Review

The girl in the window

Tampa Bay Times

Lane DeGregory, Times Staff Writer
Posted: Jul 31, 2008 04:35 PM

But She’s a Human too…

Lane DeGregory is a journalist first and foremost. She’s had a career that has spanned over two decades including the time she spent as Editor-in-Chief of her college’s newspaper.

            When it came time to write “The girl in the window” DeGregory was simply trying to write a piece that was a feature highlighting adoption stories, but it quickly grew into much more.

DeGregory wrote the feature piece for the St. Petersburg Times, now called the Tampa Bay Times. It quickly took on a life of its own leading to an eventual Pulitzer Prize for her.

            DeGregory’s captivating piece is about a 7-year-old girl found in captivity, living in her own filth, and severely neglected. It documents her journey from being rescued to her eventual adoption, and the obstacles her new parents had to overcome when taking in the girl.

While DeGregory’s vivid imagery of the deplorable conditions the young girl was found in is quite hard to stomach, it is what captures the reader’s attention from the very beginning. “It sounded like you were walking on eggshells. You couldn't take a step without crunching German cockroaches," the detective said. "They were in the lights, in the furniture. Even inside the freezer. The freezer!” she writes.

The subsequent point of views center on the adoptive parents and doctors, which help to paint a clear picture of exactly what this girl had to endure.

DeGregory carefully crafts her piece based on the traditional reporting style of the inverted pyramid outlining the most harrowing yet disturbing bits of information from the start which hooks the reader to the lengthy feature article.

DeGregory does an excellent job outlining the situation from the very beginning. She also continues to develop the story with details, characters and character interaction. She frequently discusses the adoptive parents but the nagging feeling of wondering what happened to the animal the put this little girl in these conditions haunts the reader for the duration of the article.

She finally addresses the “Mother” in depth towards the very end, which is the only gripe I have concerning the piece. The constant waiting for the mother’s “explanation” at times distracts from certain areas of the story.

How the little girl ended up in this situation is finally revealed but it feels rushed, as if DeGregory is hastily trying to tie up loose ends. She doesn’t seem to spend nearly as much time getting answers from the child’s birth mother as she does documenting the child’s progression. I don’t believe that the mother should have been the focus of the story, and she wasn’t, however it would be more insightful to hear about her before the very end.

Overall DeGregory does an impeccable job of bringing light to this particular situation and noting that there are thousands of neglected children in the U.S. at any given time. DeGregory starts the story with despair and ends it with hope. This story gets something that most others like it don’t often get… a happy ending.