Strange Fiction

Sara Levine ’92 weaves biting humor together with explorations of loneliness in her second novel, The Hitch, released in January. In this quirky family drama, yogurt company owner Rose Cutler can’t wait to look after her 6-year-old nephew, Nathan, for a week while her brother and his wife are on vacation. But after Nathan witnesses Rose’s Newfoundland kill a corgi in the park, Nathan begins acting as though he is possessed by the corgi’s spirit. Rose is skeptical at first. But when Nathan keeps insisting he is possessed, she searches for a way to exorcise the corgi’s spirit from her nephew before his parents come home. Things spiral further out of control for Rose as she deals with a disaster at her company. 

Levine ’92 says the idea for this book first came to her when she was pregnant with her daughter Sally, now 22.  

“As a parent, you’re there to help the child become the best version of themselves,” she says. But Levine observed that some parents can go too far in molding their children into who they want their kids to be. Levine wanted to explore this dynamic through The Hitch’s protagonist, Rose, who holds strong opinions about how her nephew should be raised.  

Though Levine started out as a theater major at Northwestern, she found herself drawn to the creative writing program. “I thought I was going to be a playwright,” she recalls, “and then I became interested in fiction.”  

After graduating from Northwestern, she won a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, which landed her at Brown University, where she earned a doctorate in literature in 1997. She taught in the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program for three years before joining the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2000 as a professor in the writing program. 

She began focusing on fiction writing in the early 2000s, and her first novel, Treasure Island!!!, was published in 2011. She lives in Evanston with her family, including her cockapoo, Lenny.