Interior offices, DeLisle, Mississippi; Washington, D.C. Jesmyn Ward, a National Book Awards winner for two novels, logs on to Zoom. Behind her, children in fedoras clamber up the sofa, trying to glimpse the screen. The 44th president appears, ready to discuss his new memoir, A Promised Land.

OBAMA: Are you still there, Jesmyn?

WARD: Yes, I am. I don’t know what happened to my view.

That’s okay. You’ve seen me before. You know what I look like.

Ah, there we go. Can you see me now?

I’ve been seeing you the whole time.

I want to ask you about humor because it was such a surprise for me—but I don’t want to disparage your other work! I laughed out loud, like really laughed out loud (there’s no hyperbole here) several times during my reading. I talk about how to use humor when I teach creative writing. I was wondering if that was a conscious decision on your part to incorporate it into your work, or if you learned how to do that through reading.

First of all, Michelle is funnier than me. I have to say that, because she insists that she is. She’s naturally just a great storyteller. There’s a rule in our household that she can tease me but I cannot tease her. I pointed out that’s not fair, and she says, “Yeah. So what?” I am often the brunt of her humor, and the girls have picked up on that. So at the dinner table, generally, I am the recipient of mockery and jokes.

Whatever humor comes through in the book is a reflection of me trying to accurately capture my voice, and the back-and-forth with my family, friends, and staff during this journey. I think that all of us use humor, to some degree or another, to help explain the world around us. The human condition can be absurd, and if you learn to laugh about it, then that helps you get through pain and hardship and difficulty. It’s part of the reason why the African American community has been the source of so much humor in our culture generally—because we’ve had to face up to the absurdity of things happening to us that don’t make sense, aren’t fair, are often tragic and heartbreaking, and so we empower ourselves by being able to pull out and take a bigger view.

That was part of how I managed to maintain perspective and take the work of the presidency seriously, or running for president seriously, but not take myself too seriously. There’s a scene I write in the book when we’re debating whether we can still move forward on the Affordable Care Act. My legislative director says, “It’s a really narrow path we’ve got here; it depends on whether you feel lucky.” And I say, “Listen, where am I?” He said, “Well, you’re in the Oval Office.” “And what’s my name?” “Barack Obama.” “No, it’s Barack Hussein Obama. I’m always lucky. I always feel lucky.”

That was an example of using humor at a time when the stakes were incredibly high and we were feeling really embattled. In some ways, laughing about it or some gallows humor about those situations worked better when you were dealing with stress day in and day out, the way we were, than if you were trying to give some sober speech.

All of which is to say: Yes, Jesmyn, I am funny. I slayed at the Correspondents’ Dinner. The professional comics never wanted to follow me. Come on!

I remember that. And I am going to agree with you that Michelle is very funny. There’s that part when you go to the beach with Sasha, and Michelle doesn’t go, and she says that was her one aim as first lady: to never be captured on film in a bathing suit. I couldn’t stop laughing.

Well, she wasn’t joking about that.

I could tell. She was serious.

She was serious. “This is one of my main goals as first lady. I will not be photographed by the paparazzi in a bathing suit.” And she succeeded.

I really want to ask you about characters and about empathy. Because you explicitly talk about empathy several times in A Promised Land. One of the things that I was really impressed by was how well you developed your characters. And there’s a huge cast, from Hillary to characters who have secondary roles, like Norm Eisen or Sonia Sotomayor. But still, every character, you give us a very specific impression of them from the first moment. You give us sensory details, you give us hints about their personality and their motivation, and they are really vivid and really immediate. I was struck by that. I asked myself: How do you think he is able to do this? How is he able to accomplish this? I was wondering if your capacity for empathy is what enables you to do that.

Part of the goal of the book was to connect my personal journey with the public life that people saw. So often, when we see a political figure or we’re talking about policy, we somehow think that’s separate and apart from our daily lives. What I wanted to do for the reader, particularly for young people, is to give them a sense of commonality between their day-to-day choices, decisions, insights, hopes, fears, and what somebody who ends up being the president of the United States is going through. He is a person like you, who is interacting with people, who is trying to do stuff, is disappointed sometimes, is afraid, falls short, has doubts. So in order for people to capture that progression, that journey of me as a young person inspired by the civil rights movement through my early political career, all the way through to the presidency, that required people to have a sense of how I saw the world.

So I think that the empathy you describe is central to my politics. The reason that I got into politics was the sense that, as shattering as the experience of race and discrimination and slavery and Jim Crow and the decimation of Native American tribes, all that stuff was, there is still something in this country that says, “We can be better and we can learn to be more inclusive and see each other and expand our definition of ‘We the People.’ ”

When I write, what I’m trying to do is reflect how I see people in that same way. I’m trying to understand their backstory. I am trying to get a sense of what’s motivating them. What are the things that they feel, believe, hope, fear, that I can relate to. Because if I can do that.… It doesn’t mean I’m going to agree with them on everything, but at least maybe they can see me. It’s part of the challenge of our politics right now, is that there are so many forces designed to prevent us from seeing each other, and to label each other and distance and fear each other. I wanted to make sure that this book reflected an opposite belief, that in fact we can know each other.

One very specific example that I wanted to use was the grassroots work that I did first as an organizer, and then actually reflected itself in our campaign in Iowa. I spent a whole chapter writing about how we won Iowa with all these young volunteers who were thrown into these rural communities. As I emphasize in the book, these young people, most of them in their 20s...these are Black kids from Brooklyn, or Asian American kids from California, or Jewish kids from Chicago. Many of them had never been in a rural, white, primarily farm community. They’d go into these little small towns, but they would go out there and they’d talk to people, and they’d hear their stories and find out what it felt like when you got laid off from the plant that was really part of the company town. Or they’d hear about some family that didn’t have health care and were struggling. They made connections and established relationships and loyalty with people who were not like them.

When we won the Iowa caucus, we won because hopefully people related to what I was saying, but more than anything we won because these young people had learned to see, hear, empathize with the people they were working with.

That in part is what I think readers want from memoir. They want us as writers to slow down, open up moments in seeing with other people…with us as the narrator, and then with other people, and begin to assess who the people in that moment were, what they were feeling, why we perhaps acted the way we did, why they reacted the way they did.…

Look, you think about your own books, Jesmyn. Despite being African American, I don’t know what it’s like to grow up in Mississippi or a rural part of the South. I certainly don’t know what it’s like to be a pregnant young Black girl growing up in the South. The act of you describing an interior life makes me understand her and stand in her shoes and see through her eyes. And that expands my world. And that should inform how I interact with my own daughters, with the people in my community, and, hopefully, informs my politics.

Part of my argument here is that bringing a writer’s sensibility to politics is a valuable thing. Because at the end of the day, our public life is really just a story. If you think about Donald Trump, he had a certain story he was telling about this country. I have a different story. Joe Biden has a different story. Kamala Harris has a different story. So we have these competing narratives that are taking place all the time. And I think that the insight, the wisdom, the generosity that you show in your books is part of what I want to inform our political life as well. If we can understand each other in that kind of granular way as opposed to just, “All right, that’s a white male; that’s a Hispanic female; that’s a rich person; that’s a broke person…” Those categories in the aggregate can give you some data, can give you some insight into how the society is organized. But it doesn’t really give you a feel for what’s churning inside us. And we’re bigger than our various demographics and data points. That’s something that we sometimes forget, and I think part of why our politics can get so divided.

Thank you for that. I feel like that’s part of what I’m attempting to accomplish in all of my work, just trying to get readers to feel with and feel for the people who I’m writing about, in the hope that there will be real-world—not consequences, but real-world—

—It manifests itself.

—outcomes. Yeah. Exactly.

There’s a ripple effect. That’s the power of empathy. And the reverse is true. If you can’t see somebody’s backstory, that’s how we end up reinforcing our prejudices, our biases, our fears, that’s how we then perpetrate cruelty on other people. There’s a reason why Ralph Ellison titled his book Invisible Man. We’re not seen. We were invisible for a long time.

You look at what happened with George Floyd. There was an element of that visceral recognition of this is a human being who is in dire straits, and we can recognize a part of ourselves in him. We can imagine what that’s like. It’s not an abstraction when you witness that. And that changed attitudes. Now, that doesn’t mean it changed them permanently. But you saw that suddenly people were taking the issues surrounding police misconduct and racial bias in the criminal justice system much more seriously after that incident. Because you could not help but understand what that might feel like, and his humanity came through in the most tragic of circumstances. And books, in hopefully a less tragic way, can do the same thing.

In creative nonfiction work, we always say that you should make yourself into a character—you have to think about yourself as a character and think about how you’re going to convey your defining characteristics. Throughout A Promised Land you’re so good at making the people that you write about, including yourself, seem complex and complicated and multifaceted, and capable of all the emotions along the emotional spectrum. There’s power in that, because then the reader perceives you as a complicated human being, and perceives the people that you’re writing about as complicated human beings.

Well, I appreciate that. Part of the advantage that I probably had in writing this book was having written an early book, when I was pretty young, about my journey to understand my father and my heritage. That was a useful exercise for me. By the time I wrote this book, 25 years later, I had had a conversation with myself about, all right, where did I come from, what crosscurrents run through me? What are my demons? What are my fears? There’s probably more confidence at the age of 58, 59, in letting that show, letting readers see that, being less protective of yourself. You’ve come to terms with both your strengths and your weaknesses. More than anything, I want young people to feel confident in their capacity to move through the world, change the world, be agents of justice and let their voices shine through, and understand that our public lives, our communal lives are not something that you have to leave to somebody else—you are as qualified as anybody to talk about what is right and just, and trust yourself in that.

As I point out in the book, I wasn’t, like, student body president. I wasn’t from a political family. The inspirations I drew from were also young people—a John Lewis or a Diane Nash. They were in their early 20s, taking on an entire system of Jim Crow and putting themselves in such severe danger. I didn’t duplicate that kind of courage and success, but in my own way I said, “All right, let me try this out.” I wanted people to see the ups and downs of even a successful political career.

I tell a story about how, being frustrated in the state legislature, I decided to run for Congress without really thinking it through, and getting whupped, and how I then went to the Democratic National Convention in 2000, licking my wounds, coming off a loss, and I.… It’s a good story about how I show up in L.A. It turns out I don’t have the right pass, so I can’t really get in the convention hall. I’ve run down my credit card. I’m broke. I can’t rent a car. I’m not on the list for the parties. I’m sleeping on a friend’s couch. I end up leaving. And four years later, I’m the keynote at the Democratic National Convention, and sort of the belle of the ball.

The point is, I want people to feel those ups and downs of public life, which aren’t so different from the ups and downs of all our lives. We all go through these moments where everything seems to work and moments where nothing seems to work.

Do you think that’s part of the reason why you were so committed to writing towards intimate, sort of painful moments that you experienced? From, say, losing that election, or there’s a lot about how difficult it was for you and Michelle to navigate your relationship and your family life at this time.

That pain is often some of the most profound experiences that we have. It leaves marks on us. It leaves scars. It shapes us. I want people to know that we all have, in common, loss. We all have in common disappointment. We all have in common that sense of things not being in our control that we thought were in our control. Again, I think that has to inform our politics and our public lives.

I talked briefly in the book about Jeremiah Wright, who was a hugely controversial figure during my campaign, who was an extraordinarily gifted, complicated person. One of the most gifted preachers I ever heard. Built this amazing institution that gave back to the community of the South Side of Chicago—it did so much good. But he had a bunch of pain from the experience of being a Black man who had grown up in the pre–civil rights era and went through the revolution of attitudes in the ’60s, and was still angry and hurt, and in that way reflected the anger, hurt, scars, pain of the Black community, and would then sometimes let that out in ways that weren’t always on point.

The pain of me having to at some point sever a relationship with somebody who I cared about, and then also to have to deliver a speech on race that captures that complexity, which then led me to go back and tell a story about my grandmother, a white woman who had grown up during the Great Depression, who loved me more than anything in her life, but also told me—or I learned—was scared of a Black man panhandling at a bus stop.…

In both instances, what I’m doing is both capturing these two complicated people who were important in my life, and trying to make sense of that, and trying to also describe the pain of me being surprised by them having attitudes in certain cases that I didn’t agree with, but then still insisting that they’re still part of me—and then trying to describe to the country that, by the way, they’re both part of America and we’re going to have to learn how to understand that and acknowledge that.

I don’t get there if I’m trying to sanitize all those things, I guess is what I’m saying. And it’s important for me to share with readers that those were difficult moments for me. That it was painful personally. It wasn’t just a matter of coming up with some simple morality tale, if you want to address race in America. It’s all tangled up, and there are a lot of scars and pain and memories.

When you hear people say, “Well, we need to talk more about race.…” Sometimes I’m skeptical of those conversations, where they’re this formalized “Let’s have a dialogue about race.” Because so often, we actually avoid talking about the stuff that really matters.

It’s one of the great values of literature, that often we’re able to access that pain more effectively. When I say “literature,” it doesn’t have to be fiction. I mean, obviously, Beloved and Toni Morrison’s work does it. But The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin remains as relevant today as it did when he wrote it over 50 years ago. It is searing. And it is all about pain. And ultimately, it’s probably as necessary. In order to progress, we have to be able to internalize the things James Baldwin is talking about in those essays, and be able to look at that squarely. So…

You’re very honest in your assessments, in the context that you give us, in the history that you give us, in the way that you communicate, in your emotions. You’re very honest.

Your first book to me resembles A Promised Land, I guess in form and, in a way, how intimate it is. How much freedom did you feel like you had in A Promised Land to be so forthright?

I didn’t find it difficult to share what I felt or thought—for the reason I said earlier. I’m 59. I’ve been around the track a bunch of times. I said to somebody once, one of the great gifts of the presidency is that you lose your fear. Look, I came into the presidency in the middle of what was then the worst financial disaster and economic crisis since the Great Depression. We had two wars. I had to make a series of very difficult and risky decisions early on. Some of them worked. Some of them didn’t work as I had intended. I was, like all presidents, subject to withering criticism at certain points, and second-guessing.

And I survived it. You look at it and you say: Well, I’m still here. I’ve made some good calls. I’ve made some mistakes. I’ve experienced losses as well as some victories. And lo and behold, although my hair is grayer, I’m still standing. So I felt free to describe what I truly thought about a whole range of issues.

I think what was probably more difficult during the writing process was how much I felt comfortable sharing conversations I had had, or feelings others had.

With Michelle, for example. Obviously, a lot of the book is the story of our love and our partnership, and the sacrifices she made for the career path I chose. And, needing to be honest about the fact that she really didn’t want me to be in politics, and it hurt her in a lot of ways. I was helped by the fact that she wrote her book first, she had already put out some of that, so that it wasn’t so much me, you know, pulling back the curtain. She had already done that. I was just giving my perspective in terms of how I felt about her distress around some of our decisions.

But there were times where, as I was writing, I was like: Well, this snippet of dialogue—would that person feel comfortable with me sharing it? I think at the end, the decision I made was that as long as I was generous in my assessment of their outlook and what they were feeling, then it was okay for me to share it.

Probably how I phrase things in the book might be different than how I would phrase things if you and I were just sitting around the kitchen table. If I’m talking about Mitch McConnell’s filibusters blocking important legislation of mine, I’m probably more judicious in how I describe that than if you and I were just talking. There might be a few expletives sprinkled in there. I’m trying to maintain a little bit of decorum.

But you did.

Heh-heh…yeah.

Joseph Biden recently won the election—

Hallelujah.

Yes. A real full-body relief that I have felt over the past—on Saturday. One of the things that I feel like I’ve noticed, and I’ve been thinking about it specifically because I was reading your book during the past week, is I feel like people are more clear-eyed about the fact of how we have to be more civically engaged and civically minded. Just because one person is elected to this office, that doesn’t mean that all of our work is done. I feel like there’s a difference in understanding now that I don’t think was there (and I definitely was guilty of it) when you were elected for the first time.

You wrote about that in A Promised Land, that you had a sense of double consciousness. You were sort of anxious about this idea that people were sort of projecting their needs and desires and wants and dreams. It was like wish fulfillment, all on you, and you were aware of that. Because you were clear-eyed about what the job would entail. Do you think that’s true? Do you see a difference in our ability to be more clear-eyed about this?

Well, look. I hope so. We always want to learn from our experience. I’m glad you raised this, Jesmyn, because I really think this is one of the goals of the book, is for people to understand a little bit more about how our government works. We have this sense that the president is a king who, we elect him—and hopefully at some point her—and whatever it is that they want to do, they can get done.

Barack Before Obama: Behind the Scenes With the Future President

Part of what I try to describe in the book is the incredible number of institutional roadblocks and barriers and constraints on even the president’s power. The president is extraordinarily powerful. But so is Congress, and so is the Supreme Court, and so are corporations, and so are governors. We have all these different points of power, all these levers and buttons throughout our society that help determine our direction. Oftentimes, I think people—particularly Democrats but this is undoubtedly true for Republicans as well—think, All right, we got this person elected. Now, when are we going to reform the criminal justice system? When are we going to make sure that we have universal day care? Why haven’t we immediately dealt with climate change? And when change doesn’t happen fast enough, we have a tendency to feel cynical, like, “Oh, they sold out” or “They weren’t really paying attention to the things I thought they cared about,” and disappointment and then disengagement sets in.

I go into detail about how hard it was to get the Affordable Care Act passed, for example. At the time, there were a lot of Democrats and progressives who said, “Well, this isn’t good enough. Why don’t we have a single-payer plan? Why don’t we have a public option? There are still people who are uninsured, even after the bill got passed. It’s not enough.” I try to explain: Whoo! We had to pull every rabbit out of a hat that we could to get 23 million people health insurance.

I think the more we understand that, the more we will be effective in our advocacy. Because then we can start saying to ourselves, “All right, yes, we need to elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, but now we also need to make sure that we have a Democratic Senate”—and there are going to be two Georgia seats coming up in a special election that could give the Democrats at least the tiebreaker to get legislation through. We have governors. We have state legislators.

We saw this summer this incredible outpouring of activism around criminal justice and police brutality. The fact of the matter is that the overwhelming majority of criminal laws and prosecutions take place under state law, which means that if you really want reform, then you’ve got to have district attorneys who believe in reform, and you’ve got to have mayors who are appointing police chiefs who are willing to negotiate with police unions to make sure that their training and accountability is different than it currently is. That’s actually not something that the president has any direct power over. A president can encourage it, as we did after what happened in Ferguson. Occasionally you can get the Justice Department and the Civil Rights Division there to impose a consent decree on a particular jurisdiction so that it changes its behavior. But most of those decisions are done locally.

So the bottom line is that the more we know about how the system works, the more effective we are going to be in actually bringing about change.

That doesn’t mean, by the way—I recognized the fact that I was a symbol, and that symbol is important. I was just seeing your kids, and your niece and nephew. There was a generation of kids who grew up seeing an African American first family in the White House. That didn’t just have an impact on African American kids. It had an impact on white kids, who took that for granted. It was not unusual to see, suddenly, a person of color in that leadership position. That has value too. It’s not all about policy. It’s also about spirit and inspiration.

So I don’t denigrate the symbolic role of my election. I think that was meaningful. It’s one of the reasons I was inspired to run, because I thought it would have some impact. But it is not by itself sufficient to change the history of discrimination and the structural inequities that have built up over 400 years. For that you’ve got to look at budgets and you’ve got to look at laws. We have to be clear-eyed about how difficult it is to move this society forward and not be discouraged when it doesn’t happen overnight.

What do you want us to take from A Promised Land?

I think I hint at it in the preface. I hope when people read this, in addition to thinking this is a good story; in addition to young people hopefully being inspired that maybe “I, too, can get involved in public service in some fashion, even if it’s not elective office, but I want to be involved in the course of our society.…” More than anything, I want people to come away with a sense that, I really do believe America is exceptional, but maybe not for the reasons that sometimes we think. It’s not because we’re the wealthiest nation on earth, or we have the most powerful military on earth. It’s because, uniquely among great powers throughout history, we are not only a democracy, but we are a multiracial, multiethnic democracy, and that we have fought battles internally over several centuries now to try to expand the number of people who can sit at the table, who qualify as “We the People.” Black folks and poor folks and women and the LGBTQ community and immigrants. If we can make that work, if we can learn to embrace a common creed and respect each other, and treat every child in our care with regard and concern, then that is what makes us that shining city on a hill. That’s the example that the world looks for. That American idea is worth preserving.

But it only works if we acknowledge that the reality and the idea don’t match, and that what we can take pride in is not: Oh, it’s always been great, and if you criticize it or you protest or you try to take down the Confederate flag, that somehow that means you’re un-American or you don’t love America. No-no, no-no. What we love about America is the fact that we are noisy, and we’ll protest, and we complain, and we fuss, and we struggle, and at each juncture then we become a little more just and a little more fair and a little more empathetic, and more voices are heard and more people have a seat at the table. If we can keep on doing that, then we can teach, or at least set an example for the rest of the world.

From the Archive: Barack Obama’s Office Politics

The divisions that play themselves out in the United States are not unique to the United States. There are other countries that are struggling with racial issues. There are countries like Northern Ireland where the people look undistinguishable but are just as bitterly divided historically around religious issues. There are ethnic conflicts in every corner of the globe.

And as the world shrinks and cultures collide because of social media and the internet and 24/7 television, if we don’t learn to live together, we will perish. We can’t solve big problems like climate change or global inequality unless we can see each other and listen to each other and learn to work together. And I hope that anybody reading this book says it’s worth us investing in the promise of America even as we understand that—as Moses understood and Dr. King proclaimed in a speech just right before he got shot—we may not get there. But we can see it. And it’s on behalf of those beautiful children of yours and my daughters, and children everywhere, that we keep on fighting, to make sure they get there, even if we don’t.

Thank you very much.

Yes. That was fun. It was great to talk to you. Keep on turning out those beautiful books of yours.

I am trying. I am trying my best. I finally got back on a schedule, so I’m actually writing nearly every day.

Good. Are you a morning writer or a nighttime writer?

When I was younger I was a nighttime writer. But since I have kids, I have to get up early…now I’m a morning writer.

See, I can’t write in the morning.

You can’t?

No. My brain doesn’t work. I do my best writing between 10 o’clock at night and 1 or 2 in the morning, when I’m really focused and no distraction.

Are you one of those people who you don’t need a lot of sleep?

I’ve trained myself not to need a lot of sleep. But I like sleeping when I can. It’s great to see you. Thank you.

Great to see you. Thank you too.

Take care. Hope to see you in person soon.

Yes, I would love that.

Okay. Bye-bye.

Bye.

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