Hope and Other Punch Lines(71)

This summer I realized that an essential part of growing up is relinquishing all the myths you’ve previously bought into about yourself. And so now a print of the Baby Hope picture hangs on my bedroom wall. I think of it like something more than bad hotel art, something less than a family artifact. We still have an uneasy relationship, the photo and I, though I feel like we’re moving toward a truce. Sometimes my eyes sweep across the picture and I can almost look at it as an impartial observer would. I often discover a new detail I didn’t previously notice. The silver bangle on Raj’s wrist reflecting light. A corner of blue sky.

Before I leave this morning, though, I take a long look at Baby Hope. I see a one-year-old immortalized in a single, terrible moment, and then decide that’s an unfair reduction. I know she’s more than that. Baby Hope is a symbol of optimism, a busted frontier myth, the idea of persevering even when all looks lost.

She’s also no longer me.

Once upon a time a girl was captured in a photograph.

Those four fairy-tale words finally make sense—once upon a time. We can be both fixed in time and outside of it. It can bend us to its will, and sometimes, if we are lucky, we get to bend it back.

Now, though, another question haunts me: What does happily ever after look like in a broken world?

Today, while I listen to the names of the dead, I will hold Noah’s hand. We will say our prayers in the quiet of our own minds. I will feel overwhelmed by love and grief and gratitude for my own outrageous good fortune. Afterward, we will walk home together, our hands still linked, and eat birthday cake.

I’m 95 percent sure Noah has made me a crown.

And I tell myself that this, all of this, the terrible and the good, could be what happily ever after looks like: A Monday. A beginning.





As much as Abbi and Noah’s story and the town of Oakdale feel real to me, this book is a work of fiction. There is no Baby Hope photograph except for the one that I hope now lives within our collective imagination.

I write to make sense out of things—to order my thoughts—and I’ve long struggled with those moments that cleave our lives, cleave us, into befores and afters. And there seems to me to be no bigger shared before and after than September 11, 2001. As Noah says, I often think about “all those people waking up on [that day] not knowing everything was about to change, everything, and then I think about all those people waking up this morning who may have to go to sleep in a different world from the one in which they woke.”

Though historians (and novelists!) have grappled with and will continue to grapple with the myriad political ramifications of 9/11, I am much more interested in the personal legacies of loss. How they seep in and alter our daily fabric in a million unseen ways almost two decades after the fact, and also the converse: how life goes on. How we continue to fall in love (or fall in love again). Despite the predictions, how we continue to joke and, of course, to laugh.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that while Oakdale doesn’t exist, the community of Middletown, New Jersey, which lost the greatest number of people outside New York City on September 11, 2001, does. I chose to create a fictional town for a number of reasons, not least of which is because it felt overreaching and presumptuous for me to co-opt a real community, especially one that’s still healing. If you’re interested in learning more about Middletown, a good place to start would be Gail Sheehy’s nonfiction account, Middletown, America: One Town’s Passage from Trauma to Hope.

I also want to note that “The Dust Lady” is a real photograph, and its subject has a name: Marcy Borders. Sadly, Ms. Borders died in 2015 at the age of forty-two from stomach cancer, and it’s widely believed that her illness stemmed from her exposure to toxic chemicals on 9/11.

As many as four hundred thousand people are believed to be affected by medical conditions connected to September 11, and almost seventy different kinds of cancers have been linked to exposure at Ground Zero; many are aggressive and difficult to treat. Although we rarely see it mentioned in the news, more than a thousand people have died since the attacks, and this number is only expected to rise.

An entire generation has been born since 9/11, and for many of my younger readers, I realize that day may feel remote, something that belongs only to their parents or grandparents or their history class. I hope this book encourages them to continue learning and to close that gap. As Abbi says at one point in our story: “Sometimes it feels like those towers are still falling and will never stop.” I think it’s everyone’s responsibility to continue to bear witness until they do.





First and foremost, a giant shout out-to Jenn Joel, who is one of the smartest and sharpest people I know and who makes me a better writer. Thank you to Beverly Horowitz, for her relentlessness not only in her editorial zeal, but in supporting my work. I’m lucky to have her in my corner.

A forever thank-you to Elaine Koster, who got this whole shebang started.

Giant hugs to Jillian Vandall, who is a rock star publicist and an A+ person.

Huge thanks to all of the wonderful people at Random House Children’s Books: Barbara Marcus, John Adamo, Dominique Cimina, Kate Keating, Elizabeth Ward, Kelly McGauley, Hannah Black, Rebecca Gudelis, Cayla Rasi, Adrienne Waintraub, Kristin Schulz, Lisa Nadel, and a million other awesome people I will kick myself for not mentioning as soon as this goes to print. I’m deeply grateful to the international rights team at ICM and Curtis Brown, and in particular to Roxanne Edouard. Thanks also to Nicolas Vivas, the Hatchery, and the Fiction Writers Co-Op.