Parenting & Family Quote by Poppy Z. Brite

There is a sly provocation baked into Brite's use of "demented": it frames literacy not as salvation but as exposure. The line refuses the wholesome myth that reading early makes you precocious in a tidy, school-prize way. Instead, it suggests a childhood accelerated into adult atmospheres without the usual gatekeepers, where the imagination is fed raw material before a person has the defenses or context to metabolize it.

The craft here is the double move. "I learned to read very early" signals talent, even innocence; "was allowed to read whatever I wanted" flips that innocence into a kind of permission slip for chaos. The passive construction - "was allowed" - matters. It implicates adults not as villains but as absent curators, creating a household where boundaries are porous and the library becomes a surrogate environment. The subtext is that taste, identity, and even sanity are shaped as much by access as by experience: give a kid the whole cultural pantry, and they'll build a self out of whatever jars are within reach.

Contextually, Brite's career - associated with transgressive, gothic, and horror-inflected storytelling - makes the line read like an origin story that isn't asking for pity. It's almost a wink: of course the work is haunted; the haunting started early, when language arrived before supervision. The intent isn't to blame books, but to credit them with power: reading doesn't just expand worlds, it destabilizes the one you're supposed to stay in.