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What were your first words—not simply the first word family legend has preserved, but the first hundred? The first two hundred? What might they tell us about the person you were becoming?
When Susan Letzler Cole was a baby, her parents did something extraordinary: they kept a meticulous list of their daughter's first 200 words. Decades later, Cole returns to that remarkable family document and discovers much more than a record of childhood milestones. In They Made a List: A Memoir Beyond Memory, those early words become a doorway into a time she cannot herself remember—and an invitation to think about how language, memory, family, and identity take shape.
Moving gracefully between memoir and inquiry, Cole follows the list into the fascinating territory of early childhood and language acquisition. Drawing on neuroscience, cognitive psychology, ethology, cultural anthropology, and her own family history, she explores what those first words might reveal about a child's emerging world: the people and objects that matter, the connections beginning to form, and the astonishing process by which sounds become words and words become meaning.
But They Made a List is also a story about parents and children, and about the small acts of attention through which families preserve one another. Cole's parents could not have known what their handwritten record would mean to their daughter many decades later. Their list gives her something memory cannot: a glimpse of herself encountering language for the first time.
Warm, curious, playful, and intellectually adventurous, They Made a List begins with 200 little words and opens onto some very big questions: How do we become ourselves? What can we know about the years before memory? And what unexpected gifts do families leave behind for us to discover?
Advance Word
“This is a wonderful piece of work, original and brilliant, as well as full of wonder—the wonder of Susan Letzler Cole's parents at their verbal, remarkable daughter for whom they made a list of her first words, and the wonder of the author at her parents' careful attention, of which she made this book. They Made a List will leave you in wonder too, that what began as an intellectual transaction could result in such a beautiful labor of love.”Roger Rosenblatt — author of The Story I Am and The Book of Love
“Susan Letzler Cole's They Made A List is a stunning exploration of the comprehensive record made by her parents of the author's first words. Examining the list of her first 200 words, Cole begins to unravel an individual's early vocal communication. Her masterful weaving of language development theory, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, ethology, and cultural anthropology is an engaging discourse on individuality in human and animal communication.”Kyleelise Holmes Thomas, aka KyleeliseTHT — author of Even if a Truth Condemns Us
“This irresistible book grows from an inquiry into Susan Letzler Cole's first 200 words, as recorded by her parents. It broadens into a series of reflections on how children acquire language as they experience the new world into which they are born. And it deepens into a meditation on how our earliest language experiences affect who we are today, and how our primal ties to our parents evolve yet remain as we age. Letzler Cole's intimately personal text speaks to us all.”John Leubsdorf — Professor of Law, Rutgers University; author of Man in His Original Dignity: Legal Ethics in France