Stacey Abrams Writes A Thriller

How she became a novelist, what politics and writing have in common, and why, at the end of every good story, someone’s got to die

- By Ayana Mathis

On the afternoon of my first conversation with Stacey Abrams, she had just moved house. She sat in front of a bay window, sunlight pouring in around the sides of drawn blinds. We were talking over Zoom, and the little square of our interaction was spare and tidy—that is, until she turned her camera around to show me a long, rectangular table crowded with things that hadn’t yet found a home: an open box, an orphaned white vase, a pile of books. In the stack sat biographies of Booker T. Washington and James Madison and, she said, “a book about butterflies.” Why butterflies? “Well, it’s about how butterflies are part of the ecosystem that we rarely think about. Much like bees, when we had the bee colony collapse.”