Sunday Sitdown with Willie Geist - John Grisham

Episode Date: June 12, 2022

In the three decades since leaving the law for writing, John Grisham has become one of the most widely read authors in human history. He has sold an astounding 350 million books, including 47 consecutive #1 bestsellers printed in 50 different languages. In this week’s “Sunday Sitdown,” Willie Geist gets together with Grisham to talk about his leap from small town Southern lawyer to star novelist and his latest work, the novella Sparring Partners.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hey guys, Willie Geist here with another episode of the Sunday Sit Down podcast. My thanks as always for clicking and listening along. It is no exaggeration to say that my guest today is one of the most widely read authors in the history of human civilization. Is that dramatic enough for you? Well, it's true. His name is John Grisham and he has sold 350 million copies of his books over the last three decades or so. It started with the time to kill the firm, the pelicans, the pelle, in brief, the client, the chamber, the rainmaker, it goes on and on and on. His latest is called Sparring Partners. It's actually a novella, collection of three stories, the first of which stars Jake Briggants. If that name sounds familiar, he, of course, is the protagonist and our hero

in a Time to Kill, played by Matthew McConaughey in that hit movie as well. You know John Grisham's story by now. He was a small town Mississippi lawyer and started writing about things he was seeing in the courtroom. The first was a time to kill. They printed 5,000 copies of it. Nobody bought it by his own admission, except him. He bought a thousand copies. So here we'll talk about that just to get some sales on the board. And it was the firm, the second book that really changed everything. Before it even was published, it was shopped around Hollywood. The rights were purchased. That drove up interest in the book, became a number one bestseller. And since then, you're ready for this? Grisham has had 47 consecutive number one bestseller.

47. You'll hear about his writing process, his personal story. He's a great guy. He's a smart southern gentleman with humility, even after all this success, and spends a lot of his free time working on causes like The Innocence Project, which is a non-profit organization dedicated to exonerating people who are in prison wrongfully, who've been convicted of things they didn't do, including people on death row. So a lot to talk about with John Grisham, a fascinating guy with a great personal story and a lot to say about the world today. I should point out we got together inside a conference room at the New York Bar Association, one of those long tables you'd see in movies where people give depositions.

And it made John a little uneasy, taking them back to the days of being an attorney. A great conversation with John Grisham right now on the Sunday Sit Down podcast. Sparring Partners is a novella, which is new for you, John. There are three stories, about 125, something like that, pages each of them. Why did you decide to take that approach this time? The stories, all three stories have been around for a while. And I keep a lot of stories. Most of them don't work.

Most of them, after a period of time, they just go away. The good ones stick and become something longer. They become novels, hopefully. But these three, I've had for a long time. and I realized that as the as more and more birthdays go by, the stories were not being written. They were not being published. And so in an effort to get the stories published,

and I love the stories. So let's publish them as three novellas. I'm too long-winded for short fiction and too lazy for a big, fat novel, like Stephen King type, a thousand-page novel. I can't do that. So I'm somewhere in the middle. And my usual novels are about 400 pages.

That's what I like to read. These were not quite that long. There's not quite enough characters or action or plot in these three stories. One of them takes place in three hours, a kid on death row. And so they're just stories that been around, and there's time to publish them. And does that hit you while you're writing it? Let's take Homecoming, you bring back Jake Brighance. You're writing it out and you say, maybe this isn't a full book?

Yeah. And then you kind of cut it short. Yeah, well, Homecoming is a continuation of a short story. I have one collection of short stories that came out 10 years ago. And there's a story called Fish Files about a local lawyer, one of Jake's buddies across the square, who does what or did what I knew two lawyers to do. They cracked up. They stole a bunch of money that wasn't theirs.

And they fled in the middle of the night, the small town. And Mack is our hero. and his marriage is bad, he's broke, he takes some money that belonged to his clients, and he dreamed of going off to the beach, and that's where he went. And when the story was over, he's in Belize, Central America, live in the good life. But three years go by, and it's time to come home. You can't run forever. And there's a lot of issues waiting for him back home.

He decides to try to come back home, and he has two teenage daughters that he really misses. And so he wants to come make up and stop running. And nothing goes as planned. To say the least. He hires, well, he convinces Jake, his old buddy and Harry Rex, Jake's sidekick, to kind of test the waters to see if there are any indictments waiting on him or lawsuits. And for the first few days, things look pretty clear, and then they get complicated. So Max homecoming does not go as planned.

You were so fluent in the language of not only the law, but the shady side of the law. I'm not suggesting you were shady as an attorney, John. But did you see something along the way that you sort of stored away and said, these are the kind of characters I'm going to write about somewhere in your legal career or just observing lawyers? Oh, sure. I watch lawyers, and they're fascinating. I always have. Small town guys, big firm guys are really. really intriguing, the conflicts, the bad behavior, the law firms that blow up, the conflicts

of interest, the law firms are always blowing up. Lawyers are always doing things that are hard to believe. And I've said a thousand times, most lawyers are honest, hardworking people who don't make a lot of money. They're boring. Nobody wants to read about that, okay? You want to read about the guy who cracks up and does something really crazy. And that's what's fun to write about and fun to read about. And I've actually seen that when I was practicing law in a small town in Mississippi. I knew two guys who cracked up and fled. And they both went to prison once they got called. They didn't run very fast. But I knew both of them very well. And for different reasons at different times, they cracked up. But those stories are pretty rich.

And, but I also like to watch lawyers who, um, who are innovative and with litigation are a great criminal defense lawyer and a great trial. Jake is my favorite, you know, and from, from Ford County. And I hope I go back there one day with Jake again to tell another courtroom drama. Uh, I love the courtroom as a spectator, not as a defendant. Uh, but I, I like to, I like to write about, um, courtroom dramas and the intrigue and the jury deliberations and the judges and all that kind of stuff. That's my world.

That's where I like to live. Still, after 40 books, I still enjoy it. So fun for your fans to see Jake back. It'll take them back to a time to kill, and they'll think of Matthew McConaughey and all those things that really launched you to where you are right now. Did you love sitting down with him again and putting him in a new place? Well, Jake was a very autobiographical character.

When I wrote the story 35 years ago, I was that small town lawyer in Mississippi, very idealistic, dreaming of the big case, the big courtroom drama that would, you know, establish me as a badass trial lawyer. That was the dream, never happened. But I wrote that story from that point of view. Matthew took it to a whole different level. Matthew became Jake because the movie was so popular and he was so good in the movie. And I waited 20-some-odd years from not. 1989 to 2013, 24 years, I guess, before I brought Jake back in a book called Sycamore Row.

And it was another full-blown courtroom drama. And we were pleasantly surprised at the reception that Jake got the second time he came back. And not only by critics, reviewers, but also by the sales. numbers. People really like Jake. And most that's because of Matthew. He made Jake famous. And after reviewing the sales numbers from Sycamore Road, I said, I'm not going to wait 24 years again. So I brought him back last year, two years ago, with a book called Time for Mercy, which is a really brutal courtroom murder case. And I've since realized that Jake is very popular. He makes an appearance in Homecoming for the first story and sparring partners,

not in the courtroom, but it's a friend who is helping a buddy try to return to town. But there's enough of Jake. He'll be back hopefully sometime soon. The challenge with Jake is that you want to see him in court. You want to see the courtroom drama. And a small town guy in Mississippi can only have so many big cases. Right, right. They have a massive courtroom drama every other week, you know.

So he's also growing up. He's maturing. His family's growing up. And so there'll be hopefully at least one more Jake novel. Jake sells books. Jake sells very well. And Matthew is going to do a time for Mercy with HBO, we think. We haven't signed papers yet, but he and I have talked about it.

And it's very much in the works. Maybe we have signed a contract. It took a while. Yeah. But that's supposed to be a big HBO. like a six-part series sometime in the near future. I certainly hope it happens because, again,

it'll be great for Jake, great for the brand. I love your relationship with Matthew because that movie came along at a time. People forget he was not well-known as an actor at all. And you were kind of getting off the ground. The firm had blown up, but you were still rising yourself. It's fun to watch two guys

who've reached sort of the zenith of their fields. grow up together in a way. Yeah, well, with the contract for a time to kill, I didn't sell the film rights for a long time. The first wave of movies came out. The firm, the Pelican Brief, the client, Chamber was not a big movie. Rainmaker with Matt Damon.

Those movies came out in the early 1990s, and I wouldn't sell Time to Kill. And finally, Joel Schumacher, who did the client, convinced me to sell the film rights, and he was going to do a Time to Kill. And I said, okay, but I'm going to have veto power over some of the casting. I don't want to make the movie. I don't know how to make movies.

I'm not going to write the screenplay. But I'm very protective of the character, Jake, and a couple of others in the book. And so I retain the absolute right to veto casting, which is very rare. But they gave it to me. And we got ready to film the movie, and we didn't have a star. We had Ashley Judd, we had Sandra Bullock, we had Donald Sutherland, Kiefer Sutherland. I can't even think about it. Samuel Jackson.

Oliver Platt was in there. Platt. I can't think of all of it. It was a beautiful cast. And they were all ready to go. And the money was on the table and couldn't go around filming in Mississippi with no star.

And we were fighting over the star. And Joel said, I have this guy in mind. We couldn't agree. Nobody could agree. And so they call Matthew in for a quick screen test and filmed him sitting in the office smoking a cigar. And then back in the old days, they FedEx me the cassette overnight in 1996. And the FedEx truck pulled up. Renee and I were waiting to get the cassette tape.

We stuck in the machine and there was Matthew. And the accent was perfect because that's the way he talks, being from Texas. and, you know, really charismatic, great-looking guy. Renee's first reaction was, I think I'm in love with him. He said, I think we've got our guy. Yeah, that's our guy. And so they signed him up real quick, and I finally met him on the set and hung out with him. And he's a pretty cool guy.

It was obviously, and Joel Schumacher was very generous with Matthew. close-up shots and his final summation to the jury, you know, any actor's dream to have that much, that much footage. But he, he did great. I should say, and I'm not sure everybody knows the backstory of the book, A Time to Kill. You were an attorney, as you say, a small town attorney looking for your big case. What made you think you could sit down and write a book that people might read about your experience, having watched that trial in 1984, that motivated you to sit down and write? I had no idea what I was doing. I had never written before. I had never thought about writing. It was not a childhood dream. It was not something I studied in college.

It was just this obsession with a courtroom drama that I had sort of cooked up, inspired by something I really saw, but changed a bunch of the facts. And the more I thought about this courtroom drama, the more complicated it became, the more layers there were to it. And I finally said, okay, I'm going to see if I can write this. And that started a process that went on for three years. And I was, which is not a long time in the course of writing a novel, when you have a real job and you have other responsibilities. I was practicing law. I was in the state legislature in Mississippi.

Renee's having babies. You know, life was kind of complicated. But I hung with it. I hung with it for three years. And in my spare time, wherever I kept the current, it was all handwritten on legal pads. Wow. And I kept the current legal pad in my briefcase. And so if I was, if I'd go to court and have to wait half an hour, I'd sneak off to the law library upstairs and write.

in the state legislature where we were adept at killing long periods of time. I would sneak off to a committee room and write for a couple hours. I always had it with me. And, you know, like anything else, if you do it every day, it piles up. And after about a year and a half, I realized I was halfway through with my story as I envisioned it, the drama. And we had not yet got to the courtroom. And Kevin Spacey, that's the other guy I'm thinking about Kevin Spacey. So anyway, I kept plugging away.

Renee was reading it. She was very encouraging, you'll keep going. But again, I didn't, no one knew about it, but the two of us. And I had no grand plans to get it published when I finished. It just one thing led to them. And finally, I was finished. And the trial was over. The verdict was in.

And it was about a thousand pages. My secretary typed it. I showed her the book, and I said, type this. There's a stack of legal pants about it out. And she said, why? I said, you know, hey, I'm paying you, okay? Type my book. And I took it all back to the state cap on the legislature.

And she typed it up in 1987 and begin sending it to New York back and forth, the old submission, rejection, long before the Internet. And I finally found an agent who, liked enough to, after a bunch of them said no. And he got it, he took the book, and he made the rounds in New York. And the same folks who had already said no to me, said no to him. So it got two looks. And then finally we found a small press to publish it.

It came out in June of 1989, and they printed 5,000 hardbacked copies, and I bought 1,000 of them. I didn't have any money, but I had more than my publisher. At least you're honest about that. People do buy their own books. I'd give them away. They've stacked at him in my office. Most of my clients couldn't afford books.

I just gave them the book. But it was a wonderful time. And also at the same time, I got myself into the habit of writing every day. And I tell students, if you want to write, do it every day. Don't dream about it. Just do it. And I had this idea for the second book. or another book that I really liked, and Renee really liked it.

She thought it was much more accessible, much more commercial, and that was the firm. And when the firm came out in March of 1991, over 30 years ago, things changed overnight. I was suddenly bored with the law, bored of the politics. I said, okay, I'm going to write. I'm going to, the dream has come true. I can write full time. But what gave you the courage or the foolishness, perhaps, to write another book after the first one didn't sell much?

What made you say, I should keep going with this? What I said was, I'm going to write one more book. At a time to kill flopped. I mean, we couldn't sell 5,000 copies. And they never went back for a second printing back then. No paperback, no foreign deal, nothing. Okay, it was dead. And I told Renee, I said, I'm going to write one more book.

And if it flops, you can have this career, this hobby. I'll just go back and start suing people again. That's what I'm supposed to be doing anyway. I'm a lawyer. And didn't have to do that. Well, and because it was purchased, right, the movie rights before it even came out, did you have a sense when somebody bought those rights that this was going to change everything for you? Did it feel like a big moment?

It was one phone call. There was one phone call in January of 1990. The book was here in New York at my agent's office. He had shown the book to a few publishers, and there was no demand for the firm. And a scout here in New York saw it and sent it to L.A. And a guy out there ran off 10 copies and sent it to the big studios. And sort of implied he was my agent. I'd do nothing about it.

And he got kind of nervous when they started making offers. And so the thing really just kind of spiraled. No, it took off. And finally, at the last, we had three big studios bidding for the film rights. At the last minute, somebody said, hey, should we check with the writer? And that was the phone call on a Sunday morning. My agent called me.

They finally called my agent. They had a big fight, and I all threatened sue. They said, okay, let's make peace. And, you know, something good's about to happen. So they called me at the last moment. I had no clue. There was no book deal. I wasn't sure the book was going to get published.

And the thing popped up in Hollywood. It went crazy. And I got this phone call that changed my entire life because suddenly it was a lot of money. And then once we got the movie deal, the publishers woke up. New York and everybody wanted the book. Right. So we had another auction here and then we had an auction, we started selling foreign rights. And in about 30 days, my life was upside down in a good way.

And at that point, I said, okay, I'm fed up with being a lawyer. Did you and Renee have a moment? I mean, there are moments along the way I know with my wife. We go, wow, life is changing a little bit for us. This is exciting. We built this together. Do you remember that moment? Oh, yes.

We've had several great moments, but when I hung up the phone, and I told Renee what the deal was for the film rights, we were due to go to my mother's house for Sunday lunch. And we said, we both grew up in very conservative, tight, Southern Baptist households, okay, a lot of rules. One rule was you never talked about family money outside the family. There was no money inside the family, but it was never just never just. discussed, okay. You didn't talk about your family's money. And that's the way we were raised. And we were sitting at the kitchen table and we said, okay, this is crazy, okay, this is hard to believe. We've got to go have lunch at my mother's, my family's over there. We'll talk about selling the film rights, but we are never going to discuss the money. Okay, it's nobody's business.

And we did that and everybody was happy and they had no concept of what it had just happened. We didn't really understand. First thing Monday morning, Paramount Pictures, issued a press release with all the details in the old. So it took a couple days for that to get back to our hometown, and that changed everything. So suddenly there was a lot of money on the table, and that cat was out of bag. People knocking at your door a little more often than they had been?

That didn't take long, yeah. You know, I've always wanted to sit and talk with you because I was in high school when the firm came out, and I was probably like you, played sports, like girls, all those kind of things. Pretty good at school, did my homework. But I remember we were on vacation that summer when it came out. I remember flipping through that, say, oh, this is fun. This is fun.

Reading is fun. Do you appreciate the impact you've had on people reading when you've sold 350 million books on making reading accessible and exciting and fun for people who may not otherwise have stepped through that door? Yeah. It's hard to see yourself. way other people see you. Yeah. It's hard to impact, it's hard to gauge the impact that you may have on people.

But a lot of people have said nice things, just like you just said something nice about enjoying the reading. I've got a pretty good feel for, you know, what it has meant to certain people. And what's happened since then, since the firm in 1991, and what it took me a few years to realize, I have a lot of faithful readers, and they want that big legal thriller every October. And I'm going to come through as long as I can. They'll tolerate me writing something else, a baseball novel or a football novel, or now a basketball novel, or the kids' books, or a funny story like skipping Christmas.

They'll kind of tolerate those books, and they'll buy them and enjoy them, but they want that legal thriller every October. And those fans have been loyal for 30 years now. And I think about those people all the time because I want to give them, I'm writing a book right now that comes out in October after Sparring Partners published today. I want to give those people the best book they've had yet, the best reading experience they've had yet. And that's my goal. I stay motivated to give them every time out. It's hard to, you know, it's hard to get my head around 300 million books and 50 languages.

It's always a fun moment when we're traveling somewhere, some out of the way place. And you sit at a little bookstore and you'll see a book in another language or a big bookstore in, you know, in European cities to see a Grisham shelf, you know. And yeah, we always stop and point and smile and make a joke and keep going. But, you know, after 30 years, we're kind of used to. Yeah, right. It's part of life now. But I imagine you do have moments where you think back to the little boy growing up in Arkansas and Mississippi and your dad's picking cotton.

And you say, my goodness, how did I get where I am sitting right now? Through hard work and talent, of course. But what a ride. what a ride and we have never for a moment taking it for granted. Years ago when things were getting really crazy and there was a three or four year period, 91, 92, 93 when the books were coming out but also the movies were coming out and life was really, we were losing privacy that we realized how much we cherished our privacy. And so we were making a judgment.

months in life. We sat down one time and said, look, this is, everything in popular fiction is temporary. Nothing's going to last forever, whether it's, whether it's books or TV or movies or sports or fashion or whatever. In the popular culture, nobody stays on top forever. It's all a temporary career. And so, you know, one of these days, the books are not going to be as popular as they are now. Things are going to change. And when that happens, let's admit it and realize it, let's be able to look back and say it was a heck of a ride. We had a lot of fun and we didn't change. We kept our feet on the ground. We raised great kids. And so we're still, we're still waiting for the, the books are still seven. The books are still popular. I was going to say,

I don't think that's coming for you, John. I hate to 45 number ones in a row. I don't think this day is going to come to the one you're waiting for. Hey, guys, thanks for listening to the Sunday Sit Down podcast. Stick around to hear more from John Grisham. right after the break. Welcome back. Now more of my conversation with John Grisham. You mentioned your process that you start on January 1st, wake up, time for a new book. You want to end it by July the 1st. I note by the clock that I'm eating into your writing time. I've got it. I've got a month. I've got a month. Okay. You've got some time here. Is it those fans that keep you getting up every New Year's Day to write a new one or are there ever moments where you go,

gosh, I'm taking a year off. I've done enough of these. I've thought about taking a year off. I thought, in René several times in the past, and the kids are gone, you know, it's just the two of us, why don't you take a year off? You're working too hard. And I always say, okay, I'll take a year off, if you take a year off. Where we're going to go? What are we going to do? And we can't, we, that's as far as we go. Well, you know, the motivation is, again, after writing for 35 years, it's a daily habit.

And there's nothing else I can find to do in the morning between 7 and 11, 7 and 12. I can't feel those hours any other way that I've found yet. So I still cherish those moments, the early morning hours, going to my little writing cabin with no phones, no facts, no music, no internet, no interruptions, and being able to create stories that bring a lot of pleasure to a lot of people. I could have quit 20 years ago. But it's, so it's not about money. It's about being able to entertain and bringing pleasure to a lot of people.

I still get kick out of that. Are you like the rest of us, do you stare at the screen some days and there's just nothing coming? You just drink your coffee and look at it, walk away. Some days are slower than others. No, my goal every day is a thousand words. A thousand a day. A thousand a day. And that's, you know, I don't stare for long.

Also, when I start the book, I've got a pretty good outline, so I know what's going to happen next. And again, I tell aspiring writers, you can waste a lot of time if you don't know where you're going. And if you always know where you're going, it's hard to get lost. And you know the end before you start. That's one of my rules of writing popular fiction. Don't write the first scene until you know the last. last scene. I talked to John Irving in Toronto a couple years ago, and I said, is it true that you've said that you write the last sentence before you write the first one? And he said,

that's true. Wow. I said, I'm not that smart. But I do know the last scene before I start. Imagine it. Right in the last sentence? That's pretty amazing. And working back from there. But you always, you always know where you're going. So if you know the ending, you know what's next, it's hard to get, it's hard to stare at the screen and not do anything. You got to get there. You got to get there. One of the stories in here, Strawberry Moon, is you mentioned it. It takes place over the course of a few hours, guy on death row.

And I note that it ties into the work you do in your life as well with the Innocence Project and something that's important to you. What did you want to say in that story in sparring partners? There are two issues in the book that we should, we should, deal with, one has been dealt with. Up until about 10 or 12 years ago, the Supreme Court finally ruled that you cannot put minors on trial for capital murder. That was the big issue and a time for mercy, Jake's last courtroom drama because his client was a 15-year-old kid charged a capital murder. And for a lot of reasons, that's not a good idea. It's not fair.

And the Supreme Court finally said, stop it. In this story, the kid went on, he went to trial at the age of 14, I think, for capital murder. He's found guilty. He's been on death row for 15 years. He's going to be executed at the age of 29, which is very young for a death row inmate to be killed. So the first issue is trying minors for capital crimes. The second one is in this story, the kid didn't kill anybody. He never pulled a trigger.

He was an accomplice. His brother pulled the trigger. His brother killed two people. Home invasion, home break in. They were guilty, okay? They were homeless kids who needed food. And they'd been living in the wild for a long time. And they broke in a house and they thought the house was empty.

Well, there was a gun battle. Everybody got killed, but our hero, Cody. And the point is, just because you're an accomplished doesn't mean you should be, executed. You should be punished severely, but he never pulled the trigger. He didn't kill anybody. And that law is, that's not the law in every state, but the majority of states. So I touched on the law a little bit there. But also, I've been to death row in like six states, and it's not, those are not always fun visits. But it's, it's amazing the different rituals that go into an execution. Everybody does it differently, everybody has different rules. And, and it's, it's,

And I'm kind of fascinated by those stories and what an inmate goes through in the final few hours and how they go about it, how the state goes about it, and the last minute appeals and the last minute, the last meal, the last words, the last, you know, we're rapidly approaching the point in this country where the death penalty is dying. There's so few executions now. There's so few death verdicts from juries. it will eventually go away. Do you think so? It will go away? Yeah, well, in most places. Virginia abolished it two years ago,

became the first Southern State to do so in many years. What's happening is it's just juries, juries just don't want to do it. Juries get to see the whole picture now. They get to see the horrible crime that deserves severe punishment. They also get to see the defendant and where he came from, and how he reached that point. And so there's more sympathy now for someone who was raised like that.

And so juries nowadays are much more willing to go life without parole, without killing the person. And in many cases, that's a very just punishment because of a horrible crime. So there are fewer, fewer death verdicts every year, fewer executions every year. It's probably never really going to go away because you've got some really active death states, but even places like Texas and Oklahoma, see far fewer death verdicts these days. So it's going to kind of taper off to almost nothing, but it will always be there. California has 600 people on death row. It's not an active death state.

Right. Killed two in the last 15 years. Right. So some states aren't serious about it. Other states are very serious about it. Your work with the Innocence Project, I gather, nearly as meaningful to you as writing a best-selling book, if you can help to get somebody who didn't commit a crime out of jail. Sometimes it's too long. They waste their whole life back there. But behind bars, how important is that work to you? Well, it's very important because I never knew there was a problem.

Even as a small town criminal defense lawyer, I never had a client I thought was wrongfully convicted or mistreated. I was naive. When I wrote The Innocent Man and had to research the issue, I realized that there are tens of thousands of innocent, people in prison. And most people don't believe that, but it's true. And we're trying to get them out one at a time. It's fairly easy to send an innocent person to prison. It's almost impossible to get one out. And at the Innocence Project in New York, we litigate from coast to coast

and have a budget with great lawyers and all that. But still, and these are DNA-only cases. So we have clear biological proof through DNA, and we've exonerated 375 men. Most crimes do not have DNA proof. There's no blood, semen, or whatever. There's nothing left behind. And those are very difficult to solve. And so I'm pen pals with some guys in prison. One guy in Oklahoma has been there for 35 years.

And we're trying to get him out, completely innocent. and heartbreaking. Those stories stay with me. And as a storyteller, they are fascinating stories because of the amount of injustice, suffering. Anywhere you have great suffering, you have great fiction. That's why the South has produced so many writers. There's so many stories.

But wrongful convictions are exonerations, The ultimate triumph after 30 years of walking out of prison and being able to survive in the world. While somebody else was roaming free while the real rapist or the real killer was out there, it's very gratifying, but it's also bittersweet because it happened and it could have been prevented initially. Sweet because you're getting a guy out after a long time. But the work is pretty addictive. And a lot of times it's because the guy or the woman didn't have money to hire a lawyer who could prevent him from going in there for 30 years. It's all so much socioeconomic undercurrent to all those cases.

You don't see any rich people on death row. Yeah. You don't see any wealthy people serving long sentences. You don't see that doesn't happen. And oftentimes bad lawyering is a cause. of the wrongful conviction. That's one of our, one things, one of the things we fight. We try to, we try to fight for better legal representation for people charged with serious crimes. We, we all believe in a fair trial. We're Americans. Let's have a fair trial. Let's have a trial. Let's make it fair. But they're rarely fair because the state has all the resources. And so we fight to

provide adequate representation for our clients. Does it occur to you, John? even though you haven't practiced law in more than 30 years, that because of your success as an author, you will have a greater impact on justice in America, perhaps, than you ever could have, even as a lawyer, because of the influence you have. Yeah, it's hard to gauge the influence, but, yeah, I mean, the books raise awareness.

The books highlight certain issues, and those are the better books. The books where I take an infinitely readable suspense story, a thriller, and weave some legal issue through it that raises awareness, you can't really preach because you can't assume that your readers share your politics. And you can't make that mistake. So I don't do that. But if you read my stuff, you kind of know where I'm coming from.

especially with wrongful convictions. But yeah, I want to highlight these issues. I'm not finished with that. There's a long list of injustices in our criminal justice system that I'm not finished with. I want to write about. I want to expose the problems that we have and raise awareness. But also, the ultimate goal is to entertain.

This is entertainment. I want people to be entertained. the books. Which I love you've always said that. I'm under no illusion. I'm not trying to win over the critics or this or that. I want to give my audience what they want in October of every year, buy it at Christmas time or whatever they want it. That's sort of your guiding philosophy, isn't it? I've lost the Nobel for 30 years in a row. I can take a hint. I'm probably not going to win the Nobel. I don't do it for awards. I do it for the fun of doing it and for the financial rewards and also to entertain. I'm in a lucky position to be able to write books that

people enjoy. And I'm not a serious literary artist. Don't claim to be. Don't know how to become one. That wasn't where my talent came from. I'd rather sell books. Do you ever see a day, John, where you stop? You say, I've done it. I've sold all the books I'm going to sell. I've given the people what they want for 30-some years, I'm done. I can't see that day yet. I'm only 67 years old. If I stay healthy and stay, you know, inspired creatively, I hope I can do it for a long time.

But again, I can't, I've learned a few things. You never can predict what's going to happen next. You can't worry about what's already happened. And, you know, never say never. I've said I'll never write that story again. Well, I wrote it. So I've learned that, you know, be careful what you say. I'm not going to say.

I'm never going to retire. But I think there comes a time with some writers I've always admired. You know, as they get up in the years, it's time to quit. I hope I have the sense to do that. And I get pretty good advice at home. Well, I was going to say, I think it sounds like Renee is a good editor, and she might let you know when it's time. She doesn't mince words with me, okay?

She's pretty blunt, so I'll know. If the stories aren't working, I'll know it at home before anybody else does. Isn't that the beauty of knowing your wife for so long? Because I've known my wife's in sixth grade. They're not interested in the author you are or any of that. They just hit you with it. She's not impressed. She's not impressed, buddy.

She's looking for a way to needle you, okay? She's looking for a good criticism. Stick around for more of my conversation with John Grisham right after a quick break. Welcome back now, the rest of my conversation with John Grisham. A lot of the inspiration for the characters I know comes from the way you grew up, where you grew up, some people you knew. It was humble. Is that a fair word to use your upbringing?

Or is that too gentle a word? It was pretty modest. My father was a cotton farmer in rural Arkansas when I was born in Black Oak, Arkansas. And for the first six years of my – the first seven years of my life was on the cotton farm. And it was a pretty hard life. A lot of kids in the family. But at the same time, I had two parents who were devoted to each other, and they were always there. And we didn't have much.

We didn't realize that. But every Sunday morning, we were scrubbed. and starched and sitting on the front row of the Black Oak Babbage Church all dressed up because that's what my mother believed in. So we didn't realize we didn't have much. But the farming got to the point where dad just couldn't, he never made a living. He lost crop after crop. And so he finally, he fled the farm.

We fled the farm in the middle of the night. I think some unpaid bills. Yeah, it took my dad, it took my dad 10 years. to pay off his farm debts. And so I was 16 years old. And he never bragged about it. But when he paid the last bill, he told me. So I finally paid off all those farm debts.

And we would go back to the farm, but our grandparents were there and cousins and aunts and uncles. We would go back from the city, the suburbs of Memphis to the farm country is only an hour away. And we knew we'd gotten lucky. We knew we had been lucky to get off the farm. and find a better life. And by the time I was, you know, 15 years old,

life had improved greatly for us through my dad's hard work. So, but, you know, and I capture that story in a book called a Painted House that came out 20 years ago. And I wanted to write that book while my parents were still alive because they were my resources. And we had a lot of fun doing that book. But it was very autobiographical, very accurate. But that's where I came from.

What did your parents think coming from a cotton farm in Arkansas when you became John Grisham bestselling author? What'd they make of it? My mother always said she would say, I'm proud of all five of my kids. And we just never, we just never talked about it because we don't talk about things like that. And Rene and I don't talk about it in front of our kids. We've never talked about, you know, the glitzier aspects of this. It's always been downplayed. The kids have figured it out.

You know, they're 35 and 39 years old now, so they've grown up with it. We've never pretended that it was a big deal. We've always worked hard to make things normal. You've got a pretty good job of that. I mean, it seems like that you and Renee have kept things private and normal and to the extent you can with your success. Yeah, and also have been extremely happy. I really enjoy life and feel very fortunate, very blessed. Well, congratulations on this one. People are going to love it again.

Thank you, Willie. Nice to see you, John. My pleasure. My big thanks to John for a great conversation. You can find his latest book, Sparring Partners, wherever you buy your books. And my thanks to all of you, as always, for listening again this week. If you want to hear more of these conversations with my guests every week, be sure to click follow so you never miss an episode. And don't forget to tune in to Sunday today every weekend on NBC.

I'm Willie Geist. We'll see you right back here next week on the Sunday Sit Down podcast.