In 1961, back when women wore closed dresses with tight waists, took part in gardening clubs, and loaded a bunch of kids into cars without seat belts without a second thought, back when the birth of the sixties movement was not even on the horizon—let alone the fact that its participants would spend the next sixty years analyzing it—back when the world wars had finally ended and the secret wars had just begun, thirty-year-old Madeleine Zot’s mother would get up every morning before dawn, feeling absolutely certain of one thing: her life was over. Yet, despite this certainty, she always managed to get up and prepare her daughter’s lunch. Food for thought, Elizabeth wrote on a small note and tucked it into her daughter’s lunchbox. Then she paused, pencil hovering, as if she changed her mind. And she wrote on another note: Exercise during recess, but do NOT absentmindedly let the boys win. Then she paused again, tapping the pencil on the table. It’s not your imagination, she wrote on a third note. Most people really are awful. And she placed the last two notes on top.
Most children Madeleine’s age can’t read, and those who can read words like “duck” or “ball.” But she had started reading at the age of three and now, almost six, she had finished nearly all of Dickens. That’s the kind of child Madeleine was—a child who could hum a Bach concerto but couldn’t tie her own shoelaces, who could explain the Earth’s rotation but got confused playing tic-tac-toe. And that was the problem. Because, while musical prodigies are always recognized, the same does not apply to early readers. This happens because early readers are simply good at something everyone else will eventually become good at too. So their head start isn’t considered special, just annoying.
