Kamala Harris’s new memoir, “The Truths We Hold: An American Journey,” begins with a prologue set on Nov. 8, 2016, the night Harris was elected a United States senator from California. The rest of the book addresses the urgent political matters that have risen in the wake of that night, but it also goes back to cover, among other things, Harris’s tenure as California’s attorney general and her childhood in Oakland as the daughter of immigrant parents: her father an economist from Jamaica and her mother a cancer researcher from India. Though rumors of Harris gearing up for a presidential run in 2020 are becoming noisier by the minute (when Stephen Colbert asked her on Thursday if she would run, Harris coyly said, “I might”), she told me the memoir is not meant to help lay the groundwork for such a campaign. “At the expense of sounding immodest,” she said, the book is “really about the work I’ve done already that’s had national impact, and what I hope to come from it.” Below, Harris talks about how she connects personal experiences to her professional life, the breakneck speed of the news cycle, the inspiration she takes from Bob Marley and more.

When did you first get the idea to write this book?

Election night, 2016. I sat on our couch at home after my night at the election party with a family-size bag of Doritos, which I ate by myself, one after the other, in awe and in shock about what I was watching on TV. It was a night that was bittersweet for my campaign, for all of us. None of us saw it coming.

After that night, I really felt a more urgent need to tell people what we’re fighting for. When we talk about a fight, it’s born out of optimism; and it’s not a fight against something, but it’s a fight for something. It was that emotion that led me to speak the words I spoke that night, about the need to fight; and that, by extension, led to the book.