"The American Male at Age Ten"

The primary trait that makes this essay stand out to me is the relatively familiar childlike innocence that Susan Orlean manages to capture so brilliantly. When you're ten years old, it's easy to imagine marrying someone and leading a life of joy and prosperity. Something that is interesting is that she mixes adult language and childlike language in a unique manner. For example, in the first paragraph, she writes: "We wouldn't have sex, but we would have crushes on each other and, magically, babies would appear in our home." Obviously a ten year old is too young to be thinking about having/not having sex (or so we'd all like to hope, anyway), so we see her current self commenting alongside her child self, who believes that babies are a natural product of two people liking each other. Little details like that help give the essay character, and it keeps it from becoming too mundane and bogged down in its own potential innocence.