As McCann said, let the great world spin

The most compelling stories about the terrorist attacks on America are fiction.

We were immersed last week in a cathartic wave of 9/11 media coverage, from the photo spread in Time magazine to the evocative vignettes in The New Yorker. Of course, television beat us nearly senseless with recycled revisits to the time and place of the attacks and interviews with those who lived through the day.

Wisely, The New Yorker included fiction writers, from Zadie Smith to Ian Frazier, in the writing of the magazine’s commemorative pieces. Although the authors didn’t invent the facts of their accounts, they brought their special talents to the process of transforming memory into story.

Coincidentally, last week I was talking to book groups about a well-reviewed novel, “The Tiger’s Wife,” by Tea Obreht. The author, who is 26, wrote a fictional account of the wars in the former Yugoslavia and what happens to a people who live out their lives in a country fractured by violence and ethnic hatred. The brilliance of the novel is that it never mentions any country by name, or any specific leader; it uses ancient Balkan folklore to evoke the sad truths of war.

I realized, talking about the book, that the power of storytelling far exceeds the impact of factual accounts, whether of the Balkan wars or the destruction of the twin towers. It is only through stories that we can process our memories, sublimate our fears and begin mitigating the nightmare of 9/11. The reason for this is that the stories are oblique; they change the facts but they get directly to the real emotional truth of an event.