“_{Bathed in morning sunlight, pinned to a highway emptied of traffic, I slump alongside strangers in a world that has crossed over from the existential to the surreal, a helpless observer to a mythic event beyond comprehension. Thoughts swizzle and spin away as I stare at the void where the South Tower was and see it still, its thin, bleached verticals rising as before in parallel perfection. It is nothing, a ghostly afterimage, like the lingering sight of a spent sparkler on a Fourth of July night.}“

— Recorder of Deeds

This is my story. I tell it now as I lived it then.

Recorder of Deeds is the intimate memoir of a former award-winning journalist who navigates by dead reckoning a day that changed the world and a decade that wrenched her family apart in bitter disagreement, threatened every single thing she held dear, and ultimately strengthened the tensile bonds of love.

On September 11, 2001, I was a journalist faced with a decision– either sit in a Manhattan hotel room and watch a world-changing catastrophe unfold on television, or race to the desperation at the foot of the island and file eye-witness bulletins for my hometown newspaper. I took to the streets.

Back then, I was a full-time feature writer and fashion columnist based in Wisconsin. Each Spring and Fall, I traveled to New York to cover glamorous Fashion Week runway shows. But on September 11, 2001, my life took an unexpected turn, one that rewrote the boundaries of professional responsibility.

My memoir, Recorder of Deeds, is an unflinching account of a journalist who risked everything to bring out news of terrorism and heroism during one of the darkest days in America. It is also a story of how reportage sometimes comes at a cost, for symptoms of post-traumatic stress affected my career and my personal life long afterward.

With lush narration and the flash and flare of real-time emails, my memoir reprises a decade peppered with triumphs and tragedies. My father died in a desert. My mother drowned in a bed. An intruder desecrated their home. One brother squandered a fortune. Another made a fortune. A sister lost her mind and then her life. I lost my job. My daughters completed college, embarked on careers, fell in love, and married.

In prose that is alternately searing and elegiac,  Recorder of Deeds explores universal themes of hope, despair, obligation, and boundless, selfless love.

Sweeping from the Waldorf’s Starlight Ballroom to the inferno at Ground Zero, from a beloved home in a Midwest suburb to a Death Row cellblock in the middle of nowhere, Recorder of Deeds is a memoir that proves those who write about others have riveting stories of their own to tell.

To order a signed, first edition copy of Recorder of Deeds, use the Contact Catherine page on this web site.