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-Hello and welcome to Book Lust.
I'm Nancy Pearl.
My guest today is Zayd Ayers Dohrn,
whose book, “Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young,
A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground,”
recently came out, and I am a huge fan of this book.
I thought it was one of the best books I'd read in 2026,
so I was so pleased when Zayd agreed to be
on Book Lust with me.
Welcome to the show, Zayd.
-Thank you, Nancy.
Thanks for having me.
-As soon as I saw this book, I really wanted to read it,
partly because I was at the University of Michigan with
your father, Bill Ayers, and I came from a very lefty family.
So it was kind of reading this book was sort of like
reliving my late teens into the, you know, onward.
I wanted to know, well, first of all, the title is so great.
And it comes from a Jefferson Airplane song.
But how did you, let's start there.
How did you decide on the title?
-Well, it's funny.
The Jefferson Airplane, first of all, played
an interesting and funny role in my parents' lives as fugitives
and in the revolutionary underground.
For one thing, I discovered while I was writing
and researching the book that Jefferson Airplane was one
of the celebrity groups that actually donated money to the
underground. So they were literally helping to fund the
groups that I'm writing about.
So I thought that was kind of an interesting connection.
But more importantly, that lyric,
which is taken from a song called “We Can Be Together.”
The full lyric is something like,
‘We are all outlaws in the eyes of America.
We are obscene, lawless, dangerous, dirty,
violent, and young.’
And many members of the counterculture,
including my parents, adopted that as kind
of a personal slogan.
The idea that we're all outlaws in the eyes of America,
whether you're a woman or Black or an immigrant or queer,
that that made you an outlaw in the society
they were fighting against.
And so it was just kind of an interesting
self-referential idea about who they
were at that time.
-When did you get the idea to write a biography,
both a memoir, your own experiences,
but also a biography of your parents' lives during this time?
-Yeah, well, it's funny.
I've been a writer professionally for
about 15 or 18 years, And I never touched
my family story.
And it was one of those things where people who knew me as
a writer would find out that I had this crazy background,
that I had been born underground, that my
mother was on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list.
And they would say, how can you not have written that story?
But the truth is, I think I resisted it for a long time.
I mean, I really, it felt too messy and too complicated
and too difficult to get into.
But then a couple things happened.
I think during the pandemic was really a turning point for me.
My parents were getting older.
My mother had just turned 80.
And I mean, you remember what that was like.
Anybody with sort of elderly relatives was feeling like,
are we going to see each other And so it really made me think I
should ask the questions I have about my parents' backgrounds
while I still could.
And of course, at the same
time, we had Donald Trump and George Floyd and
Black Lives Matter, all these things that seem to
echo the things that my parents had been fighting
against all those years ago.
So it just felt like an interesting
moment to explore that history.
-What was the hardest part for you of doing that?
-I think, I mean, I guess like anybody who has written a
memoir about their family or anybody who just has had
to have those difficult conversations with your family,
you know, there's things that go unspoken in a family.
I mean, my family, I think there's a lot of love in
my family between kids and parents, between siblings.
But it's also, you know, we came through some dark periods.
And so it's always obviously a little bit difficult to
have to sit down and take a deep breath and ask those hard
questions, you know, about.
And in my case, my family history is
literally a crime scene.
It's an investigation of illegal activities.
So that interview process definitely had some
complicated facets.
Yeah, I'd say that was probably the most difficult.
-Yeah, I could see that those conversations would be fraught,
which is a word I really, that I think is a
wonderful word, fraught.
When you were doing the interviewing of your family,
and of course, you know, you talk to your parents,
But you talk, you were the oldest of three brothers.
And were their experiences noticeably or notably
different from yours?
-It was one of the fun parts for me of writing the book.
You know, I'm quite close to my brothers, but you
never, there's very rarely a time to sit down and say,
let's go deep into our childhood memories and let's really
think together about what we can remember and about how difficult
those times were so I mean for example my middle brother Malik
you know I don't think we'd ever talked about the
time when my mother went to prison and what that
was like for us growing up and it's it's interesting because
I'm the oldest I have my memories of you know I was
like seven six or seven when my mom was in jail
Malik was three years younger, he had a very different
experience of that and a very different experience of the
aftermath of that.
So yeah, I think that was an
interesting aspect.
And of course, my youngest
brother, Chesa, is adopted, and he had a
very different experience of that whole time.
His parents went to prison
for many decades, and we adopted him when he was
just a baby.
So trying to kind of think through
together what it means for us now was one of the
most illuminating and kind of rewarding parts of writing
the book.
-Were there things, when I was reading the book,
and I, like, I knew what was coming because
it was like reading a history.
And so I saw what what was coming.
And there were times in the book where I
just wanted to say, you know, don't do that.
You know, don't, you know, stop.
Just don't, don't go there.
And did you, you know, did you have that
kind of feeling?
-Of course.
I mean, it's funny.
It's, it's, I'm a playwright mostly, and
I teach dramatic writing, you know, and we talk often about
about what they call dramatic irony, which is
that feeling that you get from the Greek tragedies
or Shakespearean dramas.
You know the outcome, you know Romeo
and Juliet are going to die, you know Oedipus is going to
discover this terrible thing, and you have that feeling of
why can't you stop?
But of course, the inevitability
of history, the inevitability of the story
carries it forward.
So I thought a lot about that.
I mean, both as a writer, in terms of the
craft of the book and how I wanted it to
feel like a page-turner, like you had to keep going
even if you didn't want to.
And I also felt that way myself as a kid,
kind of reliving those moments and thinking,
oh, there's terrible tragedies coming.
I wish people could rethink or could redo those moments.
Yeah, certainly as a reader, it was totally a page-turner.
And yet at times, and for me, I think every reader
who's lived through the time that you're writing about,
the time of your parents being, the family being underground,
is going to have their own sort of trigger point.
But the part that I found the most difficult to read
was about the Democratic National Convention in Chicago
and the turn then that everything took.
And my husband and I were planning to go there,
but I was pregnant and we didn't go.
And I think that I look back and think,
well, it would have been something to have been there,
but maybe it was for the best that we weren't there.
So, you know, you know.
So I think, was there a part,
was there a particular part of the, you know,
the journey that your parents were on,
that you found the most illuminating
that would explain them better to you
or the period better to you?
-Yeah, it's funny.
I mean, I think of the book on one level,
if there's a big question driving the book
or driving the investigation of the book,
it's kind of what makes us who we are
and more specifically, what radicalizes somebody?
What turned my mother from a relatively normal,
middle-class, white, suburban kid
who was straight-A student, first person in her family
ever to go to college, how did she become a
radical, a terrorist, a most-wanted fugitive,
a kind of icon of the 1970s and violent resistance and
revolution and all these things?
And I mean, I went into the book, honestly, like I know
my mother extremely well.
And yet it was very hard to reconcile the woman I knew
with this idea of a kind of a Republican parents, middle
class upbringing and growing up in that 1950s world.
So for me, a big part of the book was tracking how did
that happen, especially for her, but also for all her
friends and fellow travelers.
I guess for me, one of the really illuminating things,
partly because I was working on it during the time of
George Floyd and the kind of racial reckoning over police
violence and authoritarianism and the government and stuff.
I would say you can really track my mother's radicalization
very clearly along the lines of
friends of hers and leaders who she respected
being killed during that period so she started
out you know as an idealistic volunteer she was a law student
she at the University of Chicago she volunteered for Dr. King's
rent strike in Chicago and she was just like any other
progressive kid wanting to make a difference, wanting to use
her legal skills to make the world better.
And then Dr. King was killed.
And I think that sent her
and a lot of other people into this sense of, you
know, he tried to do it the right way and they
wouldn't let him.
And then she joined SDS.
She became a leader of SDS.
She made an alliance with
Fred Hampton, who was then and the leader of the
Illinois Black Panthers, a very young, charismatic,
brilliant guy.
And they were friends.
She joined his rainbow coalition of activist groups.
And then he was murdered by the Chicago police in cold blood.
And I think just for her and a lot of people,
there were these moments of just thinking,
we're trying to do this the right way.
And then the government comes along
or the white vigilantes come along
and kill the people who are trying to make things better.
And I think that really sent her on this road into a much
more violent form of resistance.
-Yeah.
So I think that begs the question of why
do you think, because you, you know, you're around college
students and that whole generation, why is nothing like
SDS happening now?
-It's a good question.
I think about this a lot.
And I mean, I would, I guess my answer is twofold.
One is I think there are things that are happening
that are a little bit like SDS now.
And they might be, in retrospect,
we might look back and say, there were these big
movements growing, you know, the
environmental movement, the Black Lives Matter movement,
the Parkland kids and the anti-gun violence movement.
You know, even the kind of democratic socialists
who are now, you know, electing officials
all over the country.
I think you see youth activism in various ways.
It's a little bit more fragmented probably
than it was then, just like all of our media
and culture and everything else is fragmented.
But I do think there's a lot of activism and
idealism among the young.
I guess one of the things that worries me,
and it goes to your point about the SDS convention in 1969,
is one of the things I was struck by
doing the research for this book is that my mother
and her friends
spent the entire 1960s protesting peacefully for change
and doing Democratic voter registration drives
and trying to elect better candidates
and sit-ins and die-ins and be-ins
and all the other things that you read about
in the 1960s civil rights movement
and anti-war movement.
And it was really only after nine or 10 years of doing that
and seeing nothing change, seeing things seem to get worse.
Nixon reelected, the Vietnam War escalating.
And that was really what turned her and many of her
friends towards this like despairing, nihilistic
kind of we have to do more.
We have to destroy this war machine and this racism
machine that we're opposing.
So anyway, I guess I would just say I worry that here we
are 10 years into the various Trump administrations and
10 years into a lot of progressive resistance idealism.
And I wonder what happens after 10 years of young people
doing everything they can think of and feeling like
it's not working.
-Right, just getting this sense of hopelessness about the way
the climate and everything that you talked about.
I wonder, were there books...
You talk to a lot of people in the writing of this book,
but were there people besides your parents
who you felt exemplified that period
that helped you understand it better?
-Do you mean like people who lived in that period
or people who wrote about that period?
-Both. Both.
-Yeah, I mean, there were a bunch.
Of course, I read every book I could get my hands
on about the period, both written firsthand
accounts of the period, of which there are many.
My dad has written two memoirs of his own, so of
course I've read those.
I guess of those books, one of the ones that
really blew my mind and kind of was
very helpful for me was Assata Shakur's
autobiography. I was surprised both at
what a good writer she is and at what an
incredible life she led and how, and of course,
one of the big surprises in the book, in my book,
for me and hopefully for the reader,
is the strange ways that the Black underground
and Assata Shakur specifically were entangled in
my family's history.
Um, so I guess that I would say Assata Shakur in autobiography
is quite a, an interesting read.
And then there are many books.
Um, Sale wrote a book called SDS, which
is like a comprehensive history of students who are
democratic, uh, society.
And I found that book really useful.
Um, there's been, you know, many books written about the Weather
Underground specifically, or about the Black
Panther Party.
Jamal Joseph's book, “Panther Baby,”
was really useful for me.
Yeah, but I mean, I think for me,
what they all lacked, I guess, in some way was,
well, I guess I would say there were the insiders
from that period who wrote at the time
about their own experience.
And of course, they're so close to the experience
that they rarely have a global view of it.
And then there are the historians who
came along afterwards, some of whom did
a fairly good job, but none of them had the
access or the insider knowledge of that movement.
So what I hoped I could bring was both a kind of journalistic
historian sensibility to show a comprehensive
history and also the access to those people
to like really get us inside their heads.
-Right. And I think from this reader's,
my viewpoint, you actually, you did totally.
I thought it was just great.
There were two books that I was thinking of when
I was reading the book, and one is a novel and the other
is a memoir, but the memoir is “How I Became Hettie Jones”
by LeRoi Jones, ex-wife, which which was just really, just
a very, sometimes memoirs I find get just so defensive
or poor me or whatever, especially somebody who's caught
up in a movement like the Black Panthers, like she was
in the Black Panther movement.
And the other one is a novel by Marge Piercy
called “Vida,” V-I-D-A.
I don't know if you, I really think that it's
about a young woman, not unlike your mother,
who goes underground and those experiences.
And it was written, I believe it was published in the ‘70s.
-Oh, that's interesting.
-I would recommend, yeah.
-Yeah, that's interesting.
Yeah, I mean, you know, Dana Spiotta has a book
called “Eat the Document,” which is about a novel,
but kind of about an underground figure.
Yeah, so there are many interesting treatments.
Of course, in media, we have everything
from “Running on Empty” all the way through “One
Battle After Another.”
So it's been a source of a lot of interesting
cultural documents.
-Were there things that your parents
just absolutely didn't want to talk about?
-In particular, my mother, who was a very
private, reserved person.
I think if it hadn't been for the fact that I'm her son
and that she had a sense that I had a right to tell
my version of the story,
I think for me that was, you know,
there were things she felt uncomfortable about
that she was willing to talk about.
And then there were things that we had a rule when we started
the process of the interview, which is that they couldn't
lie to me, but that if there were things that touched on
sensitive subjects, especially sensitive legal subjects, that
they could just say that's something I don't want to talk
about or I can't talk about.
But I think, honestly, in three years of interviewing
them, I think they only availed themselves of that
privilege maybe once or twice.
I think they they felt like
usually the only reason they would have
made that decision I think the once or twice
that they decided they couldn't talk
about something it was usually because
they thought it might implicate one of their former friends
in a criminal situation and so there's still
a very strong code of like we don't rat on our
friends obviously but other than that
they were very forthcoming with me.
-Are there things now at this point, are you done with the
book? Do you know what I mean?
Or do you, are there still things that you think,
“Oh darn, I should have, you know, talked about
that more?”
-I mean, I feel pretty good about, like,
it has been a long process and a lot of kind of
thinking about it.
And of course, as I said, I mean,
I spent 15 or 20 years as a writer not writing about it,
but that time accrues into a lot of, you know,
it's like, I think if I'd written this book in my 20s,
I might've missed a lot that I wanted to talk about,
but I feel like by waiting, I was able to have a
good idea beforehand of the things I really wanted
to make sure I could get to.
- Plus in your 20s, you didn't have the outside situation
of the way the culture is now and what's happening here now
to set this against, I mean against in the sense
that that's the backdrop and the book is talking
about the way it was then compared to making the
reader think well what's it like now and why is you
know why are certain things happening. Just one one
more quick question because our time's almost
up the whole turn in the the revolutionary movement
in the United States toward what I always think of
as like the cultural revolution and this attacks on the
people in it, the leaders, you know, looking at yourself,
self-criticism, all of that.
Do you think that was inevitable?
Do you think that's inevitable in every revolutionary movement?
I know that's a really big question.
-No, I've thought about it a lot.
I mean, I do think for sure this sense of, well, I'll start
by saying that my parents became very emblematic of a
certain kind of factionalism in the progressive movement.
Of course, my mother splitting SDS to form Weathermen was
one of the signal moments of that kind of breaking apart
of these mass movement groups.
But I mean, I guess when you look more broadly, you see,
hey, even at the time, all of those groups were splitting
into factions.
So the Black Panther Party, which was
one of the biggest and most important mass movements in
the country, also split in half in East Coast and West
Coast. And there was feuds and attacks and factional disputes.
And then, of course, I think as you're implying, Nancy, if you
look at history, progressive and revolutionary movements
have a tendency to fracture in these ways, all the way back to
the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks and probably long before that.
So do I think it's inevitable?
I think it's an Achilles heel of the left
and is always a danger for radical progressive movements.
And I think it's something you see today in radical movements.
You see the kind of purity tests and cancel culture
or whatever you want to call it,
that there is a sense of when people are ideologically
committed to something, they can be very intolerant
of dissent and they lose sight of the fact that they need
allies and they need a broad coalition.
So do I think it's inevitable?
I think it crops up regularly enough that we can say
it's a part of human nature.
But I also think it's a part of human nature that we can
try to resist and we can try to do better.
And the movements that have done better, everything from
Cuba to Algeria to South Africa, have managed to keep
their factional disputes to a minimum and build a movement
that actually can endure.
-Well, Zayd, thank you so much for spending this time talking
about your really terrific book, “Dangerous, Dirty, Violent and
Young, A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground.”
Thank you.
-Thank you, Nancy.
It's been a great conversation.
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