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Had she learned to read for real, rather than the pecking way that's still the best she can do—had she happened to read Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding, for example, which Molly Cooke read aloud at Bright Day in three installments—she would have discovered that the exact emotions she experienced after a trip to London with her father, at sixteen, a trip that broke her, had been felt by others. She was not unique, but neither was she alone. Reading might have saved her.