Ground Zero
Ground Zero
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Alan Gratz on Ground Zero
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.
Why he wrote it
Twenty years of student questions, one unfinished chapterThe first attempt at a 9/11 book came in 2008, for a novel called ‘The Brooklyn Nine’, when Gratz drafted a chapter set on the streets of Manhattan during the attacks. He and his editor at Penguin cut it before publication, and the reason had nothing to do with craft.
My editor and I just found it was still too raw for us, emotionally. We weren’t ready, even in 2008 when I was writing that book, seven years after 9/11.
The generational shift in his readership is what eventually broke the impasse. By the time his Scholastic editor asked whether he was ready to try again, Gratz’s own daughter, born in August 2002, was a freshman in college, and every middle schooler walking into his school visits had grown up with 9/11 as a fact in a textbook rather than a wound.
Middle schoolers today were born after 9/11, so for them it’s as much a part of history as D-Day.
That distance between the attacks and a new generation’s experience of them is what transformed student curiosity into a mandate for Gratz. The questions at school visits had been building for years, but it was only when he understood what was driving them that he committed to the project.
When I realized that all of them were born after 9/11, and that they wanted a book about 9/11 because they themselves were struggling to understand it, I started to seriously think about it again.
Once he committed, he knew immediately that a book confined to September 11 itself would tell only part of the story. The full account required following the consequences forward, which meant following the war into Afghanistan and placing a second narrator there in 2019.
I knew if I was going to write about 9/11, 20 years later, I was going to have to tell the story of what has happened since then, including the war in Afghanistan. [paraphrased from audio]
That decision produced Reshmina, an Afghan girl living in a village where the war Osama bin Laden helped ignite is still a daily reality, and whose story runs parallel to Brandon’s inside the North Tower.
How he wrote it
Too much research, not enough distanceThe September 11 research posed a different problem from what Gratz usually faces when writing historical fiction: the archive was almost oppressively large. He had broad histories, documentaries, and journalism available in abundance, but what he chose to anchor the narrative were survivor testimonies, because they kept the story grounded in a single human experience rather than the aggregate event.
Everything that happens in my story really happened to people inside the Twin Towers that day.
The Afghanistan research required a different approach entirely. For civilian life under the Taliban, and for what it meant specifically to be a girl growing up in a war zone in 2019, Gratz drew on contacts he had made at UNICEF while writing ‘Refugee’. The organization arranged a Zoom call with staff working inside the country at the exact moment he was drafting Reshmina’s chapters.
Understanding, technically, what happens when a jet plane crashes at full speed into a building; reading the transcripts of 911 calls from the Twin Towers; watching a family in Afghanistan mourn the deaths of their children in a drone attack; really examining how restrictive and hard life was for women and girls under the Taliban; all these things and more made writing this book the most emotionally difficult book I’ve ever written.
He had assumed the passage of nearly two decades would insulate him from the sharpest of those emotions. It did not.
Gratz plots each storyline separately before he drafts a word of prose. But the parallel structure the book depends on only becomes visible during that outlining phase, when he starts hunting for moments that rhyme across the two timelines.
I’m definitely looking for parallels throughout. ‘Oh, here they both see a helicopter. Oh, here they’re both trapped in a dark place underground. Oh, here they see their world come tumbling down.’
Finding those rhymes in outline form is one problem; keeping the two storylines from fracturing into separate books during drafting is another. Gratz’s solution was a strict sequencing rule he applies to every multi-narrator novel he writes.
When I write the actual book though, I write it straight through, jumping from character to character, because I want the whole book to feel like one story. One novel. Not two or three separate stories I mashed together.
One structural constraint came directly from a commitment to narrative honesty. Brandon, a nine-year-old trapped inside the North Tower, would have had no information about what was simultaneously unfolding at the Pentagon or aboard Flight 93, and neither would most Americans watching television that morning.
I knew if I was going to write about 9/11, 20 years later, I was going to have to tell the story of what has happened since then, including the war in Afghanistan. [paraphrased from audio]
On what’s at stake
When revenge outlasts the people who started itGratz built his research into Afghan culture around Pashtunwali, the Pashtun code of conduct, and specifically the concept of Badal, the obligation of revenge that can bind families and communities across generations. He then pointed the same lens at the United States: an attack in 2001, followed by twenty years of military response that has killed tens of thousands of people. Neither side, by that accounting, has stopped the cycle.
I don’t often answer the questions I pose, but I like to ask them because I want my young readers to be thinking about those things. [paraphrased from audio]
The structural choice to run an Afghan girl’s storyline alongside a New York boy’s was a direct argument about what gets left out when Americans tell themselves the story of September 11 as a story about America alone. Gratz wanted the two narratives to do something together that neither could do on its own.
These are universal experiences that ignore nationality and religion and culture — challenges that unite us as human beings — and I believe that fiction helps young people understand these big, scary topics and empathize with the people enduring them.
nerdybookclub.wordpress.com, “Ground Zero Cover Reveal by Alan Gratz | Nerdy Book Club”The book does not resolve the contradictions it opens. Gratz was deliberate about that: the moments of human solidarity in the novel sit alongside moments where every available choice leads to harm, and he refused to paper over that tension with a clean resolution.
Ground Zero explores these contradictions, highlighting how people are often at their best when the worst happens and how impossible it is to make the right decision when both outcomes are unacceptable.
nerdybookclub.wordpress.com, “Ground Zero Cover Reveal by Alan Gratz | Nerdy Book Club”What he wants us to sit with
Not us against the worldGratz distilled the book’s argument to a single sentence in his interview with From the Mixed-Up Files. He had spent years watching American political culture treat 9/11 as a story about enemies and identity; the novel was a deliberate counter-narrative to that framing.
Ground Zero says ‘It’s not us against the world. It has to be everyone, working together. That’s how we survive.’
Writing the book changed him in ways that show up in everything he has published since. He described the shift as a move from a writer who had gripping stories to tell toward one who has specific arguments to make, and he traces the turning point to September 11 and its aftermath.
9/11 and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq made me more active and vocal politically... They made me an activist.