A Book I Didn't Want to Read

A surprising experience with a book it took me five years to open

Photo by Gary Lopater on Unsplash

I spoke last week about turning towards books that have nothing to do with the book I am currently developing and this is a post about one of them.

In 2020, my husband and I were browsing in a bookstore and he picked up a book called The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 by Garret M. Graff. I immediately said, “I would like to read that, too.” Our reading tastes are quite different, so when we land on a book we both want to read, it’s an exciting moment.

I was attracted to the book because I felt as though I never wrapped my head around 9/11. The world changed so dramatically that day and I wanted to understand it more, to sit with it. The time felt right, since so much time had passed.

Rob read it and was riveted. It was, “Will you please turn off the light and go to sleep!” riveted. That got my attention. I was eager for my turn.

When he handed the book over to me, I put it on my TBR pile on my bedside table. But I never picked it up. I kept avoiding it. For five years, I avoided it, but I also kept it there in rotation, ready to be read at a moment’s notice.

I finally realized that I was scared to read it.

I think of myself as someone who is, well, chicken of a lot of things. I don’t like rollercoasters. I would never go to a haunted house on Halloween. I can’t coach a thriller. I was freaked out by zip lining. I couldn’t watch Game of Thrones. Anything that has too much tension and too much violence and too many surprises is just not for me. So I got it in my head that this book was going to be too upsetting.

Then one day not so long ago, I was packing for vacation and I thought about the experience of reading Ann Napolitano’s novel, Dear Edward, on a vacation last year. That book is about a plane crash and I read it while flying on several planes. I loved the book and found that confronting the specific fear of a plane crash in a beautifully crafted story was comforting. Maybe the 9/11 book would be the same, so I took it with me.

I could not have loved this book more, and there were three reasons why.

1. It is gorgeously conceived and executed.

The book is comprised of the words from 500+ people who were intimately connected to the 9/11 tragedy in some ways — widows of people who were on the plane, parents of people who were in the buildings, people who survived, fire fighters, doctors, nurses, politicians, intelligence professionals, pilots, boat captains, school children, news anchors.

Each entry is no more than a few hundred words at most and they appear in sections, sometimes by time, sometimes by place, sometimes by category of person speaking.

You get this sweeping understanding of the way the events unfolded the way you could never get in real time. It shows so clearly that most people in most situations are making decisions with a very narrow set of facts; we can’t possibly know everything about what is going on in the world. In fact, we usually know very little.

The way the author chose to present the entries — the specific order — also tells a thousand smaller stories. Will that one person make it out of the building? Will the fiance pick up the phone? Will the rescue crews choose to go back into the second tower after the first collapsed? Will that father find his son? Will that mother keep watching the news when she knows her daughter is stuck on the 105th floor? Will the president get back to Washington D.C. Will the person rescued by the fire fighter ever find the name of the man who rescued him?

We get this rising and falling action, this incredible tension. It was so well done.

2. It offers a perfect example of the power of story for making sense of the world.

This book is a powerful example of the reason that any of us read.

We see tragedies unfolding every day in the news — unspeakable horrors. And it is all just so overwhelming. People perpetuate and endure terrible things. And most of the time, we just watch and feel impotent to do anything.

But a book like this gives us more than the horrors. It gives us the story of it — a way to make sense of it. A structure, a framework.

I felt terror, to be sure. But I also felt a lot of other emotions. I felt awe. And pride in the way that humans treat each other in the worst possible circumstances. And a sense of hope.

The story gave me all that. It’s a powerful reason to read, but also a powerful motivator to write — to be the person who helps others feel the whole range of human emotion.I felt such immense gratitude for the author.

3. It allowed me to confront the thing I was scared of.

What I was afraid of when I was afraid of reading this book was, of course, the fragile nature of life.

I typically love books that invite us to contemplate this fragility — books like Being Mortal, When Breath Becomes Air, The Five Regrets of the Dying, The Wild Edge of Sorrow.

Most of the time, books about grief are very singular and personal: one person dying. A book about a lot of people dying in a terrorist attack is a whole different perspective, and I was scared I wouldn’t be able to handle it. That it would just be too much.

But the book allowed me to sink in and move through it at a pace that didn’t feel overwhelming. It put me in control in a way that I am not in control of the news, or of a movie that is coming at you with scary music and scary surprises. I enjoyed the experience of reading this book, which seems odd.

And what I came away with was a believe that we really aren’t in control. So much of what happens to us depends on luck and timing. The fact that any of us is here, and lives through the day, is really a miracle. So I was left not with a sense of terror and futility, but with a sense of the miraculous of life.

And a sense of gratitude to the writers in every genre who help us to make sense of it all.

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