This time, it’s personal.

Like everyone else with more than a passing interest in American unions, I had been reading Jane McAlevey’s work for years. My copy of Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell), a no-holds-barred account of her adventures in successfully reviving a moribund local of the Service Employees International Union—only to run aground on the SEIU leadership’s cozy relationship with corporate bosses—was beginning to physically fall apart when I first wrote to Jane (or “Dr. McAlevey,” as I addressed her, since she had a Harvard e-mail at the time) in the fall of 2015.

I was heading to Nevada to report on the upcoming Democratic primary campaign, and since she’d spent time there as an organizer, I wondered if she could suggest some union people for me to talk to. After a thorough grilling on my background, intentions, and political orientation, Jane sent me a brief but incredibly useful memo on Nevada union politics and introductions to a nurse and a Las Vegas municipal worker who both turned out to be terrific company—and even better sources.

When I wrote afterward to thank her, she asked about my relationship to The Nation, where I was then listed on the masthead as “Editor at Large.” It turned out she was having trouble getting her pieces into the magazine.

“Despite what it says, I don’t actually edit,” I replied. But I promised to look into the situation, and when I did was told that Jane was “difficult.” “I’ll work with her,” I said.

And so we began, first with a long interview about her forthcoming book, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age. Then with coverage of a Massachusetts nurses strike, and the wave of “Red for Ed” teachers’ strikes. By that time, Donald Trump was in the White House, and militant unions offered what looked like the only durable organized resistance to Republican rule.

When Katrina vanden Heuvel asked me to take over as editor of The Nation, Jane was the first writer I called. We met in a bar in Penn Station near the LIRR tracks as I was on my way into the city for the Nation announcement and she was on her way to JFK to fly back to California. I asked if she’d write a column for us. “How about ‘strikes correspondent’?” she countered. “Don’t you think a lefty magazine should have one?”

By then we’d already met a few times—first in London, where I was living and she was doing some consulting work for one of the big unions, then in Vermont, where Jane had learned organic farming as a young woman. I recorded a long interview with her there where she talked about her mother dying before she ever really got to know her, and about feeling like a prop in her father’s political campaigns (but also how much she’d learned from “the old man”—above all, the notion that when you enter a fight you’re in it to win: “Winning matters a lot to me…. My father’s attitude was that you don’t run a left campaign against the Democratic Party just to run it. You fuckin’ run it to win”), and about her own struggles with the cancer that had already taken a brother and a sister. And then in San Francisco, where my daughter and I stayed in the house next to Jane’s tiny shack on Muir Beach while I was on tour to promote The Next Republic, a book whose first chapter is titled “Jane McAlevey—Winning Under Conditions of Extreme Adversity.”