On September 11th, All That Mattered Was Love

As a new college graduate barely three months out of Dartmouth, love was my central focus after its sudden disappearance from my life. My First Love had called things off before graduation and swiftly fallen for someone new, who I knew with torturous certainty he would go on to marry. The search for love was my north star. This was permitted in an era that didn't require every aspect of life to be heavy and politicized. Back then, young people were able to be young, without social media feeds and moral mandates heaving the weight of the world onto our shoulders. On that fateful September morning, I slept through my alarm and woke up abruptly, a question aching in my chest: When will the rest of my life begin? I looked at my first cell phone — a hunk of plastic with a tiny gray screen — before placing it in my bag and heading out the door for work. Without real-time news updates in the palm of my hand, I did not know the Twin Towers were on fire. I moved through the crisp, pre-autumn Chicago air, chin lifted at the sky, thinking today could be the day. My cell phone screen might light up an electric green when he called to tell me it had all been a giant mistake, he couldn't live without me after all. I had been trained to expect this. Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, the almighty power of love was drilled into us from all cultural touchpoints. Bleeding-heart ballads and soulful duets topped the Billboard charts. Movies had dedicated "Love Themes" on their soundtracks. Radio call-in shows offered lifelines to the lovelorn and lonely. The most beloved Hollywood films — from epic dramas like The English Patient and Titanic to grief-laced romances like Ghost and Sleepless in Seattle — were odes to the power and resilience of love. It conquered all. Always. Cynics may say this was delusional, but the net result was indisputable: the widespread cultural focus on love pointed society upward, as Jeffrey Osborne once sang, "on the wings of love." Plato wrote about this 2,400 years ago, saying the madness of love can reawaken the soul, making a person long to fly upward and draw closer to the divine. Who would want to be alone at the end of the world? Social scientist and happiness expert Arthur Brooks calls the de-emphasis of romantic love in modern life the most urgent, existential issue no one is talking about. In his documentary Why Beauty Matters , philosopher Roger Scruton described falling in love as a universal experience that lifts us above the mundane and makes us feel vividly alive like nothing else. When society no longer celebrates the power of love, what — if anything — can point us upward? Today, mainstream culture insists that "self-love" is what matters, and the pursuit and exultation of love is antiquated and even offensive. My jaw hung open reading dozens of enraged comments from women about the decision to give Andy Sachs a love interest in The Devil Wears Prada 2 , calling it a betrayal. Meanwhile, the word "romance" has been co-opted by erotic fiction, positioning lust and sex as sources of power and marketing them as a way to "defeat the patriarchy." John Keats and the original Romantics must be turning in their graves. When my debut novel was published by a Big Five imprint in 2017, traditional publishers were moving swiftly away from transporting love stories that did not make a political statement or were not focused on identity. When pitching my sophomore novel, my publisher and other gatekeepers said my writing needed to reflect "the social and political environment." I was told my characters — young graduates entering the world on the eve of September 11th — needed to be politically active, because that's how Gen Zers would have reacted to the tragedy. At the time, politics never entered my friends and my minds, but that did not matter; rewriting history was deemed necessary to cater to the expectations of a subset of modern readers. "All that mattered to us was love," I explained to a literary agent, who was baffled that 23-year-olds in 2002 were not preoccupied with the War on Terror. As we watched the unfathomable news coverage and read the New York Times ' Portraits of Grief in the months following September 11th, all we cared about were the multitude of human stories — love stories — rocked by the terrorist attacks, with no regard for identity categories or voting records. Those stories moved me so deeply that I packed up my apartment and relocated from Chicago to New York to serve on the September 11th relief effort for almost two years. For many of us who were young and single, the tragedy deepened our yearning for love. Who would want to be alone at the end of the world? Self-love would offer little comfort. As I evacuated my office building on the morning of September 11th with Chicago as the next potential target, I clutched my cell phone as I ran north on Michigan Avenue, eyes trained on the deep blue sky that felt like it was collapsing on America. My First Love had to call that day, if only to check that I was safe. The cell phone networks shut down for hours, unable to handle the volume of people calling each other, motivated by a single emotion: love. Once the networks were restored, that call never came in. A loveless society is a hopeless society. Though I am well-versed in the perils of putting love above all things, 25 years later, I am still convinced it is the only force that will save us. A loveless society is a hopeless society. People are more callous, pessimistic, and self-focused. Its absence makes us more vulnerable to other, darker forces. If love was our shared religion in a pre-digital world, its absence made room for omnipresent politics and ideology that filled the vacuum, fracturing our society. Love is earnest and soulful, and the algorithms reward neither. Today, there are very few traces of heartfelt, romantic love in our Billboard charts, movie theaters, and book pages. The cultural touchpoints that once made us feel uplifted, inspired, and alive leave many of us feeling cold, empty, and disenchanted. We need to restore love as the central pillar of popular culture to point us upward again. As a novelist, I left the mainstream publishing system to help bring true love stories back to literature. Dogstar Press is devoted to beautifully written, character-driven fiction that celebrates love as the ultimate redeeming power. Our first title, Bright Stars , publishes this week. It is the September 11th coming-of-age story the literary system told me was irrelevant and insensitive because of its apolitical focus on love. I refused to yield and hope many more artists and readers will do the same — holding the line, in the name of love.