This is what a memorial is:
Standing still, staring at something that isn’t there.
Author’s Note
Some of the phrases in this book are taken directly from emails I sent to friends on 9/11 and afterwards. I was in the rooftop cafeteria of my office (roughly twenty blocks north of the World Trade Center) for most of the events of 9/11, but every now and then I felt the need to go back to my desk and write everything down. On that day and immediately after, I never would have thought I would someday write a novel about what was happening; words seemed an inadequate way to capture it, and facts dwarfed any attempts at fiction. It was only years later that this book began in earnest. I approached it with much trepidation, but was fueled by the fact that there haven’t been as many novels about this time as I’d imagined there would be, and also by the fact that as time goes on, readers (especially younger ones) will have less and less firsthand experience of what it was like to be in New York in those hours and days and months. I genuinely can’t imagine forgetting any of it, but I also have come to realize that history moves on, and while the meaning of that day changes in the context of what happens afterwards, the experience of the day needs to be preserved with as much immediacy as we can give it. For me, it is still one of the most harrowing and inspiring days I’ve ever lived through. Harrowing for what happened, and inspiring for how we held on.
There’s no way to acknowledge all the people who factored into this book because I’d have to retrace all the people whose paths I intersected with in those hours and days and months, from the people who were in 555 Broadway with me to the friends who took me in when I couldn’t get home to the people I saw days later in Brooklyn to the friends I marched in an anti-war rally with four years later. So many conversations went into my thoughts about 9/11, and I’m sure I drew on many of them here. In particular, the line that Claire’s mother says about not being able to comprehend something like 9/11 was actually something said by my friend Karen Nagel on that day. Thank you to Cindy Bullens for letting me borrow her song.
This book was written in many places, including my apartment, my parents’ house, my friend Eliot’s apartment, and my friends Mike and Mireia’s house on Cape Cod. Thanks to all of them (and not just for their dwellings). Thanks as always to my family and friends for supporting me in ways big and small. And thanks, too, to my niece Paige and my nephew Matthew, whose ages on 9/11/01 (twenty-one months and not yet born, respectively) helped make me realize why it’s good to write these things down.
Once more, I owe thanks to Allison Wortche, Melissa Nelson, Noreen Marchisi, and everyone at Knopf. Most of all, I owe thanks to my editor, Nancy Hinkel—I am ever in debt to your twisted point of view and your questioning eyebrows. I couldn’t have written this book for anyone else.
About the Author
David Levithan has spent most of his life one river away from New York City. He grew up a suburban New Jersey kid whose parents would take him into the city all the time for museums, shows, and family visits (something he shares with the characters in his novel Are We There Yet?). In high school, he’d take the train into the city with friends, not unlike the characters in his novel Boy Meets Boy. After college, he discovered that there was more to the city if you didn’t have to get home by the last train—a discovery that certainly informed his two books written with Rachel Cohn, Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist and Naomi and Ely’s No Kiss List. He was working in New York City on 9/11, and in the weeks and months and years after, which is really where this novel, Love Is the Higher Law, comes from. His other books include The Realm of Possibility, Marly’s Ghost (with illustrations by Brian Selznick), Wide Awake, and How They Met, and Other Stories. He currently lives just outside New York City. You can see the Empire State Building if you stick your head outside his bedroom window and look right.
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
This is a work of fiction.
Copyright © 2009 by David Levithan
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Visit us on the Web! www.randomhouse.com/teens
Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools,
visit us at www.randomhouse.com/teachers
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Levithan, David.
Love is the higher law / David Levithan. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Three New York City teens express their reactions to the bombing of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and its impact on their lives and the world.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89360-5
[1. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001—Fiction. 2. Interpersonal relations—
Fiction. 3. Homosexuality—Fiction. 4. World politics—1995–2005—Fiction.
5. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.L5798Lov 2009
[Fic]—dc22
2008040886
August 2009
v3.0
Love Is the Higher Law Page 12