“Oh, that,” Ruth said. She’d expected that. When she wrote about abortion, not having had an abortion, she got angry letters from people who had had abortions; when she wrote about childbirth, not having had a child—or when she wrote about divorce, not having been divorced ( or married) . . . well, there were always those letters. People denying that imagination was real, or insisting that imagination wasn’t as real as personal experience; it was the same old thing. “For God’s sake, Allan,” Ruth said, “you’re not worried about another reader telling me to write about what I know, are you?”
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