Heretic: A Memoir

by Jeanna Kadlec

“God gave me this big mouth, so I think it can be no sin to use it,” says the titular character in Karen Cushman’s 1994 middle-grade classic Catherine, Called Birdy, something I, as a seven-year-old, desperately needed to read and promptly internalized.* From an early age, I had been, problematically, the only girl placed in our rural elementary school’s fledgling “Talented and Gifted” program, won poetry competitions at the public library with my simple A-B-A-B rhyme schemes, and was perpetually a teacher’s pet. Like Birdy, I felt that my smarts and big mouth were God-given talent. My teachers and the media reflected back to me that if you put in the effort, people with few resources could compete with people who had everything and still come out on top. In such a worldview, God-given talent was, theoretically, enough.