No one in New York City was left untouched by the events of September 11, 2001. For the characters in A Birdhouse in Brooklyn, life was going to change in many ways, both momentous and minor. This is a story of the lives of disparate people brought together by circumstance. Here are native New Yorker Lucy Walsh, the 50-year-old editor-in-chief of a wildly popular teen magazine, and her much younger gay creative director, Shawn Farman, transplant from a small town in Pennsylvania. Here are the three sons of his Puerto Rican lover, who leaves them behind with Shawn and their grandmother. After a slow unraveling in the topsy-turvy, post-9/11 economy, Lucy, Shawn, and an unlikely circle of fellow New Yorkers are drawn together to help each other peel away the armor that has stood between them and their dreams.