After reading Aimee Levitt’s Reader cover story on rape at the University of Chicago, I sent her a note to say how much I admired it. What followed was an exchange of e-mails that exposed differences of perspective rooted in age and sex. I wondered if Aimee was beginning to think I actually didn’t like her story much at all.
I saw this device at work a second time this week, in an essay in the Tribune. (It ran previously in the Washington Post.) “I gave my daughter up for adoption. Then I tried to be her mom,” is the title of the op-ed by Stephanie Andersen, a creative writing teacher in Pennsylvania who became pregnant at 16 and gave up the baby to a couple who couldn’t conceive.
Maybe not, but I want to think she does. As a final ironic flourish to a piece of ingenious creative writing they’re hard to top. I want to think that Andersen, like Aimee Levitt, knows her stuff and trusts her readers to find what’s there.
