American Widow (Autobiography) (Graphic Novel)

by Alissa Torres & Sungyoon Choi   

Publisher: Villard (September 9, 2008)

Hardcover, 224 pages
 

“I welcomed the grief in the screams of my hard-earned labor. I invited you into each one, mourning you each time as I had not done previously. So badly, I now wanted these moments of unfettered noise that I didn’t have to explain. As I screamed, it felt like sex. I invoked you in my mind as the contraction rose to my lips. I remembered your physicality upon me as I rode each wave of pain. My first intense physical sensation in fifty days. It recalled that world of lust and body I used to inhabit, now made manifest only in grief, with each thrust of life.”

This is an autobiographical graphic novel about the aftermath of 9/11. The author’s husband began his second day of work at a finance office located in the World Trade Center. He was an illegal immigrant who had difficulty finding a job. She was pregnant and the pair had had an argument the night before, from which she was still angry. Then the towers fell and she was left to pick up the pieces and deal with emotions left dangling in the wind.

She is barely a newlywed and is pregnant when her husband Luis died. The story covers the tower’s collapse, the fears, the devastation, the initial support from various agencies (Red Cross, other charities, and eventually the federal government). After which the attacks against the families of (specifically widows) of 9/11 began in the leftist media. The high point of which occurred when Ted Rall published a cartoon mocking the victim’s families and implying that they were all now happy their family members died.

For more readings, try books by Rex Hurst.