A Widow’s Walk

"The reason why I have trouble with some of the fiction about 9/11 is a lot of it seems to be about people very peripherally affected: New Yorkers of a certain class whose lives were interrupted but who readjusted. Marian Fontana is not one of those people. Her life was completely rewritten. She writes, with great eloquence, about the very human wake of 9/11, the difficulty of balancing public and private grief when you lose someone, and the challenge of mourning while caring for a toddler. You asked me to pick five works of fiction, but I insisted on a memoir because in this case it’s particularly difficult for novels to compete with reality. I didn’t read a lot of 9/11 fiction but in the ostensible 9/11 novels I did read, their attempt to muster emotion couldn’t begin to compete with Fontana’s reality. But then again, I don’t think fiction about this event or period should consider it sufficient to try to replicate that emotion – it needs to recast it, or twist it back on itself, or examine, which is partly what I was trying to do, where it leads, what its meaning is for our society or democracy. Fontana, because of her position, could be more honest than most fiction writers dared to be. I loved lines like, “It has been interesting to watch each politician adopt a family member like a pet.” Or after dinner with another activist family member: “We accomplished little tonight, because while we are trying to operate like a business, the fact is we are nothing like one, as encumbered by our grief as we are fuelled by it.” On some level, I was probably inspired by her honesty in trying to etch the experience of my characters."