This year, America will mark the 15 anniversary of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Most Americans who remember the sheer horror of that day share the sense that those tragic events changed our lives forever. Nora Raleigh Baskin’s new children’s book, Nine, Ten: A September 11 Story (Simon & Schuster), was written for those who weren’t born yet on that fateful late-summer day. “The kids reading my book don’t know what life was like before 9/11,” says Baskin. “They’ve never known any different. I hope this book will be an eye-opener. I hope it gives people a way to talk about something that’s difficult to talk about.”
Born in Brooklyn and raised in upstate New York, Baskin had a difficult childhood by any account. Her mother died when she was three years old. Her father remarried for a time, leaving Baskin with her stepmother when they divorced. Eventually she was sent back to her father. “By the time I was in sixth grade, I had moved 11 times and gone to five different schools,” Baskin says. Not surprisingly, she began to act out, getting suspended from school. “I was angry and confused,” she says. “Adults were in and out of my life. There was so much uncertainty.”
Despite Baskin’s bad behavior, her English teacher, Mr. Thompson, gave her a chance. “He didn’t judge me,” she says. “He let me shine. He read one of my stories out loud and said it was the best in the class. He helped me discover that writing was a way to have an identity. He gave me a way to express myself that wasn’t negative. He gave me a voice and once I found it, I never stopped writing. I say with no exaggeration whatsoever that Mr. Thompson saved my life.”
Baskin went on to the State University of New York at Purchase, where she majored in literature. Nine, Ten: A September 11 Story is Baskin’s 13 book. Her book Anything But Typical won the ALA Schneider Family Book Award. Her novel What Every Girl (Except Me) Knows, earned her a spot as a Publishers Weekly Flying Start.
According to Baskin, she always has her next book on her mind. The inspiration for Nine, Ten came after she watched Bobby, a movie about the 24 hours before Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination. “It follows the lives of several different characters,” she says. “His getting shot is a very minor part of the story. The major focus is on how the world changed because of it, particularly so close on the heels of Martin Luther King’s assassination.”
The movie presented a challenge to Baskin. “I wondered if I could create that kind of impact in a written piece,” she says. “I wondered if it were possible to render that in literature.” Deeply moved by the film, Baskin decided to try to create a similar effect in a middle grade children’s book. “I realized that what made the film so profound is what it doesn’t show,” she says. “It doesn’t dwell on RFK getting shot. Instead, it paints the picture of the before, and you already know the after. I thought about that for a long time.”
Baskin considered several momentous events in American history as possible topics for her book, such as the assassination of JFK and Pearl Harbor. “All of these events led to momentous changes and seismic shifts in our country,” she says. “I chose to write about the only one that I had actually experienced, which is 9/11. It was the only event of this magnitude where I could recall the before.”
Baskin pointed out that the events of 9/11 were made even more indelible on the American psyche by modern technology. “If we had heard about it a day later, or even a few hours later on the evening news, it would have been a completely different experience,” says Baskin. “Because of the live coverage, people in Michigan and Wisconsin felt the same feelings of confusion and panic as those in Lower Manhattan. That’s unprecedented.” Anyone with a television watched the day’s events unfold in real time. “Everyone was watching as the news was coming in,” says Baskin. “We watched the towers collapse on live TV and then over and over again on video.”
Fortunately, Baskin didn’t lose any friends or family members on 9/11. “I wasn’t directly affected in the form of losing a loved one, but I was still affected, as was every other American who is old enough to remember where they were and what they were doing that day,” she says. “For all of us, things changed that day. According to Baskin, one of the biggest impacts is the lingering sense of insecurity that has since become part of daily life. “What’s sad is that for today’s children, life has always been this way,” she says.
Baskin said she hopes Nine, Ten will be a way for children to learn about what happened on 9/11 without watching disturbing videos. “I saw Silence of the Lambs, and I’m sorry I did because I can’t unsee it,” she says. “I didn’t want to write a book that kids couldn’t unsee.”
Nine, Ten features four child characters, each with his or her own tale that ties into the larger story. “I spread them out across the country because I was writing about how the United States changed that day, not about the situations in New York City and Washington, D.C.,” says Baskin. Each character was carefully chosen. “For example, I very deliberately chose a Muslim girl to touch on the themes of prejudice and bigotry,” she says.
Baskin says Nine, Ten, like her other books, highlights the themes of anger, abandonment, and survival that were so prevalent in her childhood. “But also hope,” she says. “Always hope. At the end of Nine, Ten you cry, not because everybody dies, but because of the opposite. I wanted to end the book with hopefulness for our country, our children, and our future.”
Article by Melissa Fales, Story Monsters Ink magazine, September 2016
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