American Widow
Alissa Torres/Art by Choi Sung Yoon

When the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York collapsed on Sept 11, 2001, as the result of a large-scale terrorist attack, almost 3,000 civilians perished.
Among them was Eddie Torres, who had just started his new job at brokerage house Cantor Fitzgerald the day before.
American Widow is the memoir of his wife Alissa Torres, who was 71/2 months pregnant at the time. It is about her coming to terms with the tragedy and how she navigated the tangled web of aid and compensation that followed.
After an initial outpouring of compassion and promises, red tape slowed down the handing out of monies and she found herself mired in frustration.
On top of all that, she had to battle post-natal depression and a backlash as family members of the 9/11 victims began to be seen by some as opportunists greedy for government handouts.
Her reaction was: 'It felt bad to be hated. It felt even worse to be envied.'
The text is complemented by Choi Sung Yoon's cleanly drawn black-and-white illustrations.
They are shaded in aquamarine, giving a slightly unreal edge to Torres' story, reflecting her own disbelief and struggle to come to terms with what had happened.
The advantage of the graphic novel medium is its flexibility, and good use is made of that here. For example, a one-panel page depicting the emptiness of Ground Zero speaks volumes.
American Widow also tells the story of Torres' husband, who came from Colombia and then snuck into the United States via Mexico, in search of a better future.
He bursts into life, suddenly and unexpectedly, in a two-page spread of photographs and identification cards. And an epic tragedy becomes at once intimate and personal.

If you like this, read: The Complete Maus: A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman (1996, US$23.10 or S$33.88, Amazon.com). This depiction of the Holocaust, with the Nazis as cats and Jews as mice, has been hailed widely as a modern-day classic.
(ST)