How are the events of 9/11 significant in the novel, My Education?

The day of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York represents, in the novel, much of what it represented in reality: a profoundly shattering turning point in the lives of individuals who lived in New York at the time and, arguably, the world as a whole. Both the traumas of that day, and the consequences of those traumas, hinted at in the novel were, and are, common to many people in New York and in much of America.