It’s all true. Oscar Mayer was a real person and he was my great-grandfather. The family business was in Madison, where I was born. My dad was literally working on the shop floor when I was born, and he thought I needed to go to business school and get my act together. It was a family business that had been founded in the 1880s, but it got bought out by the corporate behemoth General Foods, and then Kraft and Philip Morris, and now Kraft again. When I turned twenty-one, the company sold and the stock was held by family members, so we all basically won the lottery.

I already had a sense that great extremes of concentrated wealth were not a good thing. I didn’t really want to benefit from that system, and I tried not to be ungrateful toward my parents that tried to give me a debt-free college education — something everyone should have. But I gave the money away to a bunch of social change foundations and have very few regrets looking back. Among other things, the experience helped me realize how much other multigenerational advantages flow aside from wealth and cash. There are all kinds of other benefits. So that’s very much shaped who I am and why I think about inequality.

I have personally learned a lot from historic fiction. It can be a gateway into history or a particular region or culture. In this case, I have multiple agendas. But one of them was to lift up social movement history to talk about political formation.

There are a lot of coming-of-age stories that concern themselves with the influences on people, but I don’t see social movement formation really treated as a genre. So I wanted to tell a story that involves real people — Juanita Nelson, the war-tax resister; Sam Lovejoy, the tower toppler; or Vietnam vet Brian Willson — and I hope, as people read those stories, they want to learn more about who someone like Willson was and why he put his body in front of a train.

I was also trying to do futurist fiction, to think about the next seven to ten years. Fiction is an opportunity to articulate a vision that’s not just apocalypse. The book really is an attempt to show what it would look like if one community came together to prepare for a disrupted future, knowing that there are these larger systems that we need to be addressing while also figuring out how to take care of one another.

I live in a region [New England] where there are all kinds of interesting innovations around food systems and localized economy, mutual aid, and thinking differently about death and dying. What would it look like if we started to get our act together a little bit? That lent itself to fiction.

She’s the life of the party. She’s the person who remembers your birthday. She’s the one who dresses up in silly costumes. She did not go to college but is very much an intellectual. She thinks about ideas and history. She’s curious. In a sense, this is a formation story. Her thinking is shaped by these elders and others who are very steeped in nonviolent practice and direct action. That’s what forms her. And part of the tension is, why does she do what she does?

I’ve heard a number of people say things that resemble what Rae says — i.e. “If I become terminally ill, I’m not just going to go out quietly.” I was hiking in the woods just yesterday with a bunch of cousins — a dozen little kids and two older women. And one of the women asked what we would do if we encountered a bear. I replied that we would try to get the kids to safety, but the other woman said, without blinking, that she would go straight at the bear.

I was moved to hear her say that, because she’s in her late sixties and understands that her job is to stand up for the next generation. There’s this group, Third Act, that was started by Bill McKibben, Akaya Windwood, and a bunch of others who believe we shouldn’t be depending on young people to step up on climate change, and that we elders, who have been burning fossil fuel and benefiting from a fossil fuel–dependent society, need to step up and take the risks.

Rae is like that. She’s in the generative stage of her life. And there are people who feel this way: “If I’m called to do this, this is what I’ll do.” So it wasn’t entirely fanciful to imagine Rae would come to the same conclusion. I’ve heard many express a similar feeling about the need for an escalation of tactics in this moment.

Since I’ve heard people saying these kinds of things, it was interesting to — in a fictional way — try and spin out what the implications would be: tremendous political blowback, the criminalization of dissent, repression of legitimate protest, an acceleration of the stuff that we’re already seeing in reaction to even slightly escalated tactics.

My personal view is that what Rae decides to do is both tactically and morally wrong and that it would have tremendous negative consequences, both politically and for the people around her. We know that’s not what someone like Rae would have wanted, notwithstanding her laser focus on the responsibility of the fossil fuel industry and some of the less negative things that happen in the years following her death.

If there’s anything I hope people will talk about in relation to the book, it’s what bold action looks like when you have a rogue industry that’s as politically powerful as fossil fuels, that has done so much to create distracted chatter about who’s responsible. “Aren’t we all responsible for climate change, especially those of us in the affluent middle classes?” “Geez, I should have bought that electric vehicle!” Or “I should have ridden my bike and walked rather than driven to the store.” The fossil fuel industry is happy to have us all feel like we are all responsible for this dilemma.

And in the end, when faced with these realities, Rae comes to the very personal conclusion as she’s dying that she wants to make an impact at the end of her life. So to me, her act is an invitation for everybody to ask, whatever they feel about what Rae does, what does a bold response to climate change look like, and what does it look like to actually address the fossil fuel industry and the power that they’ve used to deny climate change and block alternatives?”

In a sense, the book is an altar. It’s an altar in the kind of global tradition of remembrance and honoring ancestors. It’s an altar to social movements and people who’ve come before who are lifelong activists. Not people who showed up at one demonstration but the lifers — the people who have devoted their whole life to economic and racial justice, to addressing inequality and to environmental issues.

Then there’s also the role of the altars that Rae gets exposed to: Brian Willson in Vietnam going into a hut and finding Norman, an American Quaker on this Vietnamese altar. Or Norman Morrison, who self-immolated. There’s a spiritual part of Rae that’s interested in honoring and drawing strength from ancestors. Through her experiences, she also comes to believe we need to rethink our attitudes about death and dying, and what it is we want to say with our lives.