By the time she was in the first grade, homework meltdowns plagued her afternoons as she struggled to understand how her friends managed to get through an entire chapter in the time it took her to read a single page.
And there was the pain and anguish of chances missed and woodwork struck before Aaron Ramsey, fittingly as Arsenal's best player, wrote the chapter in extra-time for which Gunners fans had waited almost a decade.
Equally disturbing, in its way, is the chapter on Ezra Pound in Time and Western Man.
The writers from whom he took the texts at the heads of the chapters in The Time of My Life are some guide to the width and voracity of his reading: Yeats (his greatest literary hero), Defoe, Homer, Virginia Woolf, Byron, Hugh McDiarmid, Coleridge, Auden, CP Cavafy.
And I know for myself that when I'm inspired and clear, I can write three chapters in the time it takes the uninspired me to craft a paragraph.
Chapters jump around in time, so that background and foreground stories unfold in fits and starts, delaying until the last pages the revelation of Mead's motives for leaving.
"He had that incredible impact on Saturday with the start of a new career at a new club and a new chapter in your football time," said Martinez.
"Go Daddy is fortunate to have Blake Irving join the team for the next chapter in his long time career as an innovator," said Scott Wagner, Go Daddy's Interim CEO.
The trained teachers also reported that the head teacher instructed them to teach the chapter in allocated class time.
McCall Smith's early chapter book travels back in time to introduce Precious Ramotswe, the protagonist in his "No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" series, when she was just a child herself.
