Posted by Marian Lizzi
The term “labor of love” gets thrown around a lot in publishing circles. It can mean anything from “the advance orders are disappointing” to “the editor who acquired this book has left, and the rest of us don’t quite get it.” It can be a euphemism, a battle cry, or a way to flag an unlikely seller for special attention.
But as the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, I’m very proud to be part of a project that is a true labor of love—written from the heart, filled with emotion, and benefitting a very worthy cause.
The book, The Legacy Letters, collects the voices and remembrances of one hundred 9/11 family members, sharing not just their pain and sorrow, but their deeply held hopes for the future. The letter-writers are adolescents, teens, and young adults; they are spouses, sons and daughters, parents, siblings, and grandchildren. They are first-generation Americans, citizens of other nations, and lifelong New Yorkers.
Collected by Brian Curtis and the nonprofit support organization Tuesday’s Children, the book is a reminder of the human faces behind an event that changed the world—but it’s also a project that has challenged and stretched me as an editor. Selecting the letters (out of several hundred) was the first hurdle. How do you say no to any of them? Editing the letters was another challenge. How do you edit things like private jokes, personal references, and those bits of secret language that only loved ones share? How does an editor approach a letter that starts out “Dear Sweetheart,” or one that ends with “Love, Me”?
Even deciding on the order in which the letters would appear was intense: Should we put all the teenagers together? What about the 9-year-old, who barely missed being held by her father? Or the letter written from one twin sister to another?
It would have been easy to say “no thanks” to this project. Wouldn’t it be simpler to avoid all the emotions, the challenges, the immensity of loss and pain? But the letters themselves made it impossible to turn away. They were too vivid, too honest, too full of love, too forward-looking, too hopeful to put down.
After working on this incredible project, I think I’ll retire the phrase “labor of love.” Unless we decide to publish a sequel.
Read an excerpt from The Legacy Letters that ran in Parade magazine, and watch a video from WNBC-NY News. For media updates, visit the book’s Facebook page. For more on Tuesday’s Children, visit their website.
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