A lot of the people I was speaking to and writing about were carrying secrets themselves.

Abortion is a very complicated subject, and people need time to feel comfortable to get to know you and to open up.

Hi, and welcome to Amicus.

This is Slate's podcast about the law and the courts, and I am Dahlia Lithwick. I cover those things at Slate.

This week's show is part of our summer series, where we take a big step back from the maelstrom of breaking daily court news to open our eyes and ears to books that you may have missed

or that maybe helped us look at this beat from a different, interesting perspective.

And with that in mind, we are talking to the author of a book that I just devoured in the past year.

It's called The Family Row, an American Story, by Joshua Prager. Josh is a former senior

writer for the Wall Street Journal. He's written about historical secrets and his work,

described by George Will as exemplary journalistic sleaving, has shed new light on cultural

touchstones. Josh's most recent book, The Family Row, is a double biography of both Roe v. Wade

the case and Norma McCorvey, its plaintiff.

The book has, in the year since Dobbs, really helped me to think through the fight over

reproductive rights and freedom and justice in America.

It was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. So Josh Prager, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so

much for your kind words and for having me. I want to start by saying this book is very intimate.

It opens really intimately with a kind of generational, geographic, cultural biography. And in some sense, the book opens almost Josh with an elegy to this community of poor, deeply religious, sometimes illiterate, displaced,

former Acadians. And they have too many kids and they can't make ends meet. And people just

keep getting pregnant the minute they turn 17. I feel like I want to start with the ways in which

your book is a love letter in some sense to a time and a place.

And it is as much that trying to unpeel this moment in history that eventually produces Norma McCorvey as it is a polemical or political book.

Yeah, you know, when I think about Roe and I think about abortion in America, I think about

...