to bring it up and make it smaller, but it at least gives me a blueprint to get started with. I can't just start writing blind or, God help us all, where we would end up.
Kate Carpenter 8:16
What does the revision process look like for you? How do you tackle that?
Heather Ann Thompson 8:19
God, brutal, brutal. You know, I think that most, most writers, I mean, some people are just so incredibly gifted that they can just write the draft as the draft and then and they pretty much are ready to go to press. For me, that is not at all the case. I rely heavily on, you know, the feedback and suggestions of my editors and and, you know, frankly, my husband, who's also historian, and I really need the other's eyes on it to tell me what's working, what's not working. And I also am someone who is very thick in my writing. You know, I, I tend to write really long sentences, and once I get going with an idea, it just kind of goes and goes and goes. And so it's always helpful for me to have someone come back and say, okay, just, you know, take a breath here, you know, break it up a little bit. And also to, you know, give me ideas on how to structure it. You know, I in this book, I wanted very much to give kind of dense history that I did, but I didn't want it to feel so weighty. And I also was telling a narrative story. So I would get advice on, you know, well, should we go back and forth between the, you know, more personal narrative and the deep dive into the Reagan '80s, or should we lay out the history first? And those editors are God sends when they give your work attention, because they are really committed, as you are, to making it come through the way you hope that it will.
Kate Carpenter 9:50
Do you like to start getting that feedback earlier in the process? Or do you wait till you have a full draft?
Heather Ann Thompson 9:55
I need a full draft, to be honest, and in part, it's because I, when I get the feedback, it's like, aah! I don't want to quite be derailed yet, while I'm still trying to figure out what the story is. But once I think I know what the draft is and what the story is, then it's the perfect time to go back and pull it apart and put it back together again.
Kate Carpenter 10:20
You know, both this book and Blood in the Water are such vivid stories. You know, they really bring the history to life for the readers. How does that affect how you research? Do you, do you go looking for details that will bring things to life?
Heather Ann Thompson 10:34
The thing that both of those books share is, for me, it was alarming that in both of those stories, the only thing we knew about those events was coming from what I suspected, just knowing everything else I knew about these times in history, was distorted, you know, was from the from the side of people either trying to cover up what had happened or distort what had happened, or certainly to justify the violence that they had visited on the you know, really the who become the protagonist in both of these books. And so the hardest part in both cases was to try to dig and figure out what was the real story like? Where are the stories of the people we don't know anything about, that we haven't heard from, what actually happened. And I say that in a bit with, you know, "what actually happened" in a bit of quotation marks, because, you know, it isn't clear what actually happened so often. And so for me, it does inform the research, because I'm always going back to that time period and saying, What possible source could there be out there that might shine light on this and, you know, everything from the mundane, like, you know, if somebody was in a union, are there union records of that event to, you know, might there be an autopsy report that would shine some light on it too. In the case of this book, you know, I had, I came across these applications of the victims of this shooting to the crime victims board in New York City, and the details in there, or the probation report of the shooter, Bernie Goetz. And so it's really just who's got the copy, who has something that might be related to it, and then trying to piece it back together. What I often don't do that surprises people is rely heavily on interviews with people as a journalist might, and that's actually quite deliberate. I, you know, memory is a funny thing, and unfortunately, also the victors in stories want to talk about it, and those most damaged by the stories either can't because they're no longer with us, or they're so scarred and traumatized by the story that they they won't or can't. So I I tend to try to just go back to the beginning and look at what people said at the time, or what what the sources at the time revealed. In the case of Attica, that was difficult because all the sources were sealed, that mattered. In this case, there was more accessibility, but again, only of certain perspectives. So it's the digging, you know, that's the investigative reportage part of it, I would say.
Kate Carpenter 13:22
Are you also, I mean, are you making notes about the types of details that are going to set a scene, in terms of, like, lighting, clothing, all the, you know, all those sorts of small things that historians don't always remember?
Heather Ann Thompson 13:34
Yeah, so it-- Well that, you know, that is also where, true confessions, I mean, you know, Google is very helpful. Like, what, you know, what day of the week was, December 22, 1984, or what was the weather like? And I definitely dig into those details, because, again, I think that matters. You know, was it, was there a snowstorm the day before? Well, it turns out on the day of the shooting, it was unseasonably warm. And to me that mattered not just as scene setting, but, you know, to explain why people were wearing what they were wearing. They weren't bundled up. They were, you know, wearing lighter jackets. You know, which, of course, then is relevant to, do you see a gun? Do you not see a gun? You know, these kinds of things. And so it is definitely also looking for scene setting. But the funny thing is, like when I came across all the horrible pieces of hate mail sent to the teenage victims of the shooting, it just, so they so clearly set the scene in ways that you just know is there, but you have to think about how to present it without being additionally or gratuitously, I should say, violent or offensive. I mean the racist language in so much of what I was writing about. I had to think hard about like, how do I how do I evoke that? How do I reproduce the horror of it without reproducing it, and that, you know, takes a lot of drafts and thought. And there was one particular moment where the National Inquirer, which people of a certain age will remember, was like the big national tabloid at the time, had paid these victims, these teenage victims to pose for pictures and to do a story for them. And these are very poor kids, and for $300 I think between them, I believe, they agreed to do this photo shoot and this, this interview for this tabloid, which, of course, predictably, was distorted and made them look horrible. But part of the pictures they had taken of these teens, they were basically naked with their wounds, bandaged, wounds showing. And so in the book, it's like I could have reproduced that photo. And I just thought, no, you know what? I'm going to tell you, that this photo exists and what they did, but I'm not going to reproduce it here again, so that their naked bodies are, you know, on display. But those are all these choices in the moment of how to do it, which, God knows, there's no there's no roadmap, right? There's no blueprint for it.
Kate Carpenter 16:15
So you had started writing a different book about the MOVE bombing in Philadelphia, and we can get into that more, but, but you decided instead to write Fear and Fury first. I know you've talked, I think, within the introduction and elsewhere too, about how sort of the current political moment inspired you to switch. But what I really want to know is, how did you settle on this story as the story that would sort of get us to the present moment,?
Heather Ann Thompson 16:42
You know, a mix of, I would say, just suspicion that it, that it was kind of a ground zero moment, but also it has always been a story with me. I remember when it happened, I was a grad student at Princeton when this event happened, and I remember it. And as a, at the time, mother of a one year old, I remember being horrified at the event, but also horrified and mystified as to the reaction to the event, which was to celebrate the shooting. And so I remembered it, A, then B, when I was working on Attica, William Kunstler, the key lawyer in the Attica story, was also a lawyer, would become a lawyer later in this Bernie Goetz case, he represented one of the victims in the civil trial. So I was reminded of it while working on Attica. And so then, when we when it was clear that we were going to have Trump as a president a second time, and this on the heels of January 6 and Kyle Rittenhouse, and what was just feeling like was an insane unleashing of particularly white rage, violence, and as importantly, that it was all being normalized and legally okay, and that meanwhile, the media, the Fox media networks, were telling us that up was down and down was up. And I just thought, you know what? Let me go back to this moment, because I suspected that we had really missed the turn we took in the '80s to actually lay the groundwork to where we were today. And the, and then, of course, the more I looked at it, I was like, wow. I actually did not. I didn't realize that, you know, that Fox News was rooted in the rise of Rupert Murdoch around this story. I didn't realize Trump's connection, Rudy Giuliani's connection. So it was a, it was eye opening also once for me, once I once I got into it.
Kate Carpenter 18:49
To give you a better glimpse into Heather's work in Fear and Fury, I asked her to read a small excerpt for us to talk about. Here's Dr. Heather Ann Thompson, reading from the prologue of Fear and Fury: The Reagan '80s, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage.
Heather Ann Thompson 19:06
“Things had gone awfully, terribly wrong, but Darrell couldn’t understand why. He had just been sitting next to James, smiling as their other friends, Troy and Barry, horsed around a bit farther down the subway car. It wasn’t as if Darrell hadn’t noticed the white guy. He definitely had. To be sure, the man was unremarkable in every way—nerdy-looking, pale, and quiet. Except that he had chosen a seat directly in front of Troy. This was noteworthy. Passengers usually gave teenagers like Darrell and his friends a wide berth. Also unnervingly, the man was staring straight at Troy and Barry as the two joked, laughed, and occasionally swung around a pole or smiled over at one of the female passengers with a “Hey, what’s up?” or a “You got a light?” But then something shifted. Neither Darrell nor James could hear much over the clatter of the train’s wheels, but Troy, still with a smile on his face, was now saying something to the man. Seconds later, it was as if the air had exploded. As Darrell looked on in horror, he realized that both Troy and Barry were now crumpled on the floor, immobile, staring blankly at the grimy linoleum. But why was James on the floor too, bleeding? And why couldn’t Darrell just leave? After all, that was what the other passengers were doing—pushing one another toward the doors at the end of the car in their desperation to flee. For some reason, Darrell could not stand up. He couldn’t move. At all. Maybe he was just in shock. Maybe that was why he was still slumped over, unable to get up from the seat that was slick and red. It was probably best not to dwell on that. Best not to let the panic overtake him. But the paramedics who were hovering over him looked seriously concerned, asking their questions almost too calmly. And then there were the stony-faced cops, standing by the yawning exits of the now almost empty train car. Nothing good ever happened to boys like Darrell when the cops showed up. Even as Darrell and his three friends were carefully laid onto stretchers, then gingerly carried up crumbling and filthy cement subway stairs into waiting ambulances, these victims were becoming the villains.”
Kate Carpenter 21:22
This whole book is a really gripping narrative, but in this prologue, you've really kind of deliberately written it more like a novel. We're in the heads of the characters, Darrell and then after this, Bernie Goetz. Why did you decide to start that way?
Heather Ann Thompson 21:36
I think because, to me, there's a way in which we have become so anesthetized to violence today. And you know, we hear every day, someone's been shot, someone's been harmed, someone's been killed, and we're just like, that's terrible, at best, or, of course, at, you know, at worst. So being so anesthetized to violence, I wanted to start what was surely going to be a story of violence unleashed in a way that we had to just take a beat. We had to think about, what did it feel like to be the person upon whom this was visited, and to just kind of start right there from the moment when it all goes wrong, and then peel back what leads everybody that day to that one train car where things are going to really go off the rails.
Kate Carpenter 22:35
You do a really incredible job in this book of weaving, sort of the larger context that leads up to this and surrounds what happens in that train car. You mentioned that feedback from editors was really helpful in that, but did you have kind of a vision for that structure as you were writing?
Heather Ann Thompson 22:52
I did, but my concern was always that I didn't want the historical descriptions and facts, right, the facts about how much money the Reagan administration had stripped from public coffers, or the facts about the crisis of homelessness that was being, you know, unleashed on cities across America, the kind of information that I thought was really important that people knew, I didn't want it to overtake what was, at some level, to me, the most important thing driving the story, which was the lives of all these people who end up on the train. So how to do that was a challenge. I have to say, quite frankly, it meant getting feedback. You know, again, should we? What do you think? Here's one version. What do you think? Is it, is it too much? Is it too thick of description? You know, should we take a break here? Should we go back to the train car? You know? Should we, should we go into the hospital room at this point? But largely that was the vision I had, what you see, ultimately, but it, but it definitely. I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure quite how to pull it off. It wasn't going to just be a narrative story, and that was a challenge.
Kate Carpenter 24:16
It's particularly, I think, effective because it's not just alternating context narrative? Sort of in the beginning you have more context that leads us there. But then, especially once we get to the trial, we sort of leave a lot of that context and really focus in the moment. And I think, I don't know, less thoughtful approaches to structure take just like an alternating perspective and that you really have a nice rhythm in the narrative.
Heather Ann Thompson 24:41
No, thank you. Well, I'm so grateful to hear that. And you're right that once we get through essentially part one of the book, because there are multiple, many chapters, but various parts of the book, once we get through the first part, you're right that we're just in the story, really from, from then on. Particularly in the trials, the trial itself is this kind of talk about, up is down and down is up. This surreal, you know, walking through the story of that train incident from multiple perspectives, and it's about the showmanship of the lawyers. And you know that that is a story that just needed to just go and and then I don't revisit the history, if you will, or just kind of the where are we today kind of thing until the very end.
Kate Carpenter 25:33
Some historians have a certain allergy to narrative histories. Do you ever get pushback for writing the way that you do?
Heather Ann Thompson 25:40
It is interesting, because I do not think maybe even now, that if I were up for tenure at my university, and then I was really early in my career, to do a purely narrative history, I am not sure that would fly. But I also I feel like the profession needs to embrace that narrative voice more than it does, because it is a false dichotomy to imagine that you can either have a narrative history or you can have a serious history book. In fact, I mean for good or ill, as any reader of Fear and Fury will see, there are literally, I think, 200 pages of footnotes for something insane, as there were for Blood in the Water. So it is still as rigorously researched. It is still talking about what matters in the historical moment, or shifting, or shifting historical understandings of the past and the present alike. But why must we take incredibly important moments in history and make them dry? We don't have to. And so, you know, there are times when histories don't have narratives that we need to read, and they're really, really important. But if there is a story at its core, I say the same thing to my graduate students, like, tell us the story, you know, tell us who the people are and what they look like and what happened. Because at the end of the day, if history matters the way historians believe that it does, we have to have people read it, and we have to have people care about the stories that we have spent so many years researching. So yeah, let's bring them to life a little bit more.
Kate Carpenter 27:27
So this book, as is Blood in the Water, are painful histories. So my first question is, how do you write such a hard history in a way that keeps readers going?
Heather Ann Thompson 27:40
The hardest thing for me to write is violence visited on somebody. And I have to say, it was true in Blood in the Water, it was, it is true in Fear and Fury. Every time I get to one of those moments in the writing, those are the hardest chapters to write, the hardest places to write, the ones I rewrite the most because I don't know that there is an, there's not a one size fits all answer to that. In Attica, it meant that there were horrible, horrible things I could have explained and shown in that particular chapter of the retaking of Attica prison. I mean gruesome, horrific incidents that I could have just kind of relentlessly walked you through, and instead, I tried to pick those incidents that evoked the horror that it really was. So the example there was that once complete control is maintained in the prison, so there's no reason to think that they're that anyone is in jeopardy who is a member of law enforcement. They are taking people's false teeth out. They are taking their glasses off of their faces, and they are throwing them up in the air, and they are smashing them with baseball bats. And I tell that story over story, over horrific, horrific stories of sodomy and God knows what all. Because to me, that was, look, they this is an act of violence that is literally preventing someone from being able to eat and from being able to see. And so that was took me a long time to kind of think about, how do I which examples of this, do do I use, right? And then, similarly, in Fear and Fury, the medical stuff, the the actual shooting on the train. It was the same thing. It's like, how do, how do I not just make this a laundry list of the gratuitousness of of racial violence and somehow evoke it? I, you know, the jury is out on how well I do do it or don't do it, but it is definitely difficult. And I'm always trying to think about, how would it be to read it? Like, you don't want people to just, again, that kind of goes back to your first question. I don't want people to just tune out, like, oh yeah, here we go again. Another act of violence, right? Somehow to rest with it in a minute. And that's one of the reasons also why the chapters are short. I believe you need to take a pause like if you're going to read something like that, you need to just kind of be able to take a break for a minute before you move on to whatever the next thing is. And even in the audio book, which you'll get to hear soon, Erin Bennett is the narrator of that audio book, and I, and I just love her narration so much, because she's brilliant at that, like she takes that pause, you know, she'll say something, and you'll just be like, What? What did you just say? And she gives it just that amount of pause that you would have as a reader. Yeah, so I think that's it. But again, always, always, always a journey. And when I'm gonna now, I'm now turning my attention back to the MOVE book, Lord help us. That is the exact same problem, right? It's just, how do you, it's relentless, and how do you convey it without tuning people out.
Kate Carpenter 31:11
As a writer, how do you cope with being deep in this very violent history?
Heather Ann Thompson 31:19
I think for for for me, it is that I am constantly given the gift of meeting the people and hearing from the people whose stories weren't told, and who give me the sense that it was worth doing or that that it should be done. And that makes it much easier, because otherwise I feel a little bit like I'm beating the same drum, which is, you know, why we need to care about this. And you know, this kind of relentlessness of injustice in this country just gets overwhelming to me, as it does everybody. And then I'm reminded that, no, actually, people don't actually know necessarily why this happened the way that it did. And they don't, they haven't really thought, in many ways, just as I have, not right about how we got here. So even today, you know Minneapolis, which is such a horror show, and people are just blown away, no no pun intended, by how their eyes are seeing one thing and they are being told that something completely different just happened. And I'm, you know, this book will allow us, I think, to understand how that could happen. And it's not just natural, and it wasn't just inevitable, and it was curated and deliberate. And maybe, if we understand it, we have half a hope of of undoing it, perhaps. And also we have, we are disabused of the idea that this is all about Trump, or that somehow, if-- I have a piece in The Atlantic today where I make this point, you know, we could get rid of Trump tomorrow. We theoretically, if you know, unless he refuses to leave. But that does not mean that we are okay, because we created this long before he came in office. And in that sense, everyone's hands are dirty in this story. So we've got to understand that story. So that's a driving motivator for me, and to do it through storytelling, as opposed to just through a polemical political article, I'm hoping it helps people to say, well, where was I in 1984 or do I remember the Bernie Goetz shooting, or I didn't even know that shooting. How can that be when it was so consequential at the time and so forth.
Kate Carpenter 33:42
I'm switching gears a little bit, but I've been curious to know blood in the water had a hugely positive reception, a very well deserved positive reception. You won the Pulitzer Prize in history. What was it like to turn to a new project in the wake of all of that?
Heather Ann Thompson 34:00
You've got the good questions. I mean, you know what? It's at some level, extremely, extremely nerve wracking, right? Because, you know, you don't want to, you don't want to write something terrible after writing a book that people thought, you know, was worthwhile. But on the other hand, it sort of didn't register at all, because when I wrote Blood in the Water, it took 13 years to write it. I had zero idea whether anyone would read it. I had no idea how it would be received. It happened to come out at a very auspicious moment when we were all as a kind of society trying to make sense of mass incarceration, thanks to, you know, my friend Michelle Alexander had just come out with The New Jim Crow. And you know, I was part of a community of women in particular who were kind of working on this question of incarceration. So the timing of it felt right. It didn't feel like it, there was something magical about the process of writing the book, other than, you know, I was grateful people had received it well for this book. I have to say I was more nervous at some level about the writing of this book, because I was writing about, I mean, I mostly do African American history. I was also writing really a story about white people and about white violence and white rage, and that was different, and it was also in a different political moment. Frankly, we are not in a moment where we want to hear about social justice stories, necessarily. We are not in a moment where we're feeling hopeful or possible. 2012, which was right before this book came out in 2016, I mean, you know, that was a feeling of optimism, like we were in a horrible place, but maybe we would get out of it. So I was nervous for this book. I remain nervous for this book for totally different reasons, which have to do with the political moment, and I never took the positive readership for Attica for granted. I was shocked then. I'm shocked now, grateful beyond belief then and now, but never even imagined that for that book.
Kate Carpenter 36:13
Because I am a fundamentally nosy person, I want to ask some nitty gritty publishing questions. I am curious, how did it work out with your publisher to switch up the order of your books? You had a deal for the, or you have a deal for the MOVE book. What did that look like on the ground?
Heather Ann Thompson 36:31
I have to, I have to shout out the Pantheon Press. And my editor, Ed Kastenmeier, just was such, such a heart, because I was feeling this real need to pivot and again, not to abandon the MOVE book, by any stretch. The book is already, you know, well into the writing of it, the research is done. But it just felt like a moment, like I really want to run with this book. And I, you know, had my agent, Susan Ginsberg, who is also my heart, was willing to just take the idea to Edward, and to give him credit, he got it. He understood it. He was game. And I think, yeah, it was a bit unusual. It was a bit of it was definitely unusual. But he trusted the the instinct, trusted the instinct behind the book, and was willing to, was willing to, kind of put everything else on hold with me, for which I am very, very grateful. And the other thing about the MOVE book is I feel like it is, it's potentially going to be more like the Attica book in the sense that it is, it's a big book. It's going to be, it just travels over so many decades with so many permutations, and it's a really complicated story that I wanted more time actually, to to think on it and to think about what that book needed to look like. And again, the instinct of the press was to run with it, and I'm very, very grateful for that.
Kate Carpenter 37:59
That's fantastic. I did also want to note you find yourself in a strange situation, that there is another Bernie Goetz book, which came out last week, and your book comes out tomorrow. They are imprints of the same publisher, which makes it probably extra weird. When did you find out that there would be another book?
Heather Ann Thompson 38:15
Well, in the scheme of things, relatively recently, and I have to say for your for your listeners, to explain: Penguin Random House, the company is huge, and there are many, many imprints within the press. And my imprint is a different imprint than this other book on Bernie Goetz. And so it's actually not that surprising that this, this happened. It sounds very surprising, but it's actually not that surprising because if you're actually working on books simultaneously, you wouldn't necessarily know that that this other book was out there. However, all of that said, what is interesting about it is that both of us had the instinct, you know, at the same time, that this story mattered. So that was gratifying in the sense that I don't think I'm completely making this up. And, you know, I don't know, but I suspect he might have felt the same way, like, okay, there must be something here, because somebody else thought so too. And you know, we're just, we're very different. We're approaching this very differently. He is trained as a lawyer, you know, I'm trained as a historian. We come at this differently. And so far, I think that the reviews of the books, which have been very generous to both of us, are pointing that out we're coming at this differently. We have different emphases and really a different take on everything that happened, even in the event. So I think it's all great. I look forward to actually, hopefully at some point we'll be in the same space where we can actually talk about the journey of doing these books and what we think about the event. But all good, because I-- it's not so much that the Bernie gets story is everything. It's that it it is so emblematic, in a way, that I really hope people will read and kind of think on. And if they get to read two books, then, you know, so be it.
Kate Carpenter 40:04
It is, I mean, it does set up lots of fantastic opportunities for panels and conversations.
Heather Ann Thompson 40:10
Yeah, I hope so. I hope so. And also, in the end, like when I said, he approached it differently, you know, he was able, you know, he interviewed Bernie Goetz. He has just a different take on it. For me, I think I was more kind of focused in on the story of the boys. I haven't actually read his book yet, so, it just came out, but I'm looking forward to it. I'm looking forward to learning from it. For sure.
Kate Carpenter 40:30
I'm going to turn in the last bit of our time and ask about your influences. Are there other people who you like to read or or get inspiration from for your writing?
Heather Ann Thompson 40:40
You know, there are always the beautiful writers, you know, I always go back to, actually, you know, writers like, you know, Isabelle Allende, or, you know, Arundhati Roy, or these kind of incredibly rich narrative writers that have always been such an important influence to me. But also I feel very influenced by the long tradition in African American history of writers from originally, you know, like Dubois, but way to the present, particularly with all these incredible work done, especially by black women, historians and writers and thinkers you know, Kimberle Crenshaw and Elizabeth Hinton and just so many amazing scholars. And then most recently, there's been this real energy devoted to the 80s and to New York. LaShawn Harris' Tell Her Story on the Eleanor Bumpurs murder in the Bronx. Bench Ansfield's book Born in Flames on the Bronx. So there's been a really recent stuff, Jonathan Mahler's book, The Gods of New York, all these great recent books, but then always the the original novelists that I could never hope to to mimic, but absolutely will, for till my dying day, try to capture the magic of they have with words.
Kate Carpenter 42:01
What's the most influential writing advice you've ever gotten?
Heather Ann Thompson 42:06
Wow. I mean, I think that there's not one thing, because there's so many challenges of writing. I mean, one of the challenges is the the fraud complex we all have, which is, who am I to write it? Why should I write it? Should I even write it? And to that, I say, Just do it. You just have to kind of say, I'm going to put it out there on the page and just see what happens. Then there is the practical, like, my life is so busy and I have so much going on, how in the world can I get this done? Or how could it actually become a book? And and that is the advice is just a little bit every day. And it really is true that if you just wrote a few pages each day, by the end of the year, there is a book. But I think mostly it is you have to find something that you really, really care about. I don't think that any amount of stress that writing is, and really vulnerability that writing, you know, instills, is possible if you don't feel really passionately that it's a story you care about or you think other people should care about. And that's everything. And even with my graduate students, you know, when they're picking dissertation topics, I just try to, you know, gently remind them you're going to be living with this for a really long time. And so you need to really be interested in it yourself. Because if you're interested in it, you're going to, you're going to just exude that on the page, and then everyone else is going to be interested too.
Kate Carpenter 43:38
Well, normally, I ask people what they're working on next. In your case, we have a pretty good idea, but I'm wondering, could you elaborate a little more on where you are in the MOVE book, what that will look like going forward?
Heather Ann Thompson 43:50
Yeah, so the MOVE story, like Attica, is one of those books that has multiple perspectives and multiple vantage points, but it is one that, it just spans so many years that the research took me a very, very long time. And even today, it's funny. I, you know, I periodically get emails from people saying I was there, you know, I have this, would you like to look at it? And I'm always like, yes, I want to look at it. And then I'm thinking, Oh, God, I'm never going to be done researching this book. So I'm at the process now where I have the chapters I've written, quite a few in the very beginning of the book. I have it fully laid out. I have all the research done, but I have to just kind of go back to it now mentally. And I have to do what I did with Attica, frankly, which is I had a whiteboard with Attica on my wall, where, you know what happened? First, what happened? Second? Where were the police at this time? Where was the mayor? Were, you know, what on what corner were they standing like? It's the reconstruction of it that an event like Attica, this MOVE bombing and the MOVE major confrontation that happened before it in the 1970s, is, is a logistical nightmare. As a writer, you have to, quite frankly, know where everybody was standing and what they were looking at, and you know how wide the street was, and what could people see, and who were they on the phone with? And that is, it's a imagine, you know, a whiteboard with so many colors and arrows, and you know, who knew what went or if--that's the other thing, right? You know, writing is a question, at Attica, and will be in MOVE, like, who knew what really happened when, because the truth slowly changes or emerges. So that's a whole nother structural challenge of writing. And thus, you know, back to your question. That's why I think, I think even my editors were okay with, you know, take that time figure it out, because it, it is a logistical challenge in telling a story like this.
Kate Carpenter 45:58
Well, I can't wait to read it when it comes eventually, but in the meantime, we get to read Fear and Fury, which is also an amazing book. So thank you. Thank you for writing them. Thank you, Dr. Heather Ann Thompson, for joining me on Drafting the Past.
Heather Ann Thompson 46:12
Thank you so much for allowing me to share all of this.
Heather Ann Thompson 46:15
Thanks again to Heather, and thanks to you for listening to our conversation. You can find a link to buy Heather's newest book, along with all the other books we talked about, in the show notes at draftingthepast.com. If you loved this episode and want to support the show, please tell a friend or leave a five star review in your favorite podcast app. It helps other people find the show. Until next time, I hope you've been inspired to remember that friends don't let friends write boring history.
