Bruce A. Dobish was inside the World Trade Center in 1993 when a bomb exploded in the garage below. Eight years later, he stood directly across the street when the first plane hit. He ran, nearly got trampled, and made it home. These experiences form just one chapter of his new memoir, It Could Happen to You, which was released on October 16, 2026.
The book’s significance lies not only in its eyewitness accounts of two attacks on the World Trade Center but in the way it was written. Dobish, recovering from a fractured hip in a rehabilitation facility, dictated the entire manuscript into his phone—roughly 7,000 lines recorded between physical therapy sessions and hospital meals. “I’ve always wanted to write a book, and I was sick in the hospital, rehabbing,” Dobish said. “I figured it was a good time to start. All I had was my phone.” What began as a way to pass the hours became a full-length memoir, with the recovery itself serving as one of its final chapters.
Beyond the World Trade Center chapters, the memoir traces six decades of American life through Dobish’s eyes: a Queens childhood in the projects, a shot at Brooklyn Tech, a paper route that turned into a hustle, poker tables and Grateful Dead shows, three marriages, a multimillion-dollar phone venture, a sister he did not know existed until a DNA test found her, and a fall on a cruise-ship gangway that nearly ended everything. The title, Dobish said, is not a warning but an invitation. “The title says it all. It could happen to you. It happened to me.”
The book also explores a darker current. Dobish grew up and did business around people whose choices took them somewhere he never went. Two men he counted as friends were convicted of murder and both died in prison. “I’ve been through a lot,” he said. “I think it’s real life. People will relate to that.”
It Could Happen to You is aimed at readers who prefer true stories over invented ones, particularly fans of blue-collar New York memoir and survivors’ accounts of 9/11. It is also expected to resonate with baby boomers who lived the same decades from a different seat and with anyone in the middle of a hard recovery who needs proof that a life is not over just because the body is temporarily out of service. The book’s unusual origin—a memoir spoken into a phone from a rehab bed—adds a layer of immediacy to its stories of survival and reinvention, making it a notable addition to the canon of first-person accounts of American life and tragedy.
