Books That Built Me: The Street Lawyer

I wasn’t supposed to like books by John Grisham. Not because anyone told me not to, but because sixteen-year-old me had firmly decided what kind of books I liked, and legal thrillers were not on the list.

I was into sci-fi. Preferably funny. Books with sarcasm and space travel. Books that made you laugh while they bent your brain a bit. Anything that sounded like it might have been written by someone with an overactive imagination and too much access to the then-fledgling internet.

But along came Vera, or rather, Mrs. Hodgekins my school librarian. She pressed a copy of The Street Lawyer into my hands and told me I’d like it. I was sceptical.

A week later I was back in the library admitting I was wrong. Not only had I liked it, but it had somehow lodged itself under my skin. It wasn’t just good. It mattered.

The Street Lawyer follows a high-flying corporate lawyer whose life takes a sharp left turn after a traumatic event pushes him to leave the firm and dedicate himself to legal aid work. It’s fast-paced, full of stakes, but quietly human. Beneath the courtroom drama and corporate intrigue, there is a deeper question about how we spend our time on this planet. About what matters, and who or what we choose to fight for.

And just like that, a book I didn't even expect to like completely inspired me.

I didn’t become a lawyer, obviously. But I did spend the next couple of years seriously questioning what kind of adult I wanted to be. What it might mean to pursue meaning instead of status. How it might feel to walk away from what’s expected and choose something less lucrative, more compassionate. It helped me see that fighting for people, not profit, could be a possible future for me.

At the time, it didn’t change how I wrote but how I felt. It gave me real existential thoughts, but didn't fundamentally change the way that I wrote my own stories. Not until years later.

Writing Hidden Lives, I found myself thinking back to The Street Lawyer. Specifically to Grisham's characters, how clearly they were drawn, how tightly he revealed just enough to keep you turning pages, how much he trusted his reader to connect the dots. I wanted to do that.

And perhaps more than anything, The Street Lawyer taught me something that’s become a sort of north star for my own work: people don’t have to think they’ll like a story for it to move them. Sometimes the most powerful stories are the ones that sneak up on you. That surprise you into caring. That slip past your guard and say something honest, kind, and true.

That’s the kind of story I love to tell. Accessible, human. Something that feels like it matters.

The Street Lawyer is one of the Books that Built Me. There are so many more to tell you about. I wonder which I'll tell you about next.