American Libraries

Keir Graff: This morning I was looking over my remarks at breakfast; I thought I would just give it one last readthrough. And was sitting there talking at my omelet and thinking dark thoughts about September 11th and I heard a voice, I heard singing. I heard If You're Happy And You Know It Clap Your Hands. But I'm a professional, so I got myself back into the dark place and soldiered on. And the table next to me was soon surrounded by waiters who were clapping their hands and singing Zip-a-dee-doo-dah zip-a-dee-ay. Still I kept working but when a 6-foot tall chipmunk came up to my table I gave up. I think Disneyland is probably a pretty incongruous place to talk about September 11th and the picture that has arisen from it. But we will carry on it.

The first draft of this speech reminded of the way Joe Biden diagrammed Rudy Giuliani’s sentences: he said that each one contained a noun, a verb, and 9/11. So in my second draft I took out all the verbs. One can certainly argue that all novels written after 9/11 are 9/11 novels, whether they intentionally address the subject or not, they were created in a world that was changed by 9/11. But I think we can also agree that some novels know more about 9/11 than others, whether they treat the attacks and the aftermath directly or indirectly, they take as their subject what it means to be an American now, what it means to be an alien in America, what it means to be an American abroad, or what America is doing abroad.

Carolyn See: I want to say that most of my writing life I've written about catastrophe. And I'm not going to talk too long, don’t worry. My dad left the family three weeks after they dropped the atom bomb. And I took it personally and I just thought the shit is hitting the fan, left, right and center—everything is going to hell in a hand basket. I use clichés because I was only 11, I wasn't very developed in my thoughts. And just from the very beginning, I mixed or conflated personal disaster with the larger disaster that hopefully—usually—doesn't hit us, but sometimes does. So anyway, Golden Days, the inspirational book about nuclear war, the end of the world novel with a happy ending. And so I wrote the book in which an atom bomb drops—we don’t know where it comes from. And everyone in the book survives and survives very well, and has a really good time doing it.

Janette Turner Hospital: As Carolyn has said, and I know Ellen is going to say a similar thing: It isn't how books come into being. You don't say to yourself, “I'm going to do a novel about the impact of terrorism.” They come into being in much more mysterious ways than that. There’s this beautiful little church and now there's a high fence around and it's become a memorial. People have come from all over the world and put flowers and it's become sort of shrine. And it was the church where they first took the bodies that they took from the World Trade Center. They took them there and it became a kind of Red Cross emergency station. You know, I sat on these gravestones from the 17th century and I thought, “In spite of these catastrophes that have happened throughout history, life goes on.” There's this incredible little cradle of beauty with graves from the early settlers and I thought, “This is where I'm going to end the novel.” And it is where the novel ends.

But also about that time—and I know you would have all read this—the New York Times Magazine published the transcripts of the cell phone calls that had gone out both from the doomed planes. I find this still hard to talk about this—I'm getting rather emotionally moved by it—but I remember just sobbing when I read that article because what people did in the time they had left in those upper floors of the towers. They weren't calling and raging, “Why aren't the helicopters here? Why aren’t the firemen here?” All they wanted to do is call the people they loved and tell them that. Although it wasn't meant to be a 9/11 book, 9/11 actually had a direct impact on the way that book ended.

Ellen Gilchrist: Naturally—so naturally it's like breathing, after some important cataclysmic event or some event that affects all of us—of course, we all begin to write in the wake of that. We write in the wake of it without meaning to, without thinking about it. Eventually as you begin to write and understand that you're doing that, hopefully you don't milk it, hopefully you just let it happen. And then eventually if enough of us write good readable books, someone will write The Great Book. After all the Vietnam books my friend, Tim wrote The Things They Carried. And every writer worth his salt was not jealous. We thought, "It’s done, he did it." After we dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima in Nagasaki, and we all sooner or later began writing post-apocalyptic books, and then Cormac McCarthy wrote The Road. My God! Every writer I know—nobody was jealous of it. Nobody was jealous of The Things They Carried. People were calling each other up saying, “Have you read it? Well, have you read it over again?” Nobody hated it. Nobody got mad at him for giving it to them. I mean, it's that good. And we will have a 9/11 book that good. So go write one.