YOU KNOW WHERE YOU WERE ON 9/11... DO YOUR KIDS KNOW WHERE YOU WERE?

NEVER FORGET 9/11

When the 9/11 Memorial was dedicated in New York City in 2014, I decided that I had to go there. As a newspaper and magazine reporter, I felt it was my duty to visit the new memorial and tell people what I thought about it—especially in light of the fact that I myself had lived in New York City for several years, and my brother was a survivor of 9/11. 

Visiting the memorial was a somber experience. When I returned to my hometown of Pittsburgh and got down to the business of writing about it for a local magazine, I realized that I had been writing about this event since the day it happened. Literally. I actually started writing a diary on that very day, because I couldn’t find my brother, who was working at the Chase Manhattan building at the time, and I was terrified for him.

I had all but forgotten about that diary until I realized that it would soon be the 15th anniversary of 9/11, and children were graduating from high school with no memory of the one event that significantly changed their futures. They were either too young, and now they hadn’t even been born.

And as the 20th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, I feel compelled to write another book. 

I want to talk about the things I have learned since writing Like It Was Yesterday, A Journalist’s Files Since 9/11, because it exposed me to a whole new world.