Claire Messud on Writing 'The Emperor's Children' After September 11

In an essay for Vogue, author Claire Messud reflects on how the events of September 11 transformed her writing. On that fateful Tuesday in 2001, Messud was in Northampton, Massachusetts, starting her second year as a visiting writer at Amherst College, accompanied by her husband James and their seven-week-old daughter Livia. Having just released her novella collection, The Hunters, in early August, she saw her New York launch, planned for September 13, canceled along with other literary events. Initially working on a novel about college friends turned journalists, she paused for a couple of months post-attacks, then shifted to a historical narrative about the Clarke School, where Helen Keller studied. After her husband deemed it too simplistic, she abandoned that effort. Later, she revisited her original manuscript, developing deeper empathy for her characters Marina, Danielle, and Julius, ultimately discarding the old draft and starting anew in graph paper notebooks, which led to The Emperor's Children. Messud characterizes this work as capturing 'the time before,' a reflection of a lost innocence, and notes it could only have emerged after September 11. She also mentions the Anthrax scare, the December shoe bomber, the New York Times's Portraits of Grief, and her family's eventual relocation to Washington, DC.