They just have kept it to themselves. To can be completely honest when i was listening to the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearing i was thinking a lot about these women. When women dont tell their stories a narrative is visited upon them, one of blame and shame. You did something wrong. You should have known better. I think that to me is the most resonant message from this book, to take back the narrative, the stigma, have to normalize it. One of four women terminate a pregnancy in the course of her lifetime. Putting a face to that instead of casting women as selfish and evil is important in a way to take the narrative back. Host you observe actual abortions. What was that like . Guest we shouldnt talk about abortion and euphemism. Interrupting life process even if you are prochoice you have to recognize that and he feels we should acknowledge that and what was being done during the termination. Invited me into the room to observe a 5week abortion and an 8 week abortion and a 16 week abortion. It was quite a privilege to be there with women who were going through a difficult moment, let me interview them before and after and i can tell you the 5 weekend a week abortion took less then three minutes, the product of conception were nothing more than if you blow your nose in a tissue and peek inside of it. The 15 week abortion was a little different. It took 7 minutes. Mixed among the mucus and products of conception was a tiny and very humanlike, a small hand, that was shocking to see. Interviewing women who had the termination she had three children under the age of four, she could barely afford to freedom. If she had a fourth she would not be enough to feed them. It does that make her a good mother or a bad mother. Host you are prochoice. How did you find that . Guest janine is a prolife protester usually outside the clinic but on this particular day, she has gone into the clinic pretending to be a patient so she can secretly take the workers into saying something in common aiding to put on the internet. Janine is a character who does exist. Every Abortion Provider i spoke with for research had multiple women who are protesters on their own table having an abortion or not just having an abortion is going out the next day to continue protesting. Janine was the voice of someone who is prolife. I did that due diligence, people who identify as prolife. I went in with misconceptions assuming these people must be very evangelical, zealous, i would have nothing in common with them. They were funny, smart, interesting. We had wonderful conversations but disagreed on one important point which is where does life begin and for me it hammered home that we have more in common with people who think different from us than we have not in common with them but these people come from a place of deep compassion and deep conviction like i would. They wouldnt want to be seen as antiwoman anyone as prochoice, you never want to hear women use abortion as Birth Control because that is not true either. There are misconceptions on both sides of the aisle. Host a very topical story in a page turner sort of way. Guest dont know how you find that balance except by doing it for a long time. I love the concept of the novel as a way to educate about social justice because i think for example when i wrote this book i read countless studies about reproductive rights and abortion statistics. Most people dont sit down and do that but they might pick up a novel and you think you are picking up a book to be entertained, you think youre picking up a book that will whisk you away for a few hours but a 5 done my job right by the end you think hard about a topic you might otherwise not have approached. In that way fiction is so wonderfully sneaky because it gets peoples minds to crack wide open. Host 1. 2 million abortions happened in the 1950s. Guest and every reason to believe if robie wade is overturned we will have abortions, they will just be unsafe and women will be in more danger. It is important to recognize this as a fact i didnt know until i started researching the book. 97 of the work planned parenthood and other clinics to has nothing to do with abortions. That is why it is federally funded. It is Womens Healthcare, cancer screenings and women in poverty use clinics to get that healthcare. Only 3 of that business is abortion and the only part of the clinics that fund itself. Federal funding does not cover abortions. If you get when you have to pay for it which means if we defund planned parenthood all they will do is abortion care which is not what protesters mean when they say defund planned parenthood. They think they will stop abortions. Host are Abortion Services profitable . I would not say they are profitable. No one will make a living but what they do is pay for themselves, cover their own costs because there are no federal funds that are allocated to that. What you want to doing if you get rid of them. Host before we started in studio, talking about your tour of england and questions men would ask. Host i didnt get that many questions for men but in england i had multiple men at events who would ask me did you talk to the men helping make this decision and the answer was no, i never spoke specifically to men because i was interviewing the women who have the procedures but in the course of the interview i asked about their partners and i found out the vast majority told their partners they were pregnant or in cases where that didnt happen it was usually rape or incest or the man had left the scene and wasnt involved anymore. What i did find out was men were particularly supportive when they paid for half the abortion or went in with her to the procedure, the women felt very alone and isolated. Even though they recognized their partner was trying to connect the predominant 5 with you dont understand it is happening to me and not you. Host maybe i shouldnt do this but all the books of yours that i read, i tried to find a character you identify with. I found in this one, am i way off . Guest yes. That is a really interesting character. Beth is in many ways the future of america could be in a post roe v wade world, a young girl who has run out of options, gone to get a judicial waiver, something happens with the judge who can to be there today and it is already pass the legal limit to get an abortion in the state of mississippi so she takes matters into her own hands and ordering online which is illegal and in many states, personhood statutes come into play. There is one in the ballots in alabama on tuesday. If you try to facilitate your own abortion you can be tried for murder which is what is happening to beth. I dont see myself as best, but i dont know what that means. At the clinic, obviously not to get an abortion because shes 70 and is there for other healthcare and specifically to point out the reason people go to these clinics is not just abortion care. She is smart and the beating heart of the book. If i could be anyone in the book it would be the Abortion Provider. Host want to show the cover of it, looking at this, ask people what they think the cover. What do you think . Guest it is beautiful. Looks like an impressionist painting and the more you look at it. The more you recognize the faces of women caught in a melange of colors. I thought it was an interesting interpretation of the material inside. It doesnt bother me it is pastel colors which we would consider more feminine because it is about womens Reproductive Health. Host if i were walking past that book in the airport unless i was familiar with you i wouldnt stop. Guest that isnt always a function of the color. There is, i have been quite outspoken about it, theres a huge gender bias in publishing and we see it in the marketing but that cover it self would never be a chiclet book. It would have a cartoon cover or disembodied womans body part or Something Like that. That is too highbrow. There is intense gender discrimination in publishing because of a group that has done the numbers every year, and they see how many female authors are reviewed by particular review outlets and look and see how many women are reviewers at these outlets and since they began years ago they look at people of color and people with disabilities, nonbinary authors and they start to see how white and male driven publishing is and the statistics have been remarkable and upheld 66 of book buyers are women, read men and women, men tends to readonly men and part of that is the marketing to you, part of it is that very often women are called womens fiction authors when i argue not a lot i write about would fall in the womans fiction category. Often if one is called a womens fiction author it has less to do than what is between the covers and between in the authors legs. I offer as an example small small great things does not have a kiss and it and won best romance novel in poland. I have no idea. It makes me fear for the future of romance in poland. Host you were quoted in the New York Times saying i dont mind the term chiclet. I dont write it. It is funny when people assume i do because i have a vaginae. Guest totally true. If i write chiclet, sorry if youre picking up my books but that is supposed to be a fun beach read, something with humor is it. If i write about the holocaust that would not be my choice for chiclet book. I love light fiction. I love genre fiction. I read widely and i think there is a place for that for all kinds of genre fiction. All women right womens fiction is silly. There was a point that amazon, wikipedia decided to break out womens authors from american novelists but there was a huge uproar because they took all the women out of the american novelist page. If you want to have a subcategory i am all for that but keep the women for the american novelist too. Host was the thought process lets make sure they get featured or just guest nobody can focus but the problem then, when you accept the group, you make them a subset. Host any idea how many of your readers are women . Guest i tracked it for three months contract my fan mail and i can tell you 50 of my fan mail comes from men and they often write and say im sure im the only man reading your book because you have been conditioned as men to read mail authors. I go be securing your masculinity. I hear from many men. I love when men read my stuff because they take Different Things from my novel than women do. I encourage men watching the program go to your bookshelf and do you read a female author for every male author you read, you will find you dont and that is something you should change. While the references to astronomy in a spark of light . One of the coolest facts, looking into the past, it goes chronologically backward, what people believe about controversial topics, something we find the needs of our parents, friends, our own personal experience, the Hostage Negotiator is a single dad, looking at stars, it felt like the perfect metaphor for this book. Host where does the title come from . Guest it is not the original title of the book. My publisher didnt like the original title and for a month host tell us what that was . Guest moment of conception. It wasnt about where life begins as where belief begins but they felt that was too clinical so we went back and forth and they tried to give me other titles and i hated all of the mans my amazing fabulous editor called me, she had been on a flight and read something in an inflight magazine about a study that had been done by a scientist in the midwest about the moment sperm fertilizes an egg under a highpowered microscope you can see a flash of light and it is the zinc in the side of the egg giving way to the sperm causing a spark. What is great about it is they have ascertained the bigger the sparkle more healthy the embryo is. You can imagine how that will have unbelievable ramifications for people who do in vitro because you only have a certain number of embryos, who knows which one will stick . The healthiest ones are in place. I was thinking about that and my fictional doctor who is modeled after willie parker, the universe beginning with life and then there was light and reading a biological essay about the spark of life that happened to the fertilization moment between sperm and egg and i can make this work. Host are you a big enough seller with your bestselling books that you can determine what the title of your book is . Guest they usually show me a cover and i will say if i like or dont like it. That was not the original cover for a spark of light. The original looked like small great things. I love the cover but didnt want people confusing the two. Amazing art director came back with that and that caught my eye. Host speaking of small great things that is the next book we will talk about. What does that represent . Guest when i look at that cover i think of the color chips artists use and if you look at the covers there are spots where color is missing, where there is something not quite right about the color. There is an absence and small great things is about racism in america and metaphorically to me that is such a beautiful illustration of what i was trying to talk about. Host are you kennedy . Guest any person is kennedy. That book looks at a reallife incident that happened in flint, michigan. And African American nurse with 25 Years Experience in the labor delivery board helped deliver a baby and in the aftermath the babys father said he didnt want anyone who looks like her to touch his kids, pushed up his sleeve to reveal a swastika tattoo. This put him in a hospital and the babys files say no africanamerican is allowed to touch the baby. A bunch of personnel banded together and soon, hope she got a great payout but made me wonder what if that nurse was the only one alone with the baby when it went wrong and she wound up being brought up on charges of murder. What if she was defended by a white public defender, like me or my friends, doesnt consider herself a racist and if i could tell the story in her voice, the voice of the white supremacist dad and the voice of the white public defender as they unpack their feelings about race. To me small great thingss for white people. It is meant to say open your eyes a little wider. It is easy to point to a white supremacist and say that is a racist. It is harder for white people to point to themselves and say the same thing and yet race is about prejudice plus power and if you are white in america you hold all the power. It is easier for us to see the head winds of racism and to know if you are a person of color your life might be harder it is difficult for white people to acknowledge the tailwinds of racism and the fact there are unearned benefits that come to us because we are born like this. That is something that is on white people to learn and fix. Ultimately that is why i wrote the book. Host a quote from kennedy who became jeffersons lawyer, i wanted to live like this for an afternoon. One of the things i get asked a lot, people read the book and this rocked my world and i needed to do better. I live my life differently as a result of writing this book. One of the things i talk about is making yourself uneasy, putting yourself in a situation where this is not the predominant color in the room and most people havent had that experience and if they do it makes them feel a little on edge. That is okay. You are learning something if you feel that uneasy. One of many things you can do to be actively antiracist. Another thing to do is learn the difference between equal and equitable. People means the same, equitable means fair. If you have a student in your class who is blind would you give her the same test as everyone else . Of course not. He would give her a braille test with the same information. That is what i mean. Figure out because of systemic and institutional racism people are starting at different points, we have to make sure in whatever line of work we are in, everyone has a chance to get to the finish line, that is what equitable means, things like that, talking to people, who look like us and to say be aware of the fact you have privileges that others dont have. How will you take advantage of that privilege. If you are a mom goes your Childs School and say what are you teaching about africanamerican history . Just slavery but some inventors and awesome role models who happened to be black or better if you are white and asking that stuff, no matter where you are in your life you can find a way to be actively antiracist. Host to give some semblance of sympathy . Guest they are white supremacist. Its hard to find anything likable about white supremacist and turkey is the only character i have ever written where at the end of writing a section i would have to go downstairs and take a shower because i felt dirty. It felt too easy to slip into his patterns of speech and i hated myself for that. It made me so uncomfortable but it is rare that you find someone as a villain that is 100 evil. I dont think anyone is 100 good or 100 evil i do have thoughts about that in politics but we wont go into that right now. In my fiction people are balanced and multishades of gray and i needed you to feel sympathy for turk and ultimately he is a dad who lost his baby. Any parent would feel sympathy for that. Any parent could understand how hard that is whatever you think of him and his disgusting belief you understand he might be grieving the loss of a child and many people said it was hard for them to realize they felt sympathy for turk. There is another scene where he proposes, a romantic comedy moment and people said how dare he have a romance, people who are reprehensible in their beliefs dont fall in love, of course they do and that is critical to me, to recognize as a reader you will feel a tug and say i do have something in common with him but that is important because turkey turk has a seachange by the end of the novel and you should be able to believe, someone who is morally reprehensible can find a way out into the light. Host all of your books, nearly all have something at the end to keep us interested . Guest to keep me interested. A twist at the end, to be known for it, there is no twist, just to read it and i dont know. I like doing it because it provides me the ability to lay a paper trail. Anyone can throw a twist at the end of the book but it is a sucker punch unless you have threaded it through very carefully and i like doing that. I feel it makes me a better offer. Host turks character. Is he based on a real person . Guest turk is based on two former White Supremacists i met with as part of the research for this book. There was one man who grew up in orange county, california, in a pretty privileged family and ran with a violent gang of White Supremacists and one night he and his friends beat up a gay man and left him bleeding on the curb expecting him to die. Years later he got out of the moveme