Synopses & Reviews
The single event that we know as 9/11 is over, but the shock waves continue to radiate outward, generated by orange alerts, terrorism lockdowns, and the shrinking of personal liberties we once took for granted. The stories in this book, of real people faced with extraordinary trauma and gradually transcending it, are the best antidote to our fears.
Middletown, America is a book of hope.
All Americans were hit with some degree of trauma on September 11, 2001, but no place was hit harder than Middletown, New Jersey. Gail Sheehy spent the better part of two years walking the journey from grief toward renewal with fifty members of the community that lost more people in the World Trade Center than any other outside New York City. Her subjects are the women, men, and children who remained after the devastation and who are putting their lives back to-gether.
Sheehy tells the story of four widowed moms from New Jersey who started out scarcely knowing the difference between the House and the Senate, yet turned their sorrow and anger into action and became formidable witnesses to the failures of the country’s leadership to connect the dots before September 11. Sheehy follows the four moms as they fight White House attempts to thwart the independent commission investigating 9/11 and expose efforts at a cover-up.
What would become of the young wives carrying children their husbands would never see, wives who had watched their dreams literally go up in smoke in that amphitheater of death across the river? Amazingly, each finds her own door to the light. Here, too, is the story of the widow and widower who met in the waiting room of a mental-health agency and brought each other back from the brink of despair across a bridge of love. Sheehy also reveals how bereft mothers who will never have another son or daughter found reasons to recommit to life. And she follows in the footsteps of the robbed children, documenting the incredible resilience of four-year-olds, the anger of teenagers, the courage of sisters and brothers.
Sheehy follows survivors who escaped the burning towers only to find themselves trapped inside a tower of inner torment, from which it took love, family, and faith to free themselves. She is taken into the confi-dence of the night crew at Ground Zero, police officers who worked in that pit for eight months straight and then faced the “returning home” phenomenon. She recounts the confessions of religious leaders who struggled to explain the inexplicable to their flocks. Mental-health professionals confide in her, as do corporate chiefs, educators, friends and neigh-bors, town officials, and volunteers who rose to the occasion and committed themselves to healing their wounded community.
As a journalist who conducted more than nine hundred interviews, Gail Sheehy is an impeccable researcher. As a writer with a novelistic gift, she weaves the individual stories into a compelling narrative. Middletown, America illuminates every stage of a tumultuous passage—from shock, passivity, and panic attacks, to rising anger and deep grieving, and on to the secret romances and startling relapses, the realignment of faith, the return of a capacity to love and be loved, and, finally, the commitment to constructing new lives.
Review
"One sometimes hears that everyone 'knows' what happened on September 11. This admirable book tells precisely the stories we could stand to hear more about." Publishers Weekly
Synopsis
September 11 was both a shared national trauma and a unique private tragedy for thousands of families. Fifty people never came home to Middletown, New Jersey, on that fateful day. Gail Sheehy began living part-time in Middletown shortly after the catastrophe, came to know the bereaved families, and has continued to walk beside them on their journey to recovery. How would the shattered families of this quintessential American suburb make sense of their lives after the worst thing in their world has happened? Middletown, America was over the eighteen months after 9/11. Gail Sheehy has been following parallel and intertwining stories of selected individuals and families: the bereft parents who will never have another son or daughter, the toddlers who can't comprehend why Daddy doesn't come home, the teenagers who are scared and angry to realize that their parents cannot protect them, the survivors who escaped those burning towers only to relive the horror day after day, and the dozens of young and beautiful widows, some still nursing newborns who watched their dreams literally go up in smoke in that amphitheater of death across the river. The story of how Middletown changed and survived after 9/11 is a parable for our times. It will become "the book to read, the book needed finally to comprehend how that catastrophe invaded the homes of real Americans and how they are finding the resilience to deal with what seemed to be insurmountable trauma and loss.
About the Author
Millions of readers around the world have defined their lives through Gail Sheehy’s landmark work Passages and have followed her continuing examination of the stages of adult life in her bestsellers The Silent Passage, New Passages, and Understanding Men’s Passages. Middletown, America is her fourteenth book. Sheehy is also a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and a playwright. The mother of two daughters, she lives between New York and California, and on the Web, where you can visit her at www.gailsheehy.com.
Table of Contents
Signs and wonders -- Impact -- What is Middletown? -- First responders -- Rising to the occasion -- The not knowing -- The knowing -- The money nightmare -- Hypervigilance -- Picking up stones at ground zero -- Falling from grace -- "Am ... I ... going ... crazy?" -- Comforting the children -- Christmas favor -- Muslims in Middletown -- Anger rising -- Feeling the hole -- The grieving spiral -- Stirrings of new life -- Passing the torch -- The toll -- Fragile progress -- The anniversary cloud -- Just four moms from New Jersey -- Lives under construction -- Post-traumatic stress in the year after -- The second Christmas -- The recovering ground zero family -- The arc of renewal -- Four moms fight for homeland security -- Waking up from the suburban dream.