My September 11 Story (How I Began Working in NYC Publishing)

The week of September 11, 2001, I was interviewing in New York City. I was working at a literary agency in California, and my boss, Margret, helped me set up meetings with executives at major book publishers. I met with two of them at Penguin Books on Monday September 10, and I was planning to meet with three of her other connections the next day. But I had secured one meeting on my own that I was especially proud of. It was with the head of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, whom I’d written a letter to over the summer, and he agreed to meet me on September 11 at 10 a.m.

That morning, I went to the publisher’s office in Union Square as planned, but I was instructed by the receptionist to please leave. “There’s been an incident,” she said. It wasn’t until I went back outside that I noticed the smoke and chaos and long lines at the payphone. I too stood in line, first to reassure my parents, and then to call the friend I was supposed to stay with that night in Queens. We weren’t sure if the subways were safe, so she suggested that I meet her at her sister’s apartment in midtown. So I walked 40 blocks, first to my hotel to gather my things, and then to join my friend, her sister, and one other woman. The four of us watched the devastation unfold on TV, all of us in disbelief.

That night, my friend and I finally made our way back to her apartment, where a couple of others who were stranded joined us. We all took turns using the one desktop computer—I emailed the editors I was supposed to meet to make sure they were all right, and they wrote back immediately, asking the same. The next day, a family friend picked me up and took me to their home on Long Island, where I stayed for a few days until I found a flight back home.

My boss and I had been all but certain that I would find a job in New York publishing, but that year, it wasn’t meant to be. I visited New York again in December, where every person who had agreed to me in September came through: the head of FSG, the editor-in-chief at Little, Brown, a few editors at Simon & Schuster. But no one had a job to offer me. Part of me was relieved—maybe I was ignoring an obvious sign that I shouldn’t pursue a career in New York publishing? But another part of me was determined to not give up on my dream.

I moved to the city in spring 2002, after a distant contact offered to let me stay with her, and I chased lead after lead. To this day, I can’t seem to decide if I was brave or foolish for moving, if I was ambitious or naïve for contacting every person in publishing I’d read about, and many more I hadn’t. I was certainly tenacious, and six weeks after my move, I landed a job at what was then the AOL Time Warner Book Group. Twenty-five years later, I still work in publishing.

I also remain close to the women I met on September 11—how could we not continue to talk and explore the city together? We’ve all now left—I was the last one there—and it was when I was preparing for my move just last month that I found my handwritten notes and email print outs from that fateful week, bringing back a flood of memories. To all the first responders who arrived at Ground Zero, to the strangers who comforted me that day and beyond, the people who took me in and kept me safe, the publishing personnel who encouraged me, my boss who let me my job until I found something new, and the friends I made when I least expected it, thank you. I will never forget.