Learning Day: I Survived 9/11

This is one of the most popular books in America. Its execution, ideas, and corporate background might be grimmer than its topic.

That book is the graphic novel adaptation of the young adult novelization of the World Trade Center attack portion of 9/11. Here’s a spoiler: this book about “The Attacks Of September 11th, 2001” skips the Pentagon part and skips the Flight 93 part. That’s wild on its own. It prompted this thought about its writer, from me: “two outta four planes ain’t bad?” I’m not happy about that thought. But as discussed in our look at the luxury Sylvester Stallone pen, brain input causes brain output.

Do you have children? Or people in your life who might attend a Scholastic Book Fair? I don’t. My loved ones are grown-ups and babies. But I remember the Scholastic Book Fair. I remember it warmly. I remember it like the dimpled countenance of a lover. The Scholastic Book Fair was my favorite school event, back in the day. Good news: they still do those. And those fairs shill a twenty-three book series of bestselling “I SURVIVED” titles. Book #24 (about the Black Death) is in the pipeline. Book #25 is inevitable. The books are all by an author named Lauren Tarshis. Lauren Tarshis is the bard of horrendous history, For Kids. She’s novelized everything from an Alaska grizzly bear incident to a Holocaust / Nazis combo platter. If you haven’t heard of these books, ask any ten year old boy about them. These books are huge. Animorphs but bigger. If you show this hotdoggery premise to a youth, they may react like I’m wiping with The Face Of J.K. Rowling Toilet Paper(™) (Pre-Disgrace).

I didn’t know about Lauren Tarshis until I poked around a basic list of popular young adult history books. Turns out she’s the list. She’s an industry. And her tidal wave of tragedy tales took over my nostalgia-fave book fair. “I Survived 9/11” is the fourth “I Survived” graphic novel, adapted from the sixth “I Survived” text novel, published in 2012. All versions of this book exemplify the crumbled foundation beneath every “I Survived” premise. The title promises one good thing. The title promises the child on the cover will survive. That promise is less of a win than I want it to be. For one thing, the child in this story is fictional. So this lacks the joy of the non-fiction survival stories. More importantly: the title points out that it is exceptional that this child survived. Other people did not survive. While we read the story of one child getting out of a jam, everybody else dies, in real life. What kind of sociopath sets that aside? Certainly not me, reading this 9/11 yarn. Especially because this is the gist of how it starts:

Hmm. Thank you for reminding me how many people did not “I Survived!” that situation. Still, big start. Coming in hot. I guess that’s the opposite of boring. But other than the obvious next storytelling step of “Chekhov’s Second Tower”....how do we follow that? What’s the equally meaningful next step of a book that demolishes Tower One before the page numbers are two digits?

Here’s this book’s answer to that question:

Comprehensive spoilers now: the entire rest of the book is about a child who thrusts himself into the situation of the World Trade Center attacks. His contribution to that situation is that he prevents his firefighter dad from helping more people. Then this child, and almost every other named character, survives 9/11. That’s their angle. Also: what? What the hell? That’s your angle on 9/11? “A kid got lucky” cannot be the premise of your “learn about 9/11 through a rich human tale” book. It fails both ways. As I read this, I felt new respect for the movie Titanic. Can you imagine if Titanic let both lovers live? Titanic did not, because they’re professionals. They recognized their minimal responsibility to the actual Titanic victims. They knew it’s only fair to kill at least one of the two main characters. They also save Billy Zane, in a damning way that is good writing. Titanic does that because if you’re writing historical fiction, you are in charge of the entire fiction part. You are responsible for who gets to survive the tragedy, and why. And speaking of tragedies:

Immediately after showing us a jet ramming an office and causing a War On Terror, we see a youth football player get a massive concussion. Why? Huh? Why, though? And how does this connect to 9/11? Let the author show you how it connects, with an immediate flashback inside of the flashback:

The flashback-back reveals our Generic Child (“Lucas”) got encouraged to play football by his Generic Tragic Uncle Who Is So Boilerplate He Has The Name Of Spider-Man’s Tragic Uncle. Why did “Uncle Benny” encourage Lucas to take up football? The story tells us… in an immediate flashback.

The flashback-back-back reveals Lucas has a Trauma Dad. His Trauma Dad is a firefighter, who got wounded in a fire.

Here is my opinion: if you’re writing a 9/11 book, and you want anyone to read to the end of the book, you might need to pick and choose the sad parts. This book rejects my opinion. All those sad dad panels are extra stuff, beyond this book’s depiction of Literally 9/11. I do see a reason to do that. I respect the honesty of its look at the danger of firefighting, and the foreshadowing of how bad 9/11 gets. But I resent how many pointless and ultimately frustrating narrative rabbit holes these fictional characters lead us down. 9/11 has enough trauma to go around. This book detours us into Lucas’s Trauma Dad, and his best friend uncle-ing his child through the trauma. I’ll comprehend 9/11 without seeing Benny UNCLE Lucas SO HARD it remodels Lucas’s personality.

These flashbacks are both too rapid and too much of the book. The writer swooped me through so many nested, pointless vignettes, I briefly forgot the book is about 9/11. Which means I forgot 9/11. I’m not supposed to forget 9/11! We all know not to do that! Also, I was alive for 9/11. The intended audience of this book is children. Much like how every elder feels Pearl Harbor in a way I don’t, every child is less interested in 9/11 than me. They were born on a date later than or equal to 9/12. They can only care so much. How is a child supposed to focus on “that plane thing from before I was born” if they’re whirling through a matryoshka of NPC dialogue, plus football concussions?

By the way, most of this 9/11 book is football concussions. It feels like the author knows more about CTE than they know about the World Trade Center attacks. They’re so fixated on it, they make a huge chronological error. To this day, the United States has no interest in dealing with the fundamental concussion problems of American football. Kids are suiting up for head injuries as I type. Also hello to readers a few years from now, when these words will still be true. Now let’s flashback to when this book was written. The novel came out in 2012. Around that year, the CTE crisis was new-ish information. A few people were beginning to take NFL brain injuries somewhat seriously. So if you wrote a story set in 2012, you could write a doctor character talking about that. A 2012 doctor would be on the bleeding edge of concussion concern if they thought football isn’t playable because of concussions. And if you wrote that 2012 doctor scene, it would play something like this:

I can’t overemphasize how thoughtful and bonkers this scene is. Thoughtful and bonkers, simultaneously. It’s a well-written depiction of an important idea from more than a decade after 9/11. Which means this author derails their September 11th story with the medical equivalent of a flying car. They introduce a doctor who has to be a time traveler. This doctor is Doctor Friggin’ Who. His ideas are from the future. Putting this doctor in 2001 is like putting a #NeverTrumper in 2001, or making Al Gore’s running mate the Hawk Tuah Girl.

Speaking of bizarre timelines: do you know what ideas were familiar in 2001? Here’s one: they were familiar with the concept of an attack on the World Trade Center. Flashbackbackbackbackback time!

Don’t get me wrong: 9/11 was not predictable. Bush did not “do it” or whatever. But if you had a 1990s job as a security guard on the ground floor of the World Trade Center, you would be aware of the 1993 bombing of the ground floor of the World Trade Center. Think about it, My Dear Hotdogger. You can relate to this if you work, or have ever worked. Most people know if their office building had a recent day where one unusual thing occurred. A burst pipe, or Z-list celebrity visit, or Deanna putting up The Halloween Stuff. So every security guard would know if they’re standing in a recently-exploded foyer. That security guard would also do security stuff if strangers walked in uninvited. Somehow this guard lets them right in, with no ID. They also bother to ask if a man in an “FDNY” t-shirt and hat has any connection to FDNY. It’s mind-boggling. How would such a dumb/busy/lazy/focused guard exist? Also, this book is vaguely educational. It needed a mention of the other mega-significant World Trade Center attack. Its entire story, and its multiple sets of History Factoids in its appendices, skip that. I regret to inform you this is yet another Schmidty History HotDogStravaganza where the “history book” makes you dumber about the history. Sound off in the comments with what you’ll do with those newly defragmented brain cells! You can put anything in there!

Here’s the rest of the plot: as discussed, Lucas sustains a severe concussion and prolonged blackout. This forces Lucas to sit at home recuperating, instead of getting more concussions at football practices. He also does servant’s work and hears triggering stories at the site of his father’s PTSD.

Then, Lucas goes to a brain doctor appointment on September 10th, 2001. Lucas anticipates the green light to continue sustaining more than one massive concussion per year. Doctor Who tells Lucas he can’t play football anymore, due to [the extreme concussion frequency I was not exaggerating]. Lucas responds the way many Americans do. Lucas rejects this woke eggheadism about his egg-like head. Lucas insists football is the only way a child can get the exercise, friendships, and life lessons also taught by every other team sport. No red-blooded patriot would switch to, say, basketball. So that night (the night of September 10th), Lucas devises a scheme to solve this heinous injunction against his freedom. Lucas will wake up, lie to his parents, feint toward walking into his school, and then ride a daisy chain of public transit systems. He’ll go from his suburb to the Manhattan firehouse where Uncle Benny is working. Then Lucas will exploit Uncle Benny’s [SERIES OF QUESTION MARKS AS TALL AS THE WORLD TRADE CENTER] to override a doctor and get back on the football field.

When I was a child I bought one hundred billion Matt Christopher sports novels at the Scholastic Book Fair. They all had a more plausible story than this wild goose chase. The Matt Christopher books were also more interesting than this book, even though Matt Christopher can’t write a sentence more interesting than “the quick brown fox hit a home run.” Lauren Tarshis’s topic is September Damn 11th, and I drifted off a lot. When Lucas arrived at that lower Manhattan firehouse, my first thought was to bail and watch Ghostbusters. I did not do that. I plowed ahead, discovering what’s supposed to be a shocking betrayal.

Crap!!! “Could this day get any worse?”, asks Dr Manhattan or Billy Pilgrim or another unstuck-in-time Nude Guy. One page later: 9/11.

I apologize for that “roar” not being a lion or some other actual twist. This twistless book is an agony. So I’m gonna speed up the summary. After several splash panels of a plane 9/11-ing the first tower, Uncle Benny becomes this tragedy’s literal first responder.

Hey, Dispatch? Look out a friggin’ window. Next, the book explains the astounding scale of the unfolding tragedy. How? By doodling a confusing football metaphor.

At last: a framing that makes me care about Osama Bin Laden blowing up thousands of my countrymen. Next, the book gives us an unparalleled perspective on how 9/11 felt, and what it was like to experience it firsthand. How? By not following the real heroes. The book sticks with this kid’s perspective, and keeps the kid away from the next plane hitting. After introducing many firemen who will run into this tragedy at enormous personal cost, we watch them drive away, and watch a kid remains inside a locked firehouse.

He also watches 9/11 on television, a little.

Amazing stuff. I had the exact same experience, at the approximate same age, in Illinois. Discover my journey in the upcoming automatic bestseller “I Survived: Losing One Instruction Day Of Sixth Grade First Period English.”

This book might be the least effective historical fiction I’ve ever read. Historical fiction is a flawed genre, because at least a little bit of it is lies. Lies for a reason. A good reason! You’re making up a few lies, based on facts, in order to capture an experience. Historical fiction helps countless readers care about events they’d otherwise ignore. So historical fiction is good. This specific historical fiction? Not good. Most living Americans have a more vivid memory of 9/11 than this fake kid. A child could throw this book in a trash can, SPEAK TO THEIR PARENT ONE TIME, and get a richer tale of That Day.

Anyway, Lucas stays in the fire house and makes some phone calls. The second plane hits. You might read this summary and think “but he’s a kid, he needed to shelter and stay safe.” You’re right. Also, the book rejects that normie wisdom. It sends its hero out of the building, into danger, to distract a police officer. Then Lucas prevents his firefighter father from saving other lives.

I’m not a monster. I’m glad they found each other. But earlier in the story, the firefighters tell Lucas his dad knows he’s at the fire station and will come find him as soon as he can. So Lucas is 100% selfish and stupid. At best he is hoping to see his father one more time before his father is killed, in a way that’s likely to get Lucas killed too. Then, Lucas inhales the cancerous wreckage-dust a bunch of people inhaled in Manhattan on 9/11. Lucas’s dad strives to protect Lucas from this, because he has to, because of Lucas’s actions.

Yes, Lucas’s Dad! They are all hurt. They will find out how hurt or diseased they are, later! Now go walk your son through a sad splash panel he put himself in for no reason.

Hey youths: are you still enjoying your reading experience? Hmm. You say you’re not? That’s fine, because it’s about to end. Lucas and Dad walk back up Manhattan. The book makes us wonder if Uncle Benny died. Then the book reveals Uncle Benny lived. Do any of the named characters die on 9/11? Yes. One Black firefighter, who we met for one page. He pops up one other time, as we resolve two other storylines in the dumbest ways. Every reader who just saw 9/11 happen has a burning question: what about Lucas’s unrequited love of playing football? That’s more important than ever, in this context! Here is how that resolves: Lucas realizes he can still be involved in sports without playing football. He can stay in sports by – you guessed it – COACHING football. Doctor Who told Lucas about the football concussions that killed all of Lucas’s sports heroes, and Lucas responded by going out of his way to shove younger peers into the same brain grinder. It’s like if a time traveler gave you winning lottery numbers, and you responded by pushing a recovering gambling addict off the wagon. Worse yet, we learn this development in Lucas’s life from a scene where Lucas says he’s now better at distinguishing the faces of the twin sons of the dead Black firefighter.

This piled-high sandwich of interlocking tragedies is somehow less sad than the other last story beat. Because remember: Lucas’s dad is traumatized, from a regular fire. I wonder how he’s handling the combination of that trauma and 9/11. Probably…not well? How’s Pops handling his most “en fuego” memories? Don’t worry: not with therapy, not with a different career, not with your other good ideas. Here is the book’s “happy ending”: Dad reconnects with Lucas and re-establishes their bond, thanks to Lucas also being traumatized. Remember when Lucas also ran into 9/11, a few minutes late? In this way, he and his dad share something. Something they can talk about once in a while. An intermittent topic they’ll otherwise suppress with a steely fixation on Guy Activities.

That one panel reminds me that this book gives almost no words to the main character’s mom. That’s weird. It’s extra weird in the context of its author. Its author is a suburbs-of-NYC mom named Lauren Tarshis. She cannot identify with Almost Herself. Also, “Tri-State Mom” is one of the only facts we know about Lauren Tarshis. It is difficult to find objective biographical information about Lauren Tarshis. But what’s available suggests a hidden cursed background to the entire “I Survived” series. Lauren Tarshis self-describes as a mom in Connecticut. I’m sure that’s true. She also confirms this when she monopolizes the “and now for some facts” appendix of her 9/11 book.

Tarshis proceeds to describe her harrowing experience of 9/11. It’s weirdly relevant yet irrelevant. When the attack happened, she was on a plane from London to New York. Probably scary! Possibly interesting! But then the plane turned back to London. Her family used phones to make sure everyone was ok. And she went home a few days later. I don’t want to minimize the fear she must’ve felt, being midair during 9/11. But I wish Tarshis didn’t fill several pages with that semi-relevant anecdote, followed by fewer pages of a weak sub-appendix of actual history. These fact pages also burn space on giant drawings of the fictional characters we never got invested in.

Thanks for that acronym deep dive, Grinning Trauma Dad! I’m glad they fit you in, instead of any mention of the 1993 WTC attack, or either of two recent Iraq Wars. Our author lady would rather show you multiple angles of herself eating British airline peanuts. Now let’s fixate further on that lady. I figured out how and why Lauren Tarshis is the author of the “I SURVIVED” series. According to this book, audience demand pushed her to capture 9/11 as only she can.

Beyond her own words that’s almost all we know about her. One of the only journalistic articles about her is NPR pitching her as the author who best captures how depressed and anxious kids were in 2020. NPR also cites one actual psychologist who says these books may or may not help, no real way of knowing, oh and the psychologist’s child is a fan.

But don’t worry, America: our brilliant author will NOT exploit the covid pandemic. After all:

That’s right. We need real stories, from real kids, with the benefit of hindsight. That is the way to learn how kids experienced tragedies. Of course, that doesn’t describe “I Survived 9/11” at all. Fake kid, no context, published halfway through the follow-up wars. So I’m sure Tarshis’s 9/11 book is an outlier. Right? She’d never write other books shortly after a tragedy. She certainly wouldn’t do that at the start of the “I Survived” run, to score a hit bestseller that keeps the assembly line rolling. And she’d never do that in a way that’s, uh, racially charged–

Hurricane Katrina happened in 2005. Ten years after Katrina, we were still working on distributing funds to begin rebuilding Louisiana. Nine years after Katrina, we were still trying to hold New Orleans’s mayor accountable for corruption. Just five and a half years after Katrina, Lauren Tarshis made up a Black kid about it.

So many people and resources went into a novel AND a follow-up graphic novel AND multiple audio formats. What if this team of artists and sound engineers spoke to Katrina’s astounding real survivors? Tell their stories! A few real writers do that! “I Survived” does not do that. And this Katrina book was pivotal. It followed two books about 1910s tragedies. It helped cement Tarshis as a hit author. And it paved the way for any modern problem to be “I Survived” material. Tarshis went on to novelize deadly tornadoes within four years, wildfires within two years, that Fukushima-busting tsunami before anybody cleaned that up. She’s like Carmen San Diego, if Carmen saw the Pyramids explode and profited.

Why did Lauren Tarshis do this at all? Why did this premise become her golden goose? The origin of her writing career isn’t documented beyond a basic bibliography and a vague work history. Here’s what that describes: Tarshis wrote a couple of books in the 1980s, about a fun teen and The Making Of The 1988 Box Office Flop Ironweed. Then Tarshis became an editor and an executive at Scholastic Books. Then, many years later, Scholastic Books hired Scholastic Books executive Lauren Tarshis to write an “I Survived” series of Scholastic Books. Are you suspecting what I’m suspecting? It seems like Tarshis reached a position of power at a publishing company, then decided the most exciting new author she could give a book deal to is herself. And you know what? In general, that’s fine. That can be good! Publishing is a flawed game and an ineffective meritocracy. I am rooting for any author to win that game. If you can hijack the corporate ladder to deputize yourself to write a hit book series, I have zero criticisms. I hope you gave yourself an ouroboros of royalties and raises. But this situation is unique. The premise of these books is too important. These aren’t children’s books about a caterpillar befriending a dog. They are fictionalized accounts of the biggest tragedies in human history. Making Lauren Tarshis the top historian for young readers is like making a whimsical CEO the author of medical textbooks. Her biography lacks any historical credentials. It makes me realize I have more credentials than Lauren Tarshis. I have a bachelor’s degree in history. I’ve also read one Rebecca Solnit book with one chapter about 9/11. I think I accidentally became more qualified to write “I Survived 9/11”? Without even trying? But like a creepy A.I. or retiree (unclear which) who took over Amazon dot com’s history book listings for adults, this publishing executive crowned themselves queen of the meatspace pipeline for children’s history books.

I do think Lauren Tarshis is well intentioned. There’s nothing capital-w Wrong with entertaining kids and getting them to read history. Lauren Tarshis also told NPR she’s got family who survived Europe's Jewish ghettos. And she probably cares about tragedy victims, in the generic way every one of us does. Somebody else could’ve written hotter garbage or right-wing garbage to fill this same need. Her only crime is the low quality and the lower nutritional value of what she’s pumping out. But what a friggin’ crime. There is such amazing, readable nonfiction out there about what’s really happened in history. There’s also a false belief that children won’t read history unless it’s cartoons or explosions, and boy is she cementing that myth. What if we let kids try a history book with history in it? Maybe they can handle actual facts and ideas. I refuse to believe our only alternative is the saga of a fake football player who’s pressuring a fake dead guy’s fake kids to get their mental eggs scrambled.

Ha-ha! Ha-ha. It truly was…September 11th.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to print that previous sentence out, put it in a briefcase, bring it to the first corporate book publishing job I can get, and then lie in wait. I’ll lie in wait. Waiting, and climbing, and securing publisher power, until that sweet day when I hire myself to confuse kids about The Crypto Wars Of 2037. See you at the 2038 Scholastic Book Fair, remaining humans!

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