The Usual Rules - Afterword
by Joyce Maynard

In the first week of September, 2001, I left my home in Marin County, California, with the intention of spending the next six months in some remote place far from the distractions of my life to write a novel. I wasn’t sure what I’d be writing about, but my mind was much occupied by the knowledge that for the first time in twenty five years, I would have no child to care for. My nearly grown sons and my daughter were all gone from home now -- two out of three of them on other continents -- and no doubt my decision to take my leave was inspired, more than anything else, by the vast empty space their departure had left in my life. I was thinking a lot about parents and children, for sure -- about my quarter-century-long project of raising my own three, my longing to see them safe, and the growing awareness that little I could do anymore -- now or in the future -- could protect them from the risks that come with being a human being alive on this planet.

I was thinking about the scars divorce had left on all of us, the dream I had once held so dear, of children growing up under the same roof with their two original parents. And I was thinking -- as I watched my sons and daughter embrace each other at the various airports where we said our goodbyes that September, on one coast and another -- of the great gift that has been their huge love for each other, in the face of so many other uncertainties.

Before leaving the country, I stopped in New York City to pay a brief visit to my son Charlie, who was a student there. Two days after my arrival, leaving a coffee shop in midtown Manhattan, I heard the news that a plane had hit one of the Twin Towers. Nothing was the same after that for any of us of course, nor has it been.

I ended up staying in the city much longer than I’d planned, long after planes had resumed flying. As grim and terrible a place as New York had become, in those early days after the attack, it also felt important -- particularly as someone who has loved that city since the day I first set foot in it, at age ten -- to bear witness to what had happened, as much as I was able. I spent over three weeks in New York, as it turned out -- most of that time just walking the streets, taking in the names and faces on the flyers posted everywhere, listening to the conversations on the street, standing in front of those beautiful and heartbreaking altars that sprung up all over the city within hours.

Other people’s tragedy and loss remind us of our own vulnerability of course, and so I worried terribly about my younger son, off in Africa somewhere, and unreachable, and my daughter, in Central America. But I think I worried less for my children’s physical safety, over the course of those days, than about the world they and the rest of their generation were fast inheriting. Where was hope to be found? How could a young person absorb the crushing news of what we had all just witnessed? Tragedy and disaster of that scale had taken place, forever, on other shores besides our own of course, but like a lot of Americans, I had always enjoyed a certain comfortable remove from what went on far from home. That would never again be possible.

Perhaps because of the ages of my own three children, I found myself trying to fathom how, in the midst of so much tragedy and violence and uncertainty about the future, a young person could go on to build a hopeful life. I thought about the children and teenagers who had lost a parent that day. I wanted to know how a child goes on with her life -- how anyone does -- after huge and irrevocable loss of the most abrupt and senseless form. Lacking any clear answers, I decided to create a character who might help me locate them.

I don’t pretend that every child who has experienced huge losses will survive as hopeful and whole as my fictional girl has done on these pages. I only mean to offer a glimpse -- for myself, and the young people I love, and others I haven’t met yet -- of what might be possible, of the light that remains, after a season of darkness, and the spring that follows even the coldest kind of winter.

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