Former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms on new memoir

[0:00] Welcome back in her candid new memoir, former Atlanta mayor and current Georgia gubernatorial candidate Keisha Lance Bottoms opens up about her childhood, her journey into politics and what it really takes to be an effective leader in one of the largest cities in the country. In Rough Side of the Mountain, Bottoms details her life before prominence, intimately revealing personal challenges from a past eating disorder to childhood abuse to infertility as she explores the real price of hiding your truth from others and the freedom that can come from revealing it. [0:30] Keisha Lance Bottoms, kind enough to join us in studio. Thank you so much for joining us, Mayor. [0:35] Thank you for having me. [0:36] So let's start with the title because growing up in church and we would sing I'm coming up the rough side of the mountain, but as you yourself quote Aretha Franklin in the book, she said that the rough side is the easier side to climb, right? Because you actually have something to hold on to. Why was that title so poignant for you? [0:54] My grandmother played that song in her kitchen as she cooked and it brings back so many great childhood memories, but I didn't really understand what it meant and until I began to appreciate what that rough side meant for me. [1:08] When we are going through difficult times, we much rather they not exist. But as you grow and as my grandmother used to say to me, just keep living, you see that it's the rough parts, the hard parts that make you stronger. [1:24] You start the book really kind of with this bang of your dad getting handcuffed for selling drugs and the police officers telling you and your siblings just to sit on that couch and you don't move until your mom gets home. How did that trauma shape you? [1:40] It was the light switch in my life from this life as a very privileged child. My dad was an entertainer. So ballet lessons and international travel and all these things that most kids don't get to experience to then exchanging all of that to visit my dad in prison across Georgia. [2:02] He was sentenced to 10 years in prison and he was as he used to tell me a really big deal. He was an entertainer named Major Lance. He gave Elton John his story in music and then that experience shaped me in ways that I'm still coming to appreciate. [2:21] In so many ways, it was the most traumatic thing that ever happened to me. I liken it to a death because it was the death of our family, but also getting to tell my dad's story in his totality that he was this wonderful human being who struggled with addiction, but he still loved me. He still loved our family and a good person who made a bad mistake. [2:47] You talk a few times in the book about how you sanded yourself down on your journey to success and even said you tried to throw parts of yourself away. Why did you feel that that was necessary? [3:01] I believe that there was a way I had to show up to be enough and not fully appreciating that all of these unpolished people in my life allowed me and shaped me to be who I am so that I can show up in the way that I am. [3:21] And I felt like showing these parts of me, this rough side of the mountain would make people think that I didn't deserve to be in certain rooms and that I didn't deserve to lead and that I wasn't enough. [3:37] And it really was in 2020 that I began to find my way back to all that common sense and the wisdom that came from these people who didn't have a formal education. [3:49] They didn't have professional titles. And when we didn't have a blueprint, it was what would my grandmama do? How did my mama say this again? What did my granddaddy think? What would my daddy tell me to do? [4:04] You mentioned a poem, Paul Ernst Dunbar's The Mask. We wear the mask that grins and lies. It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes. What was it about that poem that resonates so much with you? [4:16] That poem always struck with me when I heard it first as a high school student. But as I've grown and I've matured, I'm like, oh, that's more than some beautiful words on paper. [4:30] Mm-hmm. That's the mask that I put on, that I wore for many years, not wanting people to see me in my fullness. And it is a mask that's worn as protection in many ways, but it can also weigh you down. [4:50] Do you feel that writing this book in part was taking the mask off? [4:55] Oh my goodness, yes. Because I unpacked so much that I put away. And even in writing about the day my dad was arrested, my siblings and I had never talked about that day and how we each felt about that day. [5:08] They didn't know about the neighbor who used to touch me inappropriately. They didn't know about my eating disorder. And there were so many things that I put on the table that allowed even my family just to talk about things that we've always buried. And it's been liberating. [5:28] And healing, I would imagine, for the entire family. [5:30] Absolutely. You know, when we experience trauma, we often feel that we're the only ones. Even in writing about the day my dad was arrested, my brother said he remembered coming home that day and thinking that a tornado had come through and only hit our house. [5:48] You know, this experience was one that I thought, if only my family reads it and it makes them proud, it's enough. [5:56] Yeah. [5:57] But I'm finding that it resonates with so many people. And I hope that people will find themselves in my family. [6:05] Georgia, of course, is really ground zero right now for election fights. [6:09] What do you think that this moment says about the state of democracy in Georgia and beyond? [6:16] Anything is possible. I talk about my family being traced to a plantation in Crawfordville, Georgia, and the fact that just five generations later, I had the opportunity to serve as mayor of Atlanta, that, God willing, I'll be the governor of Georgia. [6:34] Georgia, it's just this reminder that even in our darkest days, we aren't the first generation that's faced hardships, but the power is within us to do better, to try better, and to lay a foundation for generations not yet born. [6:52] Keisha Lance Bottoms, we thank you so much for the time and the conversation. [6:56] Thank you. [6:56] Thank you. [6:57] And you can get Rough Side of the Mountain in stores now.