Kristi Noem

And so I take you into their lives, into the South.

I mean, I think so.

I hope so.

I mean, it's not that I would not have talked to everybody, perhaps.

It is that I realize, look, I mean, to one of the victims ends up killing himself on the anniversary of the event.

Another dies very young.

I mean, he's completely drug addicted after this.

His life is so much in shambles.

One of them is who is still alive is paralyzed, brain damaged from this event.

So

When I sort of realized that part of this story was about the erasing of the costs of this unleashing of vigilante violence, then I just wanted to say, look, let me go back.

Let me reconstruct this.

And, you know, that is what I did in my first book on the Attica uprising.

It's what I did in this one.

It's a journey, I will confess.

Yeah.

But it is one that I feel like I'm able, I hope anyway, to take readers there in that moment on that subway train or in that project where the teenagers lived or in Greenwich Village where Bernie Getz lived and what he was experiencing.

I think that's exactly right.

And what was interesting to me was unpacking not why people felt like that as if it were somehow illegitimate.

I remember it.