The often maligned stand-up comic Dane Cook has a routine about the voyeuristic communities that form around car accidents. Upon hearing the screech and boom of a collision, neighbors come out of homes to rubberneck, drink hot cocoa with each other, and share in the communal gawking. When the police arrive to take statements, everyone in the neighborhood, according to Mr. Cook, has similar eye-witness accounts: “I was in my kitchen and I heard it, so I came out. I will testify in court! I was in my kitchen, cleaning a dish… and I heard it, so I came out.”

I think of this hit-and-miss standup routine whenever I encounter a piece of creative writing that promises to deal with September 11th. The drama and political upheaval of 9/11 has, of course, affected everybody, and many have added their “I was in my kitchen and I heard it, so I came out” stories to the growing body of 9/11 writing. When an event affects so many, we all want to share our personal stories—“I was on the bus when I heard.” “My friend who knew a woman whose husband worked in the North Tower called me.” “I was in my kitchen and I heard it, so I came out.” In 9-11: Emergency Relief, a collection of comic artists’ reactions to the event, Sam Hester, a graphic artist and flight attendant, relates her thoughts upon hearing that a plane hit the World Trade Center:

I can’t believe it, I was just there in May… Well, I guess I don’t have to go to work. But I was going to meet Hiromi for Pad Thai in Toronto tonight! What’s wrong with me, how can I think about Pad Thai!? What about Chris, he lives just outside New York!? What about Phil, he lives just outside Pittsburgh!? Who did this, why? Oh, the people on board, oh my god. I can’t deal with this, I’ve had two hours of sleep, I need to sleep. Oh—it’s September 11th, the official release of Bob Dylan’s new album. I’ve been waiting for months.

I do not wish to impugn Sam Hester’s work in any way—it takes a brave writer to discuss the minutiae running through her head in the face of such tragedy—I only draw from her stream-of-consciousness comic to illustrate that, no matter how many degrees of separation, almost anybody who remembers that day is willing to share his or her personal perspective on a national tragedy. “I was in my kitchen and I heard it, so I came out.”

In American Widow, writer Alissa Torres shares a personal perspective on the personal tragedy of 9/11. Illustrated by Sungyoon Choi, American Widow is the story of Alissa and her husband Eddie Torres, who started work at his dream job at Cantor Fitzgerald in the North Tower of the World Trade Center on September 10th, 2001. The book begins with a fourteen-page review of the couple’s three-year relationship, from their meeting at a dance club in Manhattan to reading Pablo Neruda together in Central Park, then homeownership, pregnancy, Eddie’s layoff and subsequent hiring at Cantor Fitzgerald. It’s a whirlwind that leads up to the morning of September 11th. Alissa, angry at her husband over a fight the night before, walks the dog in the morning while a thought bubble balloons into a splash-page fantasy about leaving Eddie and moving to Hawaii. Upon her return home she receives the news of the attacks.

The rest of the book follows Alissa through her grief, her struggles with aid agencies like the Red Cross, her guilt, the birth of her son, and the first anniversary of the attack. In the days after 9/11, she searches the hospitals for her husband, dealing with friends and strangers desperate to help a seven months pregnant woman. One man practically screams “Don’t hang up, please. Give me something to do for you!” When Eddie’s body is recovered eleven days after the attack, Alissa prepares for the funeral and the endless parade of well-wishers, reporters, and case workers that will dog her for years.

Unlike many writers who link their own perspectives on September 11th to the greater national experience, Alissa Torres keeps American Widow focused narrowly, almost myopically, on her own grief. When such national touchstones as the Red Cross, Cantor Fitzgerald, or the Fresh Kills Landfill appear in the book, they remind us of Eddie Torres’s death rather than our familiar experiences of headlines and somber newscasters. Torres’s pain over Eddie’s death guides not only the content of the book, but often the form. A series of flashbacks within black margins, rather than the typical white, tell the story of Eddie’s youth in Columbia and his immigration to the United States. Torres narrates the bulk of the book in second person, making it feel less like a narrative directed at graphic novel readers and more like an intimate journal entry addressed to her lost husband. In one particularly affecting passage, Torres writes “The medical examiner said it took you 15 seconds to fall. What were you thinking?” The next panel depicts a black speck falling from one of the towers against an austere white background. The grief is so strong that upon turning the page the reader is overwhelmed by a collage of full-color photographs of Eddie, scans of his Permanent Resident Card, his Cantor Fitzgerald employee badge, and other mementos.

The focus on personal grief over social or political commentary makes Torres’s few dips into politics feel out of place. An early montage of the arrest of three men who appear to be minorities on the afternoon of September 11th is never revisited. George W. Bush makes two brief appearances: one early on in the first chapter’s 9/11 montage where he is informed of the attack while reading to school children, and another, more problematic one late in the book. Illustrator Sungyoon Choi’s depiction of the president at his ranch in Crawford, Texas—in silhouette, maniacally pruning bushes, an oversized copy of the daily brief that mentioned Osama bin Laden stuffed into his back pocket—feels heavy-handed and a bit over the top. The one area where Torres’s grief and the greater national narrative mesh well is in her struggles with the Red Cross. Much of the middle of the book deals with Torres’s frustration over the red tape surrounding her husband’s death. Instead of being allowed to grieve she is sent on a series of errands, fetching her husband’s death certificate, his green card, his records from Cantor Fitzgerald, before she can claim the aid promised to her. The Red Cross’s confused, uselessly bureaucratic, and often insensitive case workers also make several appearances. Upon hearing Torres’s tearful report that she came immediately to the Red Cross from her husband’s funeral with the necessary paperwork, one case worker perks up and says, almost with a smile, “Really? So how was the funeral?”

Torres’s greatest strength is her unwillingness to lionize the victims and heroes of September 11th. She presents most characters not as Americans united under an overwhelming tragedy, but as messy, complicated people—faux pas, awkward moments, and contradictions intact. In one scene, Torres’s conversation with her mother about funeral preparations draws unveiled stares from her fellow bus riders. As the woman sitting next to her begins to cry, an embarrassed Torres sinks low in her seat. Alissa and Eddie’s relationship is presented as far from flawless, and Torres seems to struggle with reconciling her husband’s death with their unfinished fight: “When the police came and told me you’d been recovered, they confirmed what I already knew. I’m jealous of the crumbs of time you spent with the others right before you died. I’m sorry that we fought, but I’m still angry with you. Maybe even angrier now.” These words are juxtaposed against panels depicting an imagined scene of Eddie and Alissa embracing in the ruins of the Cantor Fitzgerald office before the North Tower’s collapse, a curious yet effective compression of time and space.

Illustrator Sungyoon Choi does a great job reinterpreting Alissa Torres’s grief into a visual medium. The illustrations are cleanly inked black and white, with splashes of light blue—almost a less-cartoony take on Daniel Clowes’s art in Ghost World. Some scenes, like Torres’s walk toward the smoking towers, are busy, with tilted angles, lots of movement, and billowing white and blue smoke. Other scenes match Torres’s grief and loneliness with heavy white space. One scene mirrors the empty space the World Trade Center towers once occupied with empty space in the frame. In a panel dominated by blue sky, Torres writes

The space didn’t make any impression on me until I raised my eyes to look at the buildings that surrounded it. The Woolworth’s building, the post office, the old church on Vesey Street. They should have been hidden. As I stared at how the loss had revealed the surrounding concrete, I could no longer imagine what it meant to me. Yes, I understood you died here, although the reality would continue to escape me. This visit did nothing to change that.

The preceding panel is captioned “It just made me remember,” and reveals the expansive white space of Ground Zero, a painful visual metaphor for the loss not of the towers, which were to become emblems of a united America in the months after the attack, but of Eddie Torres, a man.

American Widow was not what I expected. Due to its intensely personal nature, it does not fit in well with other 9/11 literature, even literature written by New York authors like Art Spiegelman (In the Shadow of No Towers) or Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close). Critical of many people and organizations who were lauded after 9/11, critical even of Americans who watched horrified and wished to commemorate their grief (one panel depicts a newspaper running a picture of the towers falling over a headline “9/11 TV: We Want it Raw,” juxtaposed to a bible verse reading “No widow nor orphan shall you abuse.”), American Widow reclaims September 11th as a personal tragedy. It is a difficult book to read, but it stands out from the ranks of “I was in my kitchen and I heard it, so I came out” 9/11 writing by offering a fresh perspective and beautiful illustrations that make the most of the graphic novel format.