There's a Road to Everywhere Except Where You Came From

January 17, 2011
In his third book, Charles (Grab Onto Me Tightly as if I Knew the Way) chronicles his early years in New York. The aspiring writer was 24 when he arrives in 1998 hoping to jump-start a literary career. Instead, he finds himself stuck in a dead-end job rewriting promotional material for Morgan Stanley in their World Trade Center office. The pay is good but the work is dull, fiction rejection notices pile up, and he finds it increasingly difficult to pursue writing. Abortive romances compound his misery. His life (and his memoir) seems to be going nowhere. But the morning of September 11 Charles is sitting at his desk, and thus begins a long and much-needed narrative of his experience fleeing the building, dealing with the horror of the day, the resulting emotional distress, and feelings of survivor's guilt. It's a gripping account told in the muted style of a writer with true authority.

October 1, 2010
Midwesterner Charles moved to New York City in 1998, where he rented a squalid Brooklyn apartment with old friends from Michigan and worked a temp job. Broke and homesick, Charles relays both his ambition to make a living by writing and his increasing sense of isolation within the hustle and bustle of the Big Apple. Then he lands a lucrative job as a financial writer at Morgan Stanley in the World Trade Center. His growing bank account and sense of accomplishment are offset by his superficial romantic entanglements and soul-deadening work. He is at work on the seventieth floor of the second tower at the World Trade Center on 9/11. His matter-of-fact recitation of the panic and confusion that ensued while walking down the stairwell contrast with his post-9/11 siege of nightmares and panic attacks, which culminate with his decision to quit his job and devote his time to creative writing. With a spare style, subtle humor, and huge dollops of emotional angst, Charles (Grab on to Me Tightly as if I Knew the Way, 2006) puts a modern spin on the urban memoir.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)