I began kindergarten at age four, so I was younger than most of my classmates and utterly lacking in social skills. Moreover, my mother sent me to school wearing velvet bonnets and high-topped leather shoes, the kind of shoes babies wore at the time. In kindergarten such ignorance of fashion—and of the rules of the pack—went pretty much unnoticed. By first grade, my classmates began to notice. And in the years that followed I fell steadily in their esteem. I was a good-enough student and got along well with teachers, but there was no way around it . . . I was a nerd!

I wonder how many children's writers were, for one reason or another, outsiders when they were young. From those I know personally, I would say many, if not most.

Such an experience, while certainly painful, seems to have the capacity to open a door between adult existence and childhood that is more usually left closed. It gives us direct access to a world that most people learn to forget as they move into maturity. And perhaps it gives us a need to return to childhood to fix whatever went wrong the first time around.