It’s been a rough year for Alex Collins. In the past twelve months, he’s lost his best friend, become the target of the two biggest bullies at school, and been sentenced to community service. But on June 25, 2013, he gets a call for help from Cassie Ramirez, the prettiest girl in school. At last, he feels like his luck might be changing.
Cassie is at the Texas State Capitol to protest Wendy Davis’s historic filibuster of the abortion bill HB2, and she’s rallying everyone she knows to join her. Until today, Alex didn’t know what a filibuster was, and he’d never given a moment’s thought to how he felt about abortion. But at the Capitol, he finds himself in the middle of a tense scene full of pro-life “blueshirts,” pro-choice “orangeshirts,” and blustering politicians playing political games as Wendy Davis tries to run out the clock at midnight.
Alex may have entered the Capitol looking to spend time with Cassie, but the political gets personal when he runs into his ex-friend Shireen in an orange T-shirt and quickly realizes that when it comes to an issue like abortion, neutral isn’t an option. Over the next nineteen hours—as things get increasingly heated both on the Senate floor and between the two sets of protesters—Alex will struggle to figure out what side he’s on, knowing that whatever choice he makes will bring him face-to-face with his past mistakes.
We were lucky enough to get to chat with Dan, the wonderful author of this fabulous book!
Hi Dan, welcome to the blog! Thanks for sparing us some time.
Thanks for having me!
Tell us a little about yourself.
Sure thing. I live in Austin, Texas with my wife and our dog. These days, I’m a writer for Texas Monthly magazine. Before that, I strung together odd jobs to make a living—mostly loading moving trucks and volunteering as a human lab rat for pharmaceutical research trials—but I’ve been writing professionally for almost fifteen years now. The Fight For Midnight is my first YA novel.
What made you want to take on this topic?
I was at the Texas Capitol most of the summer of 2013, when the abortion laws were being debated and the filibuster occurred. It was a pretty incredible scene—certainly the messiest and most intense example of democracy in action I’d ever seen—and it never left my head. I was already an adult by the time it happened, and it was a fairly life-changing experience for me; I started to think about how it might have impacted me if I had been a teenager at the time, and about how to convey the weight of the issue to people who were too young to be there at the time it happened.
Was it difficult to keep both sides balanced as you wrote?
It wasn’t exactly difficult, but it was really important to me. I believe abortion is a fundamental human right; that is the perspective from which I come to this issue. I also have family and people I care about who disagree with that. I don’t think the book would have worked if their perspective hadn’t been represented accurately and fairly. I think it only works if they can see themselves in this story too—as a book written, in part, for people who are likely to still be making up their minds about abortion, it would have been dishonest to treat that side as less sincere or thoughtful than the people I know with whom I disagree. Readers are smart, and they’ll come up with the arguments you aren’t making if you try to put your thumb on the scale. For Alex’s conclusion toward the end to carry any weight, he has to engage with the best version of each argument, not the most manipulative one.
Did any of the characters surprise you as you wrote? Anything not end up as you thought it would?
There are two major narratives in the book—the first is obviously what’s going on at the Capitol with the filibuster, while the second is Alex trying to deal with both his guilt and his resentment toward Shireen over what happened the previous year. I knew how the filibuster story would go from the beginning, but Alex’s feelings over the rest of it unfurled themselves differently than I expected—it takes him longer than I thought it would to make peace with himself, and with Shireen. I think when it comes to that sort of emotional stuff, you can’t rush it—your characters will tell you when it’s honest for them to have a breakthrough.
What are you reading/watching at the moment? Any recommendations?
I’m a big comics fan, and read two graphic memoirs recently that I adored in different ways, for different reasons. It’s Lonely at the Center of the Earth by Zoe Thoroughgood is an incredibly beautiful, incredibly personal, emotionally raw book about the way making art can sustain us through the hardest parts of life, and which questions whether being someone who feels the need to create in order to survive our own brains is worth it. Ducks by Kate Beaton is no less intense, though it is a bit more straightforward, as a book about spending years working in the Canadian oil patch, that uses vignettes to create something wrenching and sad and funny and human. I strongly recommend both of them. And then my favorite books without pictures I’ve read this year are Nina LaCoeur’s We Are Okay and Mo Daviau’s Every Anxious Wave, which are wildly different from one another, but which both tell stories with a great deal of heart.
And finally; who is your favorite Muppet?
What a great question! I admire so many of them. Kermit, for his presence of mind and clear leadership even under stress. Rowlf, for his wisdom and insight. Beaker, for his determination in expressing himself despite challenges. Animal, for his passion, enthusiasm, and joie de vivre.
Dan, thank you so much for spending some of your valuable time with us!
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Book Links:
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60729454
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Fight-Midnight-Dan-Solomon/dp/1635830869/
Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-fight-for-midnight-dan-solomon/1141896943
IndieBound: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-fight-for-midnight-dan-solomon/18694697
About the Author:
Dan Solomon is a journalist based out of Austin, Texas. He’s a senior writer at Texas Monthly, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and Details. He covered the HB2 filibuster for the Austin Chronicle, where his work was part of the alt-weekly’s AAN Award-nominated coverage.
Author Links:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/dansolomon
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dansolomon/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/3829941-dan-solomon?stay=true
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dansolomon/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/3829941-dan-solomon?stay=true
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