{"id":1405185,"date":"2026-02-07T10:30:24","date_gmt":"2026-02-07T15:30:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thenewsherald.com\/?p=1405185&preview=true&preview_id=1405185"},"modified":"2026-02-07T10:30:55","modified_gmt":"2026-02-07T15:30:55","slug":"whats-like-got-to-do-with-it-evanstons-sara-levine-on-the-art-of-difficult-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thenewsherald.com\/2026\/02\/07\/whats-like-got-to-do-with-it-evanstons-sara-levine-on-the-art-of-difficult-women\/","title":{"rendered":"What\u2019s like got to do with it? Sara Levine on the art of \u2018difficult\u2019 women"},"content":{"rendered":"

CHICAGO\u00a0\u2014\u00a0The other day the author Sara Levine asked me to meet her at a dog beach in Evanston. I didn\u2019t have a hard time finding her. She said she would be wearing an orange cap and she was. The problem \u2014 and here is where I felt as though I slipped suddenly into a Sara Levine novel \u2014 was that the beach was padlocked and Levine arrived without her dog. Also, at the very moment we met, Northwestern University\u2019s Emergency Notification System began to boom out a test, which sounds like a tornado siren with the addition of a deep male voice imploring you to stay calm, no emergency is occurring.<\/p>\n

In a Sara Levine novel \u2014 and so far, she\u2019s only written two in 25 years \u2014 the heroine would likely take that as a sign, like some kind of cosmic irony that an emergency was definitely occurring.<\/p>\n

Levine suggested we meet at a dog beach because \u201cThe Hitch,\u201d her new novel \u2014 her first since \u201cTreasure Island!!!,\u201d Levine\u2019s beloved 2012 cult classic \u2014 centers on a dog attack in Evanston that leaves a corgi dead and a 6-year-old boy certain he\u2019s possessed by the dead dog\u2019s soul. But like \u201cTreasure Island!!!,\u201d it\u2019s also funny and unhinged and so relatable you wonder if Levine, who chairs the writing department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has been slowly making a case for the lost art of the literary comedy novel.<\/p>\n

Indeed, Levine\u2019s characters are so queasily recognizable, this wasn\u2019t even the first time in recent months that I felt as if I had stepped unwittingly into a Sara Levine story. By some twist of completely off-the-wall fate, the same week I was reading an early copy of \u201cThe Hitch,\u201d I was bitten several times by a dog. Seriously. It was bonkers. I was walking through a restaurant patio on the North Shore and a dog launched itself onto my calf like I was sirloin. My first thought: Why me?<\/em> I felt like that guy in a movie who hasn\u2019t yet become a werewolf but all of the neighborhood dogs know he\u2019s a werewolf and start barking. And yet, it wasn\u2019t even the dog attack that reminded me of Levine \u2014 it was the way diners glared at me, as if I interrupted their burgers. I felt a weird shame.<\/p>\n

When I told Levine this \u2014 and that I was not that excited to hang out at a dog beach anyway, considering \u2014 she told me about the attack in Evanston that led to \u201cThe Hitch.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSo I was walking my dog by (Evanston Township High School) and he\u2019s a little goldendoodle and this dog \u2014 no leash, but with a pink collar \u2014 suddenly appears in the alley. It\u2019s a pit bull. I\u2019m not anti-pit bull and I don\u2019t mean to stereotype. She\u2019s a little pit, but pits do have strong jaws and she attacks my dog. This was 2020. I have these horrible voice memos with my dog wailing. Anyway, now I\u2019m in a crisis, and what am I doing to do? I\u2019m terrible in a crisis. I also don\u2019t want to hurt the other dog. If I let my dog off the leash he might get hit by car, so I\u2019m frozen there, and I\u2019m also trying to separate them, but I\u2019m also thinking I can\u2019t kick this dog \u2014 even with what\u2019s happening in front of me, I couldn\u2019t do it.<\/em> The house on the corner has a Newfoundland standing in the yard, and the woman at the house sees me. She tells me to run for her car, but it\u2019s actually a truck with a flatbed. She grabs a shovel and starts swinging at the dog, and my legs at this point are jelly but we make it into the flatbed and the pitbull is just launching itself at us, just like Cujo. My first thought was, Did I make this happen?<\/em> I had started writing about a dog, so: Did I bring this on?<\/em> That\u2019s nutty, but it\u2019s how you feel at times when things happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Sara
Sara Levine\u2019s new novel \u201cThe Hitch.” (Stacey Wescott\/Chicago Tribune)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Levine\u2019s novels feel right for early 2026,<\/strong> for this gray period when we\u2019re all expected to reassess our lives, make changes and emerge in the spring with clearer heads. The way certain works of fiction can do, her books could double as perverse self-help, starring heroines who go out of their ways to show how not<\/em> to conduct your life. Her writing voice, sardonic, breezy, chimes with Joy Williams and Donald Barthelme, but it\u2019s hard not to hear \u201cCurb Your Enthusiasm\u201d and even \u201cThe Office\u201d \u2014 that nexus where unraveling people lacking self-awareness stumble across empathy.<\/p>\n

The heroine of \u201cTreasure Island!!!\u201d \u2014 a 25-year old clerk of a \u201cpet library\u201d \u2014 reads Robert Louis Stevenson\u2019s legendary adventure and quickly reassess her narrow timid life, deciding there and then to live by a credo culled from Stevenson: Boldness, Resolution, Independence, Horn-blowing.<\/em> But by the end, she kills a parrot and is so obsessed with \u201cTreasure Island,\u201d family and friends stage an intervention between her and the novel. The heroine of \u201cThe Hitch\u201d could be related, if only tangentially: Her name is Rose Cutler and she is an Evanston yogurt company CEO (as well as \u201cantiracist, secular Jewish feminist eco-warrior\u201d). Rose is also perilously up her own keister. She does not want children (\u201cnot for one atom-spitting second\u201d) but she is never so shy with opinions about the way her brother and sister-in-law raise their own kid. When they go on vacation, Rose jumps at the chance to play aunt for a week \u2014 which is when the dog attack occurs, her nephew decides (cheerfully) the dog\u2019s soul leapt bodies, and worse.<\/p>\n

Rose is a micromanager, and lousy in a crisis. It spoils nothing to say the closest she gets to enlightenment is a brief ah-ha<\/em>: \u201cSometimes my mind gets active as a prairie dog and I build elaborate tunnels underground, room after room of judgement and justification.\u201d<\/p>\n

The writer Roxane Gay<\/a> \u2014 who once included Levine\u2019s work in an essay on unlikeable women characters (\u201cNot Here to Make Friends\u201d) \u2014 said that just after she landed her own imprint (Roxane Gay Books) at Grove Atlantic, she sought out Levine and asked what she was working on: \u201cIt had been some time since \u2018Treasure Island!!!\u2019 and Sara did not disappoint. The writing voice I fell in love with was still there, but she had grown, and though this Rose character was older, you\u2019re reminded that sometimes we don\u2019t really outgrow our lesser selves \u2014 that sometimes we just learn to live with them, you know?\u201d<\/p>\n

Levine told Gay that not every reader is a fan of unlikeable woman characters. She told Gay about the (smallish) subset of Goodreads reviewers who describe her women as \u201cutterly unlikeable\u201d and \u201cirredeemable.\u201d Gay told me, \u201cI don\u2019t know why writers are so willing to expose themselves to Goodreads. Some people have a parasocial relationship with book characters, and it meets a puritanical streak where people decide they don\u2019t like a character who is a \u2018bad person,\u2019 forgetting flawed people exist. Rose is convinced she knows the right way to do things and her ethics are in the right place \u2014\u00a0bless her heart<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Levine\u2019s sweet spot is what literary scholars have long called \u201cunreliable narration\u201d \u2014 she even taught a class at Brown University (where she got her Ph.D. in English) on the topic. Levine said: \u201cMy father\u2019s a psychiatrist and he tells me we\u2019re all unreliable narrators. But in a novel, it means there\u2019s a deficit of comprehension from the character telling the story and that deficit is part of the story. But when I hear from people who hated \u2018Treasure Island!!!,\u2019 often they think I\u2019m<\/em> the narrator. My feelings get hurt. But maybe they don\u2019t understand that gap. It took me a long time to realize it.<\/p>\n

\u201cOr maybe \u2018unreliable\u2019 is the wrong term for this. Should I just refer to my characters as \u2018difficult women\u2019? No, maybe not \u2014 I was at a party recently and told someone I write about \u2018difficult women\u2019 and this person said, \u2018OK, wait, what do you mean by difficult <\/em>\u2026?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Sara
Sara Levine sits in home writing space on Jan. 9, 2026, in Evanston. Levine is the chair of the writing department at School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a novelist whose new book, \u201cThe Hitch,\u201d follows her 2011 novel Treasure Island. (Stacey Wescott\/Chicago Tribune)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Horror novelist Paul Tremblay \u2014 whom Levine consulted to get a sense of how to handle the possession part of \u201cThe Hitch\u201d \u2014 is a big fan of Levine, and included \u201cTreasure Island!!!\u201d on his ballot for the New York Times poll of the best books of the 21st century. Part of that appreciation, he said, is \u201chow she is reviving an old tradition of first-person a-hole narrators. Think of \u2018Confederacy of Dunces,\u2019 or the novels of Sam Lipsyte, except publishers don\u2019t like books by women<\/em> who go there. Readers are getting more literal, I think. It can feel like a risk to just include any moral uncertainty in a novel now. I hear this especially from younger readers, who want to know what the moral is, and the thing is we are not writing to bestow morals but explain what it means to be human, which can be dark and uncomfortable \u2014 all words I would use to describe Sara\u2019s books.\u201d<\/p>\n

You could also argue the long afterlife of \u201cTreasure Island!!\u201d \u2014 a perpetual word-of-mouth bookseller favorite, handed down to friends who can relate to spiraling exhaustion \u2014 is a mirror of contemporary America. Or at least indie culture: Rose Byrne is likely to grab an Oscar nomination soon for \u201cIf I Had Legs I\u2019d Kick You,\u201d as a stressed mother who makes a series of bad decisions; she\u2019d slide neatly into Levine\u2019s books. Levine is one of your favorite literary writers\u2019 best-kept secrets: Blurbs for \u201cThe Hitch\u201d<\/a> came from Elizabeth Gilbert, Rumaan Alam, Adam Levin and Chicagoan Michael Zapata<\/a>, who told me: \u201cBlurbs can be blurby, but the one I wrote was truly sincere.\u201d \u201cTreasure Island!!!,\u201d which has yet to be adapted to TV or film (but probably will be one day), has already been developed (and dropped) by Natalie Portman and James Franco.<\/p>\n

Levine sounds almost naive about the depth of this love.<\/p>\n

She told me another established screenwriter got pretty far with \u201cTreasure Island!!!\u201d but then appeared to bail and never signed their contract; Levine never heard from the woman again. One day, during a class at SAIC, she projected an email exchange between her and the writer as an illustration of professional etiquette. \u201cI had to explain how she opted out of the project, and as students do, one took out his phone and googled the woman\u2019s name and a minute later replied, \u2018Oh, Sara, no \u2014 that woman had died. That\u2019s probably why she never got back to you.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Sounds like a Sara Levine story, I said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt does?\u201d she asked.<\/p>\n

\"Sara
Sara Levine sifts through a box of drawings from 2012 that she created in the early stages of writing her novel \u201cThe Hinge\u201d at her home on Jan. 9, 2026, in Evanston. (Stacey Wescott\/Chicago Tribune)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

To be frank, the biggest disappointment about Sara Levine is that she\u2019s not nuts. I anticipated erratic and flighty and I got calm and rational. James McManus<\/a>, author of the poker memoir \u201cPositively Fifth Street,\u201d who taught alongside Levine for 25 years, said: \u201cShe is as sane and responsible an adult as they come. In fact, (SAIC) wanted her to move into even more active leadership roles, but that can be a time suck, creatively.\u201d<\/p>\n

She has long gray hair and large cartoon eyes and comes across as naturally funny. She said people do expect her to be a wacko. \u201cSomeone introduced me at a party recently as \u2018one of the most sane people\u2019 at the Art Institute, or maybe it was \u2018the least insane.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Levine, who is 55, grew up outside Cleveland and wrote a couple of plays that were produced when she was still a teenager (one professionally, for a Cleveland theater group). She went to Northwestern for theater only to find her way to creative writing. She then bounced from Brown to the University of Iowa to SAIC, which she joined in 2000. She describes herself as \u201cornery\u201d that entire time. She threatened to drop out of Brown, refused to start a novel, moved to Iowa to teach non-fiction, only to decide, \u201c\u2018I don\u2019t want to live here, I don\u2019t want to teach this my whole life\u2019 \u2014 it was like looking into my coffin.\u201d<\/p>\n

She found she was more interested in \u201c\u2018hysterical\u2019 voices, the more obstreperous personalities of fiction.\u201d \u201cTreasure Island!!!,\u201d which she began to see if she could write a novel after years of short stories and nonfiction academia, took a decade, but she found that she was more ambitious than she knew. She also learned she had a knack for describing everyday suburbia with cutting precision: \u201cThe Hitch\u201d is filled with Evanston parents who over-schedule kids so much you wonder if they \u201ccan\u2019t sit still in a room\u201d with children. Doctor\u2019s offices offer \u201csix televisions playing six different channels.\u201d Vast expanses of Illinois contain \u201ca strip of road that featured an abandoned movie theatre, a discount shoe store, and a cemetery bordered by a six-foot high metal fence capped with snow,\u201d as well as a hospital \u201cfounded in affiliation with the Evangelical Lutheran Church and rooted in the belief that all persons were created in the image of God, a hospital that had not in the past five years received higher than a two-star Yelp review.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Sara
Sara Levine sits in her home writing space with her dog Lenny on Jan. 9, 2026, in Evanston. (Stacey Wescott\/Chicago Tribune)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

After \u201cTreasure Island!!!,\u201d she wrote a big sprawling novel titled \u201cLeave It,\u201d a more lyrical and somber kaleidoscope of Evanston characters; she didn\u2019t want to follow one \u201cdifficult woman\u201d with a second. She gave it to her agent, but then soon after, she pulled it back and shelved it.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was worried I was reinforcing the \u2018hysterical\u2019 woman thing, so I wrote something else, but that something else? Other people do that book well. So I have this narrow track. Twyla Tharp talks about knowing your own creative DNA, and that helped me. I\u2019ve always had teachers who said you need to keep growing, you\u2019ve got to keep pushing, that there is a natural aesthetic restlessness where you should never repeat yourself. I really bought into that. But what if it\u2019s helpful to focus on one form and go very deep into only that? Look at Monet, who spent a lifetime painting haystacks \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2018Compares self to Monet,\u2019\u201d I interrupted, joking, pretending to jot that in my notebook.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, and also Nabokov!\u201d she said, laughing. \u201cAnd of course Jane Austen! Write that down.\u201d<\/p>\n

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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