“My mother had an extraordinary capacity to forgive,” says Justice Sonia Sotomayor. “It’s something I think I’ve learned from her. I’m still not quite the woman she was, but I’m closer.”

She’s calling in via Zoom from the Penguin Random House offices in New York, and behind her is a copy of her latest picture book, Just Shine! How To Be a Better You (Philomel, September 9). Luminously illustrated by Jacqueline Alcántara and similar in structure to Sotomayor’s Just Ask! (2019) and Just Help! (2022), the book is an evocative tribute to her late mother, Celina. Drawing from Greek mythology, with an epigraph from the Homeric Hymns, Sotomayor compares her mother to the moon deity Selene; she explores the ways in which the everyday acts of kindness and generosity Celina performed throughout her life made the world a brighter place. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

This is your fourth picture book for children. What about the format appeals to you?

I didn’t start out thinking I would be a children’s book author. I didn’t start out thinking I’d be an author at all. If you know my biography, you’ve heard that I spoke Spanish before I spoke English and struggled until my young adulthood with learning how to speak and write English properly. It was Philomel Books and [publisher] Jill Santopolo who came to me and proposed writing a children’s picture book about my life. My first reaction was that there’s already a children’s book about me [Sonia Sotomayor: A Judge Grows in the Bronx / La juezquecreció en el Bronx] that I really like!But they suggested I tell my life story through the influence of books, and the idea was enough to make [my first picture book] Turning Pages a reality. I enjoyed the process tremendously, mostly because the thing I’ve learned the most is how to condense very complicated ideas into very concise and simple language.

Justice John Paul Stevens, who I overlapped with on the Supreme Court my first year, once said to me when I was unsure about what kind of justice I would become, “No one’s born a justice. You grow into it.” You live life learning lessons, and sometimes those lessons can be painful as you learn them. But my interactions with children, as a result of my books, have made me realize that that’s what drew me into becoming a children’s book author—that I could help them see things that took me so many years to learn.

Just Shine! is a book about being a light in the darkness, but that means you have to show a lot of the darkness. From your perspective, what’s the best way to help kids confront the darker things like grief and loss and war?

Every child is going to experience sadness. Learning how to navigate that space of sadness is a life skill—learning not merely about coping with it, but how to thrive from it. In some ways that’s what Just Shine! is talking about—it’s teaching children that from these moments of sadness, you can still draw some incredibly powerful and important lessons and a sense of being and belonging that can help you take next steps in life. For most people, it takes so many years to come to terms with that, and I’m hoping to give kids an edge.

The book often feels like a folktale—your inspiration and opening lines come from Homer—and kids won’t necessarily know it’s about a real person. Can you talk about how you took what is, for you, a very personal story and made it feel more universal?

This is the hardest children’s book I’ve had to write. The earlier versions were really my grief about losing my mami coming out on paper, and sharing it would not have helped children understand, because it was a personal conversation I was having with my own mother. When I changed my perspective, I realized I could write a story not about her, but about how she made other people feel. I recognized when I was writing that the moment I shifted the focus from her or me to others—and how she’d made them feel—that it could be a story people could identify with, that I had the power to help other people feel special, just like she had shown me.

As a character, you yourself only show up in the book’s illustrations. How closely did you work with illustrator Jacqueline Alcántara?

I am told that I work more closely with my illustrator than most authors do! From the very beginning, I stuck my nose into every illustration. I have a fairly large suitcase filled with all the family photos I’ve been able to accumulate, left over from my mother and other family members, and those photos are the story of not just my mother’s life, but the life of everyone who’s been important to me.

Jacqueline spent the day with the photos, and we talked about what I saw in them. When the first illustrations came to me, I just knew she’d nailed it.

We had a long conversation about whether I should be on the first page, where I’m sitting at a desk writing the story. It’s a collaborative effort when you work with me—I enjoy the process, because a picture book is words and pictures, and I think the impact has to be joined. If it’s not, then no matter how wonderful the words are, the message will not be as impactful.

You’ve spoken in other interviews about how your mother was an incredible guiding force throughout your life, but also how she could be distant, which makes the moon imagery you use throughout the book so much more powerful. A picture-book narrative is so concise—how did you balance these realities?

I don’t think anybody should ever believe that my relationship with my mom was perfect. We had a rocky start in life, and it took us decades to build our relationship to where I could write a book like this and mean every word. What I came to learn, and it was through her help, was that all the things I had been resentful about were never intentional—they were products of her own limitations in life.

My mom’s willingness to listen to the things that had caused me pain and to respond to them—not dismissing my feelings or denying them, giving me the opportunity to understand where she’d come from and why—led both of us to be able to forgive.

A lot of kids today are pushed to leave a mark on the world, and I love the value that this book places on ordinary kindness and care as a legacy.

I’m often asked what my greatest legacy will be, and the expectation is that I’ll say something that I’ve written as a Supreme Court justice that will be remembered in history. But the reality is, while I’ve certainly read some very great Supreme Court decisions, I don’t remember the men who wrote them. I don’t know anything about them.

I tell the kids that I speak with on these book tours that my greatest legacy will be the last child who remembers something I’ve said or done that helped them manage something in their life. Once I die, I will be alive through that last child whose life I helped make easier in some way. And that, I hope, could be a very long time.

Maggie Reagan is a program manager for the American Library Association and lives in Chicago.