AMERICAN WIDOW

A graphic memoir renders the trials of being a 9/11 widow.

Torres relates in mostly broad strokes how she grappled with losing her husband when she was seven months pregnant. Eddie Torres, a native of Colombia, had arrived in America several years before and risen from sweatshop laborer to currency broker at Cantor Fitzgerald. His first day at his new job was September 10, 2001. The bulk of the memoir details the cruel comedy of his widow’s interactions with the bureaucratic alphabet soup of NGOs and government agencies set up to help people like her, a process with numerous extra tangles because Eddie had recently been hired and his original legal status was muddy. Torres conveys weary outrage at being treated more like a symbol than a person. She cynically writes of her troubled delivery: “They handled me kindly, as a V.I.P., because I had a post-9/11 baby to deliver. Gently, gently, they cut the widow open and took out the orphaned prize.” She also decries the mindless invective hurled at 9/11 widows after the media circus decided that they were lazy money-grubbers. Torres scores a few points here and there, but her gauzy and distant authorial perspective dilutes the anger, and a strange lack of detail weakens the book’s message. The casual meanness thrown her way is certainly revolting, but readers know so little about her day-to-day life other than her dealings with aid agencies that it’s hard to empathize with her. Stiff, blue-tinted art by New York Times illustrator Choi adds little immediacy to the narrative.

Muted outrage produces muted results.