A Memoir for Every Story of the Towers?

On the morning of Sept. 11, as the towers of the World Trade Center collapsed a few blocks away, writer and performer Mike Daisey took refuge inside a Wendy’s hamburger joint. He opened his laptop, quickly composed an e-mail of four short paragraphs and sent it via wireless Internet to a list of 7,000 acquaintances, who in turn forwarded his account to their friends, families and colleagues.

Just hours later, he got a call from a major Manhattan literary agency. On a day when most New Yorkers were unable to get through the overloaded phone circuits to assure loved ones they were alive, an agent called to ask Daisey to write a book about what he’d seen, based on this testimony of less than 300 words.

Elsewhere in Manhattan, Phineas Mollod was on the phone to a friend in Atlanta. He called to say he was all right and then quickly got on to business. On his walk away from the terror downtown, Mollod had come up with the title for the book he thought they should put together about the day: “110 Stories.” One narrative for each floor of the towers.

It’s been said countless times since “Dragnet’s” writers coined the phrase that in the naked city there are a million stories. If any metropolis is the city of storytellers, New York is surely the one, with more novelists and journalists per capita than anywhere in the world.

The ubiquitous answers to the endlessly asked question “Where were you when?” quickly traveled from street corners to newsrooms, as New York’s famous responded in the glossy pages of the New Yorker (John Updike was on a rooftop in Brooklyn) and in the newsprint of the New York Times (Mary Gordon watched television on the Upper West Side). Lesser-named citizens clogged the network airwaves with similar stories and recorded their days in thousands of e-mails and journal entries.

The first book of memoir to hit the market, “09/11 8:48 AM,” which contains 85 accounts of the attack and the days that followed, took just two weeks from commission to publication. Even New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik spent time during speedy car rides, ferrying from the rubble heap to news conferences and back again, to add an additional 40 pages to his recently completed memoir for HarperCollins. And at last week’s Frankfurt Book Fair, an account by Battalion Cmdr. Richard Picciotto, the leading fire department commander inside the World Trade Center when Tower 2 collapsed, was sold on the basis of a one-paragraph proposal.

By all accounts, this barrage is just a beginning. “We’re waiting for a lot of books like this. It just seems so obvious,” said Charlotte Abbott, the book news editor of Publishers Weekly. “But what I wonder is if it will revise the whole category of memoir. These are a whole different type of personal narrative. The zeitgeist has changed. Memoir won’t just be writing about family dysfunction anymore.”

Abbott is hardly the only one considering the meaning of memoir in this instant new era. The history of memoir publishing stretches back hundreds of years to the day Augustine penned his “Confessions.” But the typical and much-maligned modern memoir of personal dysfunction--the variety we all know and purport not to love, though book sales tell a different story than critics’ pans----began only in the last decade, a literary companion to talk-show confessional culture.

“Maybe one of the good things to come from Sept. 11 is a wising up of the genre,” says George Packer, author of “Blood of the Liberals,” a political and cultural memoir that subverted the typical personal trauma narrative. “Almost by instinct, people have to connect themselves to the outer world, including the world of ideas and politics and culture--that’s what the force of the shocks make you do.”

But some people think forging powerful new memoirs will require a far more unique and elusive element than simply a formidable outer narrative that revolutionizes inner consciousness. “Whether it’s personal trauma or political trauma, there’s just no subject matter that’s intrinsically interesting, and that’s practically a law,” says Phillip Lopate, an essayist and the author of “The Art of the Personal Essay.”

“I’m not going to want to read most of what comes out of this experience. Just like I don’t want to read most stories from the Holocaust. The sensationalism falls away, and what’s left? It’s like this: Primo Levi’s ‘Survival in Auschwitz’ I want to read, but not because he’s one of hundreds of survivor accounts. It’s because of his gift, because of his mind.”

Still, Lopate has no doubt that this abundance of personal narrative is a crucial addition to the historical, if not literary, archives. While some people decry the deluge as self-centered overload in the face of the glut of media coverage, Lopate sees it an antidote to what he deems the dangerously monolithic media coverage of the first month. “Personal writing is our best possible refuge from media speech, which was an attempt to impose a group mind-set on the event.

Vivian Gornick, author of a recently published book about writing called “The Situation and the Story,” and a memoirist in her own right, shares Lopate’s disdain for how the media told these personal stories. “The living voices of people have more power than media could ever project,” she says. “These stories live in the small details, the way in which you’ll hear the reality of people having felt it.”

And while Gornick agrees that this flood of writing is a golden feat of history in the making--”What’s better than the raw material of life?”--she bristles at naming it memoir. “These are testaments, eyewitness accounts, that’s all. A memoir, like a poem or a novel or another piece of serious work, needs self-reflection and composition, not just reportage,” she said. And self-reflection, of course, takes time. Lopate’s example of Primo Levi’s Auschwitz diary perfectly exemplifies this point. He wrote the book almost 15 years after the war ended.

Some writers, like Daisey, who declined the offer to quickly write a book (“I need distance to write seriously; I need time--I mean a whole lot of time--to see where all this goes, and then I’ll still need to be farther away from it,” he said), are mindful of the need for such perspective. Even the writers pitching “110 Stories” resist the instant-book phenomenon when it’s paired with published personal writing.

“These things take a long time to sort out,” says Jason Tesauro, the Atlanta-based writer behind the project, who is hoping to publish the book on the first anniversary of the attacks. “That quick-response stuff is really what the Internet is for.”

Stacks of personal testaments may be littering the desk of editors and publishers these days, but by far the greatest overflow of personal writing has occurred online. More than 30 Web sites, such as https://www.nycstorieshttps://.com and https://www.twintowerscrash.com, have sprung up in the last month to gather and disseminate first-person accounts.

The New York stage has begun to hear testimony as well, in the form of director Sarah Tuft’s project “110 Stories” (perhaps not the most original title, for all its symbolic worth), which consists mainly of actors reading some of the thousands of e-mails sent in the aftermath of the attacks.

Few people question whether the act of writing has inherent benefits--in fact, the whole school of narrative psychology rests upon a foundation of just this type of storytelling. But reading this writing is a different thing; its consumption, not just its creation, elevates it on some levels to the stature of journalism (no matter how questionable) and, on other levels, even art.

“That’s just what it is,” says director Tuft. “And with a clear purpose. See, we all spoke about how this horrible thing united us, and then we were fractured by political opinions days afterward. But when we listen to other people’s experiences, we become one, we reunite through their experiences.”

Carol Bergman, who teaches creative nonfiction and memoir-writing at New York University, considers writing “an important survival mechanism” but seriously doubts that this sort of instant-response writing could be art. “It’s like this,” she says. “People rarely go back into personal journals. They’re for writing, not reading. To create an artifact, it’s a different operation.”

Interestingly, what may be the most pointed criticism of this new body of work came from within the first published book of first-person accounts. “9/11 8:48 AM” closes with a short essay by Susie Linfield, a book critic for The Times who teaches journalism at NYU. In just three paragraphs, she questions the civic import of this glut of personal writing, suggesting that perhaps it represents avoidance rather than catharsis.

Other than “where were you,” Linfield writes, “a different set of questions needs to be asked, and the endless reiteration of our personal stories prevents us from asking them. In fact, I suspect a major function of that endless reiteration is precisely to shield us from asking them.”

Perhaps the hopeful predictions of change in memoir publishing will address exactly the issue Linfield raises, how one can write about personal experience while continuously asking questions about our political understanding, historical awareness, and tactical and psychological responses regarding what has passed, and what is to come.

It seems that the marketplace of memoir has been a barometer of this nation’s self-absorption and myopia in the past. Perhaps it will chart a personal engagement of the larger, broken world--not just an inner broken world--in the future. “If memoir was the representative genre of the boom, it’ll be really interesting to see what happens to it in the bust,” said Packer.

There are more than 5,000 stories that can never be told now in the naked city--and a continuing flood of thousands more that can’t help but tell themselves in an attempt to gain closure and meaning from grief and confusion. (“That grief and that confusion should only be the starting points of our stories, not their conclusion,” Linfield writes.) We can only wait and see what forms those stories take, and what they will teach us, their storytellers and the culture that made them. If the last month is an indicator of what is to come in publishing--unlike in this slow and shadowy war--we may not have to wait long to see where we’re headed.