My memories of them are defined by their humiliations. But for me, and I’d posit for millions of other kids who messed up everything all the time, the awkwardness of Cleary’s characters was everything. The children’s author, who died last week at the splendid age of 104, has been heralded for the way she captured-sweetly, and with humor-all the ordinary ups and downs of childhood: sibling rivalry, misunderstandings, having a teacher who you can sense doesn’t like you. Nobody understood this better than Beverly Cleary. And childhood is nothing if not a series of bungles, one maladroit, painfully public flop after another. Humiliation is a kind of trauma when we experience it, our nervous system floods us with adrenaline, heightening our perception and preserving the memory as a warning against future social transgression. I can’t even type that sentence without flushing at how conspicuously bad I felt, and how alone. When I was 6, after being chided twice for talking too loudly during lunch, I was made to stand in the cafeteria by myself until the other kids finished their food. The childhood memories we retain most searingly tend to involve shame.
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