Amy Coney Barrett has very little in common with her fellow justices Clarence Thomas , Sonia Sotomayor , and Ketanji Brown Jackson , all of whom preceded her as authors of bestselling memoirs that, in one way or another, illuminate how they or their families surmounted poverty, discrimination, and other societal barriers on their way to the pinnacle of American law. All three saw the law’s impact firsthand in the trenches, as lawyers—working in government or defending people from it in court. Many found their stories compelling precisely because these authors traced their paths without dwelling much on how they think about their current, far more isolating jobs. Their remembrances stopped, in other words, at or near the Supreme Court steps.

That’s not what Barrett set out to

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