One Day I Woke Up in America begins on a morning many Americans will never forget.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, a young production assistant finally walks away from the corporate machine, determined to pursue a life in film and writing. Stepping onto a downtown train, he believes he is finally beginning his real life. By the time he emerges into lower Manhattan, the world he thought he knew is gone forever.
Moving between the hours surrounding that devastating day and the two years leading up to it, One Day I Woke Up in America follows a young artist as he abandons the safety of his Long Island upbringing and throws himself into the creative underground of a rapidly changing New York City. Between celebrity production gigs, overnight shoots, cramped apartments, and late nights in pre-gentrified Brooklyn, he chases art, ambition, love, and the possibility of reinventing himself.
At the center of that transformation is a woman whose sensuality and fierce intellectualism pull him into an intense relationship that reshapes the way he sees desire, intimacy, and his own future. Together, they move through a city pulsing with energy and possibility just before everything changes forever.
Part love letter to a vanished downtown New York, One Day I Woke Up in America is a literary novel about reinvention, ambition, intimacy, memory, and the fleeting innocence of a generation standing unknowingly at the edge of history.
