Erik Ronningen came close to death several times on 9/11 as he made his way from the heights above Manhattan to the relative safety of the sidewalks below. The day after, while comparing notes with his wife, Ronningen was struck with the idea that living through an event such as this merited writing about. He began interviewing fellow survivors with an idea of writing a book for the first anniversary, but found that both they and he grew weary of contemplating such an awful day in their lives. After many years, he finally finished From the Inside Out, a narrative that incorporates his and other people who were inside the North Tower during 9/11. It makes sense that everyone he talked to escaped from the North Tower: that was where he worked, after all, and they were the people he labored with to get down and out before anything worse happened. The book is divided into three parts: Before, Impact, and Collapse. I’ve read the definitive oral history of 9/11, Only Plane in the Sky, and didn’t figure for any surprises here — and yet still there were a few. It took far longer for people to realize the enormity of the plane’s impact than it should have, depending on the floor: one man who had survived the 1993 bombings assumed this was more of the same, and spent precious time inventorying his file cabinets to remove documents and computer media that he didn’t want to be separated from during the downtime. Another surprise was how insulated the people in the North Tower were from events outside: those who escaped were moving down stairwells full of other escapees, and when they emerged to find the plaza littered with paper, debris, and — horrifyingly — bodies, they were dumbfounded. Still worse, when they looked up they saw that the South Tower was also on fire, even worse off than its sister tower — the pilots of the United flight hit it at speeds surpassing AA-11, speeds that would have cased breakup in flight — and soon realize they weren’t out of the danger zone yet. This is an immersive narrative but is far surpassed by Only Plane.

Then the blizzard began—a blizzard of falling paper, debris, and rubbish forced out of the upper tower from the explosion, resembling a midwinter, Great Plains storm. So intense was the raining wreckage that the beautiful view of New York Harbor could no longer be seen. A FedEx package came spiraling down in the mix made Erik immediately think of the Tom Hanks’ movie Cast Away. The mind is a curious mechanism.

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Leslie Haskin’s memoir is rather different: for one, it’s a personal memoir, and it’s very introspective. If this were fiction, it would be counted as a novella given its length (just over a hundred pages): it ostensibly focuses only on her own experience, though it does include a section with vivid description that could have only been sourced through speaking to others. (She describes the collapse of the South Tower as if she were in the area, whereas she was sitting on the commuter boat traumatized and learned about it through people screaming about it.) Haskin worked in an insurance office on the North Tower, and while dozens of floors below the impact zone, she describes a harrowing scene of ceilings collapsing, visible fire, etc. On first reading this didn’t make much sense to me because Ronningen’s account has him much closer to impact, but with none of the “The building is about to fall!!” drama that Haskin records in her office. After thinking about it, though, I realized Haskin’s floor could have been hit by the fireball that swept through the elevator shafts — that seems especially likely given that her floor was very close to the first skylobby where people changed elevators, and that she encountered severe burn victims on her own way down. Her prose is vivid to the point of florid, but given that she was put into a state of severe mental distress after the event. I’m not inclined to be critical.