A Young Man's Guide to Abortion Rights in The Fight for Midnight

Dan Solomon, author of The Fight for Midnight (photo by Jeff Wilson)

In 2013, back when Texas liberals and progressives played defense against Republicans banning abortion at 20 weeks (a length that in today's state of affairs feels like donkey's years), a little-known Democrat state senator from Fort Worth called Wendy Davis became an overnight superstar when she filibustered for 11 hours at the Texas Capitol. It all culminated in the bill's failure after folks in the gallery raucously shouted down the clock of the governor's special session. As Austin-based journalist Dan Solomon sees it, "It's kind of rough to recognize that in 10 years, this thing that felt so draconian and restrictive at the time now looks like a progressive fantasy of what abortion rights in Texas could look like. It's grim, but it's been a hell of a 10 years."

Solomon, now a senior editor at Texas Monthly, saw the day of the filibuster as fitting perfectly into a cohesive story structure. That's not the central story he wanted to tell, though. "The filibuster ended up being this real life-changing moment for me as a grownup," Solomon said. "I started thinking, 'What would it have been like if I had been 16 years old at the time I was there and seeing all of this happen?' How would that have affected me?"

In his debut novel, The Fight for Midnight, that question is answered in the form of Alex Collins, a reluctant teenage boy swept into the world of early 2010s political discourse. Somewhere in the throng of protesters donning orange or blue attire depending on their political affiliation, the fictional Alex finds himself questioning where he stands on the issue and how far he'll go to show it.

Davis' crusade for reproductive rights serves as the backdrop for Solomon's riveting page-turner. But while the real-life events of that heated summer would be a fascinating saga on their own, Solomon's tale inserts a familiar yet deeply engaging coming-of-age narrative into the commotion. It makes sense for him, too: He was there in 2013, bearing witness to Davis' fight alongside thousands of Texans. "It was all this really remarkable example of politics on a real personal level," he said, "of people being really involved in it, and really showing up with the ability to make change and to effect change, which isn't always how protest works. A lot of the time protest feels kind of like an empty gesture. But because the filibuster turned on the actual voices of the people in the chamber running out the lawmakers, I think that really empowered people."

However, he wasn't one of the protesters: He was a writer for The Austin Chronicle, covering the news as it unfolded. "With the Chronicle stories, the point there was really to help people understand what was happening in the moment," Solomon reflected. "But the goal wasn't to engage them emotionally in the same way [as a novel]. The emotional engagement that the reader has in journalism is not something that the author often gets to impart ... And with fiction, I can say, 'I want you to care about this young person and his relationship to his best friend and to the old guy he reads to and to this other teenager who he's really pissed at.' For someone who wants to immerse themselves in 60,000 words of a story, those things are important. And so it's nice and really freeing to have the opportunity to say, 'This stuff matters, too.' The nuts and bolts are out there, and now we're really going to get into feelings and that territory because all of that is ultimately why what is happening matters."

The Fight for Midnight arrives at a time marked not only by the anniversary of the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade, but also one when books veering into the political realm are subject to persistent scrutiny. "Everybody's like, 'Oh, your book's gonna get banned. Are you excited?' Well, no, I hope it doesn't," Solomon said. "I would rather it not get banned. I would rather have this conversation. I don't have a ton of faith in some people who run this state, but I would hope that they would welcome this as a discussion. I would hope that they would think, 'Okay, let's open the minds of these young people to this argument.' If they feel strongly about their position, I hope they try and win the argument because I think it's worth having. Certainly it's more useful to have the argument than to just ban books, or abortion, more importantly."

The book will certainly resonate with anyone – not just young-adult-fiction devotees – who has never had the opportunity to cement their opinions and have their voice be heard. The dedication gives a good sense of who Solomon had in mind: "All of the boys who will need to show up."

"You don't get a lot of guidance as a young man, especially as a teenage boy," Solomon said. "There are a lot of people who want to have influence over you, and some of them are people that you want to be influenced by and some of them are people who are going to tell you that feminists are responsible for everything that's hard in your life or whatever. There are a lot of these different kinds of influences, but you're really left in a lot of ways to kind of figure things out on your own."

The Fight for Midnight