- [Announcer] Support for "Overheard with Evan Smith" comes from HillCo Partners, a Texas government affairs consultancy, Claire and Carl Stuart, Christine and Philip Dial, and the Eller Group, specializing in crisis management, litigation, and public affairs communication.

ellergroup.com.

- I'm Evan Smith.

He's a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, whose book about 9/11, "The Looming Tower," won the Pulitzer Prize.

His latest novel, "The Human Scale," is a police procedural set in Israel and Palestine, and you will not be able to put it down.

He's Lawrence Wright.

This is "Overheard."

A platform and a voice is a powerful thing.

You really turned the conversation around about what leadership should be about.

Are we blowing this?

Are we doing the thing we shouldn't be doing by giving into the attention junkie?

As an industry, we have an obligation to hold ourselves to the same standards that we hold everybody else.

- Two.

- This is "Overheard".

(audience clapping) Larry, it's good to see you.

- Thanks, Evan, it's good to be back.

- Always happy to have you here.

Boy, this book is so great.

Can that be the whole show?

We just say that?

- Yeah, thank you.

- Absolutely good.

- Thanks very much for coming.

- Thanks very much for coming, everybody.

(audience laughing) The reviews have been great.

We're sitting here on the day the book is published, but we've seen some reviews already, and they really are terrific.

But I'll give you my review.

As I said, I could not put this thing down.

I started reading it, and I just thought, this is exactly the book I wanted to read right now.

So, thank you for that.

- Well, I'm always grateful to have a reader.

- Well, I want- (audience laughing) (chuckles) At least that's one.

One down, right?

- Yeah.

- I've never done this, but actually, I want you to read the first two paragraphs- - Oh, sure.

- Of this book, because it was the case, sometimes with the show- - Is that as far as you got?

- Only two paragraphs.

(audience laughing) What happens after that?

(Lawrence chuckling) Sometimes when my wife and I are watching an episodic series on streaming.

Like, we'll watch the first episode, and she'll turn to me or I'll turn to her at the end and go, "Okay, I'm in."

Like, I know I wanna see the rest of it.

I read these first two paragraphs, and I turned to myself, and I said, I'm in.

(audience chuckling) - Yeah.

- I knew I wanted to keep reading, so please read the first two paragraphs, then we'll talk about it.

- All right, "Jordan, May 21, 2022.

The bomb that didn't go off was aboard an American Airlines flight from Jordan's Queen Alia International Airport bound for JFK.

It was another sweltering day in and hottest day on record, and the temperature inside the plane was insufferable.

The pilot promised the rest of passengers that the air conditioning would kick in after takeoff, but a sandstorm suddenly swept out of the desert, pounding the windows like a desiccated hurricane and leaving the aircraft stranded at the end of the runway.

The plane heaved.

Passengers swooned.

Eventually, maintenance called the plane back to the gate and United scrambled to ready another aircraft which would have to come from Cairo when the storm passed.

Some of the passengers bailed out, but most hung around the terminal drinking cocktails in the bar, watching the sun surrender to a dust-choked sky.

It wasn't until the luggage was transferred to the new aircraft that a detection dog froze in front of a metal suitcase.

Instead of barking or nosing the offending article, which would alert his handler to drugs, the dog sat and stared, as he'd been trained to do in case of explosives.

Any slight movement could set off the bomb.

Within minutes, the airport was evacuated because of a gas leak, passengers were told.

So they stood in the parking lot, shielding their faces against the stinging sand and cursing their bad luck.

Nobody knew that they might all be dead now, their bodies shredded by the blast and scattered across the Mediterranean somewhere near the boot of Italy."

- [Audience] Ooh!

- I mean, I'm telling you something, you know, in the moment we're in (audience clapping) where the state of the world is so tenuous and perilous, where air travel is all of a sudden something that you have to have a thought about.

- Yeah.

- You know?

Where sort of the dangers of the world, I guess, maybe said differently, are visited upon us every day.

- Yeah.

- I was terrified reading those first two chapters.

It freaked me out, or first two paragraphs, but also I was like, I gotta know what happened.

- Yeah.

- So, I need to understand from your perspective, well, let's actually say what the book is about, and then I wanna talk to you about how you thought about the story.

This is, as I said, a police procedural of a sort, it's not exactly Law & Order Gaza, but it is kind of a, it's the murder of an Israeli cop.

- Right.

- Police chief, specifically.

- Yeah.

- And it's being investigated by an American FBI agent with a Palestinian father and by an Israeli cop, right?

It's a book about the thing that we're watching play out every day on the news, it's about building bridges and building trust.

And the book culminates with the October 7 events.

I mean, it's just, like, so perfectly set in time.

Why this?

Why now?

How did you think about the need for this?

- Evan, I guess the best way of saying this, I've been, in a way, writing this novel for much of my career.

You know, when I was a young man, I taught English at the American University in Cairo.

- [Evan] Right.

- And introduced me to that region of the world.

- You know this region of the world.

- Yeah, for better or worse.

And then when I came back, I got my first job at the Race Relations Reporter covering the Civil Rights Movement in Nashville.

And then, you know, as things evolved, you know, I wrote this movie called "The Siege," which was about what if terrorism came to America.

- Right.

- And it came out in 1998, and then terrorism came to America.

And then I wrote "Looming Tower," and all of this was edging into deeper and deeper into this conflict, from which so much of the world of terrorism, you know, the descent among nations has taken place, so much of it erupting out of the Middle East.

- Yeah.

- And I began going there on reporting trips.

- Right.

- And, it was 20 years ago, I think, when a producer in Hollywood asked me to write a screenplay that was, you know, sort of like an "In the Heat of the Night" type of screenplay set in the Middle East.

And so that was the sort of genesis of it, but Hollywood wasn't ready for that story.

- Right.

- And honestly, I hadn't really solved the problems in the storytelling.

- Well, I mean, the good news and the bad news about the Middle East peace process to the degree that that's not a misnomer.

- It's been waiting for me.

- Right.

(Lawrence chuckling) I mean, you could wait for all time, and this would not be settled.

- Honestly- - This would continue to be a narrative worth telling regardless of when you did it.

- This is a real sore point for me 'cause I'm the same age as Israel.

I'm an old man, but it's a young country.

And I, you know, you think of this being an insolvable problem.

- Right.

- But in my lifetime, apartheid ended, the Soviet Union dissolved, we elected a Black man president, those were all things that were never gonna happen, but this keeps going and going and going.

- Yeah.

- So why?

What is it that makes this so difficult to resolve?

And that's the inspiration for the novel.

And my feeling is that part of the problem is the disparate value of human lives.

And we can see that in the novel but also currently, you know, where you're trading a small number of Israelis for a vast number of Palestinians.

- Right.

- And I wrote a one-man show called "The Human Scale" that had a lot of the ideas that I ported into this novel that has the same title.

And I did it in New York, in Tel Aviv.

It was my first attempt to try to understand it, you know, head-on.

- Yeah.

- And it was interesting 'cause the audiences were receptive even though the material's very difficult, it's dark.

- Yeah.

- And- - Well, you do dark pretty well.

(chuckles) I do dark a lot, anyway.

- Right.

You go back through your history of the books you've written, nonfiction and fiction.

- Yeah.

- Right, you wrote a novel about the pandemic before the pandemic actually happened that basically predicted the pandemic.

You're like the Nostradamus of bad juju.

- Yeah.

(audience laughing) Well, the benefit of being a prophet is that you write a book like that and put it out when all the bookstores are closed, it's an act of genius.

(audience laughing) - Yes.

(Lawrence chuckling) I said you're a great writer, I didn't say you had a great head for business.

- That's right.

- Right, but the reality is that you have always figured out how to tell the stories that needed to be told, even if they were difficult stories to hear or to read.

- Yeah.

- Well, this really came about because with all the attempts that I had made in nonfiction to understand the problem, I still didn't understand it.

- Yeah.

- And I thought what I should do, or what I might be able to do is to create characters that embody the conversations and the ideas and the histories and so on of so many of the people that I've met over so many decades.

- Well, you literally humanized the conflict by creating characters who represent the different elements of the conflict.

- Yeah, if there's a goal here, it is to force the readers to see the other person's perspective by putting them into their shoes.

And that, I think, is fundamentally the problem in the Middle East, is that people are so unwilling to see the other side.

But what I'm trying to do, to show in this novel is that these characters represent the problem.

- Yeah.

- They're, I hope, fully fledged human characters on the page, but they also come from different points of view.

And that novel is asking, can they resolve their differences and learn to trust each other?

- Right.

- And that's the question I put in the reader's mind, and I do hope that if it has, if there's some hope in that, then people might be able to look at the problem a little more with fresher eyes, I say.

- So, this is your fourth novel.

- Yeah.

- Right?

So the novel about Noriega.

- Yeah, you're the only person in Austin that knows about that.

- "God's Favorite," right, yeah.

- Yeah.

- The terrific pandemic novel I referred to, "The End of October," a wonderful novel called "Mr. Texas," which is about the world that you and I know well and live in about the world of Texas politics.

- Well, if you think you can solve the problem of Texas politics, the Middle East should just be- - Should be a walk in the park.

(audience laughing) Full disclosure, not gonna solve that one either.

(Lawrence chuckling) (audience laughing) And then this one.

You have made a decision at times in your career to go the root of nonfiction or to go the root of fiction.

This could have been a work of nonfiction.

- Yeah.

- But you could've chosen to address the very same themes as a nonfiction work.

Why a novel?

Why was the novel the better way to tell this story?

- Well, the reason novels still exist in this media-filled world that we're living in is that it's the only medium in which you can go into the minds of your characters.

And in the mentality of the people that I'm writing about are the secrets.

And, you know, what they say in public, what they, you know, their actions, you know, may betray them, but if you can get inside their mind, you can find out who they really are.

- Yeah.

- And so that was my goal- - So you have creative latitude.

- Oh, yeah.

- And you can advance a narrative through that door.

- Yeah, yeah, and you have creative latitude in other forms of writing too, but it doesn't mean you have the open access of your imagination.

- I wanna come back, though, to something I said earlier, and I wanna go a little deeper on this.

This moment to write fiction has to be a challenge, because the news, the world around us, if you had told anybody about any number of things that have happened over the last 10 years, if you wrote that as a manuscript and sent it to book publishers, they would reject it as too implausible.

The reality of our world is legitimately stranger than anything you can create.

And as a novelist who is writing a book that is essentially off of the news, what a time to be doing that, and how much harder it must be.

Right?

- Well, perhaps, but the, I think the avalanche of news creates a kind of deadening aspect in our society that we start to tune things out because- - Desensitize.

Right.

- I think that's a better word.

- Yeah.

- And this is meant to be the opposite.

It's meant to sensitize you to the actual persons that are living out this drama.

And if people can read, you know, I expect that readers from various perspectives will be reading the book and have different opinions, but if they can just see a little bit into the character that embodies the opposite, the other, then I think the book will accomplish its mission.

- Yeah, well, again, I'm a fan.

I'll come back to the book in a second, but I wanna understand the process here.

So you alluded to the play, the one-man show.

- Right.

- One-act play.

That was "The Human Scale" back more than 10, almost 15 years ago.

- Yeah, I would think so.

Yeah, yeah.

- Right.

But you didn't produce a draft of this novel, even though it has the same name and the themes are shared.

- Yeah.

- Right?

This is essentially kind of an evolution of the idea that informed that.

This novel did not come to existence until a few years ago, right?

First draft.

- First draft, first draft was called The Holy Land Killing.

- Yeah.

- And I turned it in in August of 2023, so this was just a couple of months before the October 7 tragedy.

- [Evan] Right.

- But a lot of things happened in 2023 to me.

When I was working on it, I went in February of that year, I went back to Israel and the West Bank on sort of a fact-checking mission.

'Cause I had written enough of the book and I needed to go back and clarify and then, you know, eliminate wrongful thoughts and so on- - Well, let's just stop and say and acknowledge that your process involves you doing the kind of reporting you would do on a nonfiction story - Oh, yeah.

- Or a nonfiction book, which is not nothing.

- Well- - Right?

- I love research, you know, but also I find that whether it's nonfiction or fiction, the reader wants to think this really happened in case it's a nonfiction, or it really could happen.

- Yeah.

- The only way to do that is to get your facts straight.

- Right.

- And have, you know, if you're creating a world, like I am in this novel, then it has to be a world they recognize.

So in February of 2023, I spent a lot of time in Hebron.

- Yeah.

- And, I couldn't believe the level of hatred.

It just, even though I'd seen plenty of it in my own country, it's the unbridled hatred, which is so dangerous because once people hate somebody at that degree, they feel empowered to do whatever they want.

- Right.

- And, you know, and when I was writing "The Looming Tower," I also felt, you know, the hatred that these jihadists felt toward America was so powerful, but it was also really alluring to people who had nothing going in their lives.

You know, they felt very oppressed, and suddenly there's an enemy that we can hate.

- Yep.

- And, that's the fundamental problem.

And hatred is a luscious emotion.

You know, people delight in it.

And, you know, you can see the joy sometimes when people speak about their enemy.

And it's so easy.

But the opposite, which is accepting the other as a fully formed human being with their own legitimate feelings and rights, that's hard.

That's really hard.

And that's the reason people don't do it, 'cause they're lazy, you know, morally lazy.

- Yeah, yeah.

I made you read the first two paragraphs of the book.

I'm gonna read the last line of the book.

- Okay.

(chuckles) - I'm gonna give it away.

The last line of the book is "Pray for us."

- [Lawrence] Yeah.

"Pray for us," which, on this subject in the context of this book, and to be honest with you, as a not particularly religious person, even in this moment, seems like pretty good advice.

- Yeah.

- Right?

- At least you begin to think about the other in a humane way.

- Yeah.

- And that's where we're falling short.

And, you know, that was the goal of the book, is to bring to life- - [Evan] Yep.

- People that you can't deny and get into their eyes and see the world from their perspective.

And you can't do that in any other form.

I mean, this is why novels will always exist.

- Right.

So I wanna talk about something else.

- Yeah.

- Speaking of praying for us and speaking of, you know, trying to understand and empathize with the situations of people who are different, you recently wrote a story in The New Yorker, your home for your journalism for more than 30 years, about nuns, a convent of nuns who were working with the women of Texas death row.

- Yeah.

- Right?

Working with them, praying for them, you know, effectively, if this is the right word, ministering to them.

- Right.

- Nun-ing to them, whatever you would actually say.

(Lawrence chuckling) (audience laughing) Speaking of things I couldn't put down, man, I was just moved with every paragraph about the stories of these, by the stories of these women and the nuns.

Like, you're still continuing to do these big swings at the ball narratively.

- Well, I'm trying to squeeze it all out of the tube.

(chuckles) - I guess so, leave nothing.

(audience laughing) Leave nothing left.

Right.

Well, the toothpaste is as old as Israel, I hear.

That's what the point is, right?

- I'm always on the lookout for stories, and whether it's a novel or a nonfiction article, you know, stories, basically- - So how did you come to that particular story?

I mean, obviously it's in your backyard on the one hand, fair, but- - No, this was totally fortuitous.

A friend of mine, Marjorie Clifton, and I go walking every couple of weeks.

And her mom, she was telling me, is in the Catholic Prison Ministries, and she sometimes goes to death row.

And Marjorie told me that, you know, there's these nuns that go visit them.

And I thought, well, I've never read that story.

I don't know what it is- - Well, I mean, you hear that and you're like, again, I'm in.

- Well, yeah.

- Right?

I'm in.

- I just cleared my desk, you know?

I just went home and said, I've got my assignment, but I don't know what it is yet.

- Yeah.

- But it's, it's one of those things that's bound to be fruitful.

You know, you got immense obstacles.

(chuckles) You know, getting into death row is not the easy.

You know, the first time I went to the prisons in Gatesville, there are five prisons, or six prisons, five of them for women, and Huntsville is the opposite.

I've walked into the wrong prison, and somehow they let me in.

(laughs) It was ridiculous.

And so- - Not that I feel good about that.

- I know, it was a weird thing.

(audience laughing) Then I was a little worried about getting out, but- - Right.

(audience laughing) - But, you know- - I'm sure The New Yorker is very popular in Texas prisons.

(audience laughing) - I just wanna say this about Texas prisons and the people that run them.

They're far better people than I had imagined.

I just think there's a movement going on inside the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, and the people that are leading it, I totally admire.

- Really.

- So it's not "Cool Hand Luke."

It's another day.

And, you know, there's terrible problem, underfunded, you know- - Staffing shortages.

- No air conditioning.

- No air conditioning.

- You know, there are a million problems.

But, you know, to me it was enlightening to see the care with which at least these people are in in this one unit, the Patrick O'Daniel Unit in Gatesville.

Patrick O'Daniel himself took me around, and his care for these women was really, and he goes and asks 'em what they need.

And, you know, for one, they need to have laser tattoo removal because if they get out and their face is all covered with tattoos, they're not gonna get a job.

So, you know, dentures was a huge problem.

And, you know, I met several women who had just gotten dentures.

They just moved some sort of denture production thing into the unit.

Women who are learning to translate documents into braille.

And some of the women that started that, you know, there's a hundred stations where they're, you know, at one time, they're learning to, and sometimes when they get out, they make, you know, $100,000 a year.

It's a good job.

- Doing that work.

The level of detail, this is the thing that I find always so remarkable with you and your stories, and your novels, for that matter too, is that your eye for detail is totally as good as it's ever been.

Like, I think that was the thing about that story, the details about the lives of those women was extraordinary.

- Yeah, well.

- And the empathy, and the empathy for these women.

- Yeah, I mean, it's hard because, you know, for the most part, these women have committed heinous crimes.

- Right.

- Some of them are innocent.

- Right.

- There's seven women.

One, Melissa Lucio is- - That's a celebrated case.

- Well, it's not celebrated enough.

- Yeah.

- Because she's still on death row two years after she's been declared innocent.

- Well, and effectively everybody associated with her prosecution has now said, King's X, we think she's innocent.

- Yeah, well, the guy that prosecuted her went to prison because he was in the cartel.

And, you know, it's a terrible story, but you can read all about it.

- Yes.

(audience laughing) - And just the other day, Brittany Holberg, the Fifth Circuit vacated her sentence.

- Yeah.

- And because they had a prosecution witness who was a jailhouse snitch that they paid for.

And their whole prosecution rested on this, and she's been in prison on death row for 27 years.

- Can't get that time back.

- No, so, you know- - Right.

No amount of restitution that you can offer her to get that time back.

- But the question is, she did kill this old man in Amarillo in a perfectly heinous way.

And, so the question that I was sort of, that drew me to it was, can such a person be redeemed?

You know, is it possible that, you know, you can grow into a different person?

And I think that's true of most of the women that I met on death row.

- Well, to be honest with you, it comes back to this.

- [Lawrence] Yeah.

- Because for a lot of people, as they are raised to hate and to see people as the other and to absolutely, consciously, intentionally deny the humanity of other people, the hope is that they can be redeemed.

- Yeah.

- Right?

That they can grow.

Thematically, these things, I think, are quite aligned.

- Yeah, I think there is a line.

I'm drawn to people who are in conflictual situations.

- Yeah.

- And you would think the nuns would be the opposite of that, but they are, you know, they're a wonderful counterpoint to these women on death row, and their love for each other is just adorable.

- Yeah.

- You know, I'm crazy about the nuns.

(audience laughing) (Evan laughing) The average age- - By the way, that'll be the clip that we'll cut out of this interview and just (Lawrence laughing) push out to social media.

(audience laughing) - The average age for a nun in America is 80, and the average age of these nuns in Waco is 35.

So if there's a future for Catholicism in America, they're at the front edge of it, and it's a- - The Young Nuns of Waco would be a good streaming series, by the way.

(audience laughing) I'm in.

- Wow.

- I'm in.

- Wow, I gotta say- - Right?

Don't you think?

(Lawrence chuckles) - The logline's great.

- We have like 30 seconds left.

You always have something else you're working on.

What are you working on that you can tell us about?

- Well, I'm taking that story about the nuns and the women on the row and making it into a book.

And- - You are.

- Yeah.

And I'm looking for the next project.

You know, I'm in that sort of ready-to-get-pregnant stage, and- (audience laughing) It's the moment, you know, when, you know, you're particularly attuned to things that are moving through society, and concerns that maybe I had years ago that suddenly reappear, and you just, you feel receptive, and that's the stage I'm in.

- Yeah.

I'm very thankful always, but especially in moments like this, for your energy and for your commitment to your work.

We need more of it.

- Thank you very much.

- So, thank you, give Lawrence Wright a big hand.

(audience clapping) Thank you very much.

- Thank you.

- Wonderful, thank you.

We'd love to have you join us in the studio.

Visit our website at austinpbs.org/overheard to find invitations to interviews, Q&As with our audience and guests, and an archive of past episodes.

- Origins of terrorism, there's not a single thing.

You know, poor education, you know, political chaos, repression, lack of education.

You know, there's gender apartheid, you know, there's a long list of contributing things, but they're all like tributaries that flow into this river of despair.

- [Announcer] Support for "Overheard with Evan Smith" comes from HillCo Partners, a Texas government affairs consultancy, Claire and Carl Stuart, Christine and Philip Dial, and the Eller Group, specializing in crisis management, litigation, and public affairs communication.

ellergroup.com.

(bright music)