Remembering 9/11 By Caroline Bock, Author of The Other Beautiful People

This year, tomorrow, 9/11, falls on a Friday.

For me, 9/11 will always be a Tuesday. 

Twenty-five years ago, I woke up early after a sleepless night. I had a big day. Bravo cable network was holding a press conference at a swanky hotel downtown for our first reality series – The It Factor, and I was running the event. I was the head of public relations and marketing at what was then, in 2001, Bravo, the film and arts network. It was Hell Week, a week when the cable industry would gather in New York City for a series of industry-wide galas, seminars, and, in our case, a huge announcement about this reality series, which would follow a group of up-and-coming actors aiming for their big break. We had big expectations for this series. The word of the day was ‘big.’ 

Over the past twenty-five years, I have written various blog posts about this day. I never thought I would write an entire novel with 9/11 as the backdrop to the story of an ambitious, hard-charging marketing and public relations exec at a cable network—at the Cinema Channel.

Eudora Welty, the great Southern Gothic short story writer, once reportedly said, and I am paraphrasing here, don’t write what you know, but what you don’t know about what you know.

I know I never got into Manhattan that day. I lived on Long Island, and I stopped first at our Long Island office (Bravo was owned in those days by a company called Cablevision, which had Long Island and Manhattan offices) to fuss over the press kit and press list for the event. If I had gone directly into the city, I would have been in the middle of it. My husband was. He was on a subway under the World Trade Center at about 8:15, running late. Monday Night Football had featured his beloved Giants, and it had been a very late night for him. He usually took a train directly to his office in downtown Brooklyn but ended up at Penn Station and then on the A train. 

I often think of how our life is determined by these small things, not big ones. We run late. We call in sick. We go to vote (it was a primary voting day in the New York area). We take a different train.

My husband is extremely claustrophobic. He often had to jump off subways at stops that were not his and walk. He didn’t that day. If he had, he would have been in the World Trade Center or on the streets right nearby. What I know is this: He came home. He jammed into the last train out of downtown Brooklyn that day, and covered with dust and sweat and panic, came home. I didn’t know how much that day would change us both.

It’s no secret that Jack, in my autobiographical novel, The Other Beautiful People, was inspired in part by my husband of now forty-one years. In the novel, on Tuesday, September 11, Amy finds Jack on the roof of their apartment building:

We were up on the roof for hours. This wasn’t any scene from any movie I’d want to see. The streets emptied. The skies were choked with a sickly twilight of plastic burning. Siren-wails, siren wound up and released like bomb bursts, and helicopter and fighter jets and more sirens streaked across the sky.  

That night, the last thing Jack said to me was, ‘Don’t ask me about what happened this morning. Not ever.’ 

I stroked his face, ashen and older than that morning. He turned away from me.

A few days after 9/11, and for years after, I made it into my office in midtown Manhattan. The stakes were high; business as usual had to go on, or so we were told by the powers-that-be. As a novelist, I could have set this at another point in time, but it was important to me—to remember, and to have the stakes be as high for Amy as they were for me.

In the days after 9/11, I remember crossing Seventh Avenue and glancing downtown and seeing smoke rising. Smell the burning, a chemical, plastic-searing cloud of smoke, as if the bedrock was burning, as if the island of Manhattan was burning. I didn’t know this city. I didn’t know who I was in this city.

In the days and weeks after 9/11, I could feel in the rawness of my skin, in the hot tears coming down my face in the middle of Seventh Avenue, what I had only felt once before (when I lost my mother to a stroke at age four): that my world had irrevocably changed.

My main character in The Other Beautiful People, Amy Greene, doesn’t know who she is either after 9/11. The novel opens in December of 2001 in Silver Spring, Maryland, where she and Jack have fled to—on the pretense of a new job. And Amy is commuting on the Amtrak, the first in her office to ever try balancing a flexible office-home schedule, which in 2001 does not go well. The action quickly moves to midtown Manhattan, where Amy’s work and her work family remain. They are the other beautiful people, especially in her life. 

The Other Beautiful People is about becoming, about the choices we make—and the secrets we keep close, until we can’t hold them anymore. About how we face our presents, our recent pasts, and our distant ones, and move forward, not because we are ready, not because we planned to, laid it all nice and neat on some spreadsheet or run-of-show, but because we must. 

Twenty-five years ago, the world changed. My world changed, and so did Amy Greene’s. I will never forget. September 11th and Manhattan inspire The Other Beautiful People; I hope you will read it and find inspiration. 

—

Caroline Bock is the author of the acclaimed novel THE OTHER BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE (Regal House Publishing, 2026) as well as the award-winning short story collection Carry Her Home (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 2018), and the young adult novels Before My Eyes and LIE from St. Martin’s Press. She is also the co-president/prose editor at the Washington Writers’ Publishing House, a nonprofit literary press based in Washington DC since 1975.

The Other Beautiful People

In the entertainment world, the spotlight shines on the beautiful— but behind the scenes are those who make the magic happen. Amy Greene is one of them. As head of marketing and public relations at the Cinema Channel, a beloved yet struggling cable network devoted to classic and independent films based in midtown Manhattan, Amy is at the height of her career— but her life is anything but steadfast.

Torn between her charismatic boss, Owen Orski, and her husband Jack, Amy’ s world schisms with 9/11, the death of her father, and the secrets she’ s kept locked away. The Other Beautiful People is a dazzling cinematic novel about love, loss, and the search for meaning— in work, family, and the spaces in between. It’ s a story that will captivate your heart and stay with you long after the final scene. The Other Beautiful People is a workplace love story unlike any other.

BUY HERE

 

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing