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March 2020 | Rolling Stone | 77
anecdote to get you drawn in. But you’re also
confused half the time, like, ‘Where is he going
with this?’ And it all makes sense in the end.
My mom builds layers of understanding. She’s
very deft with anecdotes, but her structure is
much more about ‘I want you to leave here not
just remembering the part that made you think,
I want you to have to think about the part you
didn’t get.’ ”
When Abrams was little, visiting her grand-
mother, with her some 16 first cousins running
around, she was the one in the corner, holed
up with a book. She loved Helen Keller’s The
Story of My Life, The Count of Monte Cristo, Silas
Marner, Little Women, Jane Eyre, Ender’s Game,
Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Atlas Shrugged (“But
not for the Paul Ryan reasons.... There was
something about how [Ayn Rand] highlighted
the capacity of a person to be more than.”)
She loved mythology. “Greek, Norse, Roman,
Cherokee. If I could reach it, I would read it,”
Abrams says.
Her mother, Carolyn, had dropped out of the
fourth grade in part because her family couldn’t
afford bus fare. The way Abrams tells the story,
she found her way back thanks to the kindness
of others — a neighbor who offered odd jobs
to help her save a little money, a teacher who
tucked a note in her file vouching for her — but
it’s really a story about poverty and the struc-
tural barriers of escaping it.
“I came from a family that struggled finan-
cially. We had lots of education, but we are
congenitally disposed toward poverty becausemy parents got master’s degrees and then went
back to Mississippi to become poor ministers,”
she joked onstage at the Gwinnett gala. “My
sister became a judge after leaving one of the
wealthiest law firms in America because we just
don’t know how to do this right.”
She plays it for laughs, but Abrams’ larger
point is about how difficult it’s been for her
and her family — people who have done almost
every thing right — to stay on firm financial
footing. And if there was one line of attack
that seemed to stick to Abrams during the
2018 election, it was around the fact that she
was $227,000 in debt. (Republican ads called
her “fiscally irresponsible.”) Abrams started
accruing the debt — a mix of credit cards,
student loans, and deferred taxes — in college,
and continued to rack it up supporting her
brother, who struggled with a drug addiction,
and helping her parents, who are raising her
brother’s daughter.
But the narrative that she is bad with money
runs contrary to the rest of Abrams’ biography,
being a successful tax attorney, co-founding
a thriving financial-services firm, and as city
attorney going toe-to-toe with then-NBA com-
missioner David Stern during negotiations over
the WNBA’s Dream moving to Atlanta. (“He
screamed at me. It’s my claim to fame. Made me
really popular with my brothers.”)
Coincidentally, Abrams’ role with the Dream
meant she was, briefly, the lawyer for Georgia’s
newest U.S. senator, Kelly Loeffler, a bitcoin
market executive who Gov. Kemp appointed inDecember. Abrams negotiated the team’s deal
with the NBA when Loeffler and her partner
purchased it in 2011. But that doesn’t make
them allies. “I deeply disagree with the policy
positions she has espoused and the approach
she is taking, and I do not support her,” Abrams
says. “I’m going to be very actively involved in
ensuring that a Democrat wins that seat.”
Abrams ended up settling her outstanding
debt this past May with the money she made
from her bestselling 2018 memoir, Lead From the
Outside. She’s now in the final stages of writing
her next book, Our Time Is Now, on voter sup-
pression, scheduled to hit bookstores in June.
When we sat down to talk in January, she’d just
received word she’d sold yet another book, the
details of which she wasn’t ready to publicly dis-
close. One of her earlier romance novels is being
developed into a television show at CBS, and
she’s working with the Emmy- and Oscar-nom-
inated director Liz Garbus on a documentary
about the history of voter suppression.
“I’m a good loser,” Abrams concedes, reflect-
ing on the 14 months since her loss to Kemp. But
even with everything she has going on, there’s
always space for new ideas, bigger ambitions,
and more cells on the spreadsheet.A
BRAMS’ VOICE CARRIES across
the hotel ballroom in a way, one
imagines, she must have learned
from her parents. She is retelling a
story her grandmother told her, about a time
shortly after the Voting Rights Act passed, when
Abrams’ grandfather was struggling to coax
her grandmother to the polls: “I remember
the last time we tried,” she told him. “The billy
clubs and the dogs, and they spray you with
those hoses.”
It was the shame she felt over her own fear
that forced Abrams’ grandmother to the voting
booth that day. She never missed another elec-
tion. “Across Gwinnett, across Georgia, there
are folks who are afraid of their power, who
are afraid of what they remember, and they’re
afraid to try this time,” Abrams is saying. “In
2020, our responsibility is to erase their fear,
to take their hands and walk with them.... Yes,
they have been silenced... but this time they are
not going alone.”
It brings the house down.
This crowd has good reason to take Abrams
at her word. They are already direct bene-
ficiaries of the work she’s done here. When
she was elected minority leader back in 2010,
the Georgia Demo cratic Party was in a belea-
guered state. It had lost every statewide office
— Republicans held a supermajority in the state
Senate and were only a few seats short of one
in the house. [Cont. on 95]Abrams with
Obama in 2018