Don DeLillo, author most notably of Underworld and White Noise, seems like an author that does not enjoy writing, but rather writes out of a sense of obligation to himself and to the reader. His books tackle grandiose topics — death, love, popular culture — in grandiose ways and the results are always lucid and startling. No different is his latest, Falling Man, a novel of the weeks immediately following 9/11. The main character, Keith Neudecker, survives the attack, stumbling out of the North Tower and back home to desperately try to reconcile his old life with this new existence.

DeLillo sat down with All Things Considered, and said the whole book started with one photograph of a man walking from the rubble, holding somebody else’s suitcase. “I didn’t know who the man was at first, but what I did know was the fact that the briefcase he was carrying was not his and that seemed to suggest a mystery that needed to be solved.”

Listen to the whole interview here.