To Remember the Day

I was there in New York on 9/11, on the 21st story of an apartment building in East Village. Watched them both fall. Looking back at all my writing about the event, I tried so many metaphors to describe the day. People covered in chalky dust like mimes. People streaming over the Brooklyn bridge like refugees fleeing ethnic cleansing. The smell like burnt electricity. All of the metaphors only partially worked for what I was trying to do: process it.

In the weeks afterwards, I took a seminar in Forgiveness with Jacques Derrida. He’d just written a book on the impossibility of Forgiveness, and the problem of forgiving the unforgivable. He cautioned us: It’s too soon to try to make sense of it. I think that process of reading literature, both at that time and later on, when the books about 9/11 came out, did help me along.

It’s a stranger thing, living through it. When others watch video, they’re seeing what they saw that morning, in the same form, encapsulated by the same television box. But it’s reminding me of the actual event, of watching out the frame of my brown shutters that had tin-foil wrapped along the edges, with nothing but blue sky between me and the crumpling towers. Not only does video from that day still get me teary-eyed, but movies that references it obliquely (Cloverfield) and books.

And now, a simple list of books dealing with 9/11. Because after walking past the thousands of candled memorials, decorated with scraps of notes and pictures curled at the edges, I know that can’t be recreated. So this is a memorial from the literary community. This is a list of the ways that we’ve honored the past.

• Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
• Don DeLillo, Falling Man
• Chris Adrian, A Better Angel
• Claire Messud, The Emperor’s Children
• Ken Kalfus, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country
• Deborah Eisenberg, Twilight of the Superheroes
• Jay McInerney, The Good Life
• Martin Amis, The Last Days of Muhammad Atta
• Frédéric Beigbeder, Windows on the World

Update: My friend Will Entrekin has also posted his memories of 9/11. (And if you purchase his short story collection, all proceeds go to the United Way NYC fund to help the relatives of those who perished.)