After the Fall: New Yorkers Remember September 11, 2001 and the Years That Followed ed. by Mary Marshall Clark, Peter Bearman, Catherine Ellis, and Stephen Drury Smith (review)

On September 11, 2001, about midmorning in central Arizona, my three-year-old son reached up and turned off the television in an attempt to calm his mother who was overcome with sadness. The horror, panic, and chaos of that fateful day affected people and places far removed from the terrorist attacks and became a point in time at which lives were divided into before and after. It was a watershed event with national and international ramifications. A catastrophe of such great scale overwhelms individual human experience. What it meant on a personal level to live through and continue to live with the events of September 11 is displaced by larger, and invariably more simplistic, narratives. In such contexts, the power of oral history, as a way to reclaim the narrative and enrich perspective, is profound.

After the Fall is an anthology of nineteen oral histories of New Yorkers intimately impacted by the attacks of September 11. The book is the first published compilation of oral histories from the groundbreaking September 11, 2001 Oral History Narrative and Memory Project led by Columbia University’s Oral History Research Office in collaboration with the university’s Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy. The project endeavored to gather as many different perspectives as possible on the impact of September 11 from a broad spectrum of ethnicities and professions. Organized in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, project interviews began that fall and have continued for more than ten years. To date, through this and its other projects on September 11, Columbia University has recorded approximately one thousand hours of oral history with more than six hundred individuals. This selected anthology marks the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks.

After the Fall takes readers through the stories of individual New Yorkers whose lives collided with the events in lower Manhattan. Each chapter offers a distinct view of that fateful day. The viewpoints include those of a human resources director on the sixty-seventh floor of the north tower, a computer programmer in her Battery Park apartment, a priest at a church a half mile away, a banker heading to work at the World Trade Center on the subway, and a street vendor working across the street at the federal building. As I read the stories one after another, I began to form a mental picture, placing each narrator where he/she was that morning, thus forming an array of perspectives on the events.

The stories here, however, were not recorded with September 11 as a singular focus. An intentional element in the project’s design was to embed the experience of September 11 within each individual’s broader life narrative, and the strength of that method is evident in this volume, providing the reader with a much richer understanding of the narrator’s perspective. As narrator and psychologist Ghislaine Boulanger points out, these oral histories represent, fundamentally, individuals “bearing witness to their own experience” (262). Here, that bearing witness is done within the architecture of the life story. Another feature that adds to the value of the project is that it was fashioned as a longitudinal study, revisiting interviewees at different points in time to gather their stories. This approach adds a malleable, and consequently more authentic, character to the recording of their experiences, allowing the reader to follow as narrators’ viewpoints either shift or become entrenched as time passes.

One of the most interesting aspects of the narrators’ stories is their wide range of responses to having their lives shaken by the events of September 11. Their feelings in the aftermath were as diverse as their initial perspectives. Some experienced anger, loneliness, panic, guilt, nightmares, fear, sleeplessness, and withdrawal, while others felt blessed or experienced emotional awakening...