Cindy is breaking through after her 45 years of struggling to read again after being traumatized and humiliated by her fourth-grade teacher and classmates.

The best selling author Nicholas Sparks helped.

A supportive husband, careful listening, and some children’s animal books,  the novel “Notebooks” by Nicholas Sparks and the movie it inspired in 2004 were also key.

I learned a great deal working with Cindy, and I hope to find some way to help people with reading phobias they are eager to shed.

I’ve heard Cindy’s problem before. She works as an aide for a doctor I saw this year several times.

She had anxieties about reading all of her life and froze when reading in front of other people.

Her mother criticized her for her reading struggles, and her teacher humiliated her by forcing her to read in front of the class even though it caused visible and physical panic.

The teacher told her mother in front of Cindy (not her real name) that she thought Cindy was “retarded” as the term was used then, and she sent her to a class of “retarded” children for remedial reading, where she was ignored and further scarred for two years.

She did no writing in the class and was mostly ignored.

Cindy is a working-class woman; her husband is an avid reader who tried to help her get past her dread of reading.

She kept claiming she couldn’t understand the words or follow the stories, but I saw her reading posters and charts and medicine lists and sensed her problem was emotional, not physical.

When her husband found out she was working with a writer in the doctor’s office, he urged her to come and ask me for help. She did.

I can’t emphasize how important it is for people in a family – especially men – to encourage their sisters, wives, and children to get help with old and ingrained reading (and writing)  issues like this.

I mention it not to beat up on men but because I often hear stories of indifferent, remote, and unsupportive men.

Men often – not always –  seem to be threatened by their wives experimenting with creativity or moving in new and different directions. Some clearly have control issues.

I hear it again and again.

Cindy’s husband is very supportive of her reading but is not so supportive of her seeing a therapist deal with some of these issues. He’s afraid, he says, that she and the therapist will say bad things about him.

My first breakthrough was in giving Cindy five books that I read to the Mansion residents. They have few lines of text and large and gorgeous photos of animals.

I asked Cindy to read to me from these books. I call them “comfort books.”

She cried and trembled each time, but she could read the texts, although she was shy and wary.

I saw she struggled with certain words, but she returned to them, and I told her to pronounce them slowly. It wasn’t the meaning that scared her, but it was the fear of mispronouncing them in front of me.

I urged her to take time each morning, go to a room where she could be alone and read them aloud to herself. This was an instant success. She loved the animals’ photos, the short lines of text, and the sound of her own words.

Her confidence grew rapidly, her crying and shaking eased. I urged her to call a therapist to work through some of these issues in-depth, and she is talking to a therapist I recommended tomorrow.

She says money is a problem, but this therapist works with people who need financial consideration.

I told her that what she says about her husband is not her husband’s concern. I told her if I attempted to control what Maria said to a therapist, I would get stabbed right through the heart.

After a week of growing confidence and curiosity – she is desperate to read – I suggested a few weeks ago we move up a notch. I contacted my advisers in Battenkill Books in my town, and I sat down with Cindy and talked about the different genres.

I sensed she might like some romance novels. I asked her if she wanted slightly sappy books with gushy endings, and she jumped for joy.

I can be a bit of a literary snob; the books we chose are far from trashy, but I was careful not to wrinkle my nose at them, but she laughed when she figured out I had a snooty streak.

So I got her three popular romance-writer books, all of which sold more copies in a year than I did in 40 years of book writing.

One was by Sheila Roberts, Welcome To Moonlight Harbor, the second was Notebook by Sparks, and a third was written by Susan Wiggs, one of her Lakeshore Chronicle series.

Before I bought the books, I asked her what some of her favorite movies were, and the second one she mentioned was the “Notebook,” a tender, perhaps sappy romance. She jumped at the idea of reading “Notebook’ as this was one of her favorite movies.

This is a trick I learned when I was teaching a literary class. I ask students what their favorite movies are, and see if a movie was made from it. This connects them to the story and draws them to reading about it in a different form.

Spark wrote “Notebook” over six months when he was 28. It’s sold more than 75 million copies in the United States alone.

The Notebook is a love story about “miracles that will stay with you forever.” Every woman I know cried through every minute of it.

The story is set in coastal North Carolina in 1946 and begins with Noah Calhoun, a rural Southerner who returned home from World War II.

Noah, who is 36, helps restore a plantation home and is haunted by images of the beautiful girl he met fourteen years earlier.

He searched for her for years but was unable to find her, yet unwilling and unable to forget the summer they spent together.

He is content to live with only the memory of her until she unexpectedly returns to his hometown, searching for him.

Allie Nelson, now 29, is engaged to another man, but her love for him, she realizes, has not dimmed in those years.

Of course, the vast gulf between their families and their words is much too extensive to ignore, and things are, of course, complicated and dramatic.

As it unfolds, their story becomes something different, with very high stakes. There is a lot of  dialogue in the movie like “You are, and have always been my dream.”

The movie was made by Nick Cassavetes and starred Ryan Gosling, Rachel McAdams, and James Garner.

I asked Cindy to read the first two pages right there in the doctor’s office, and I could see she got hooked. “This seems wonderful,” she said.

Once she got into it,  she would be unable to stop, which would create a new but very welcome problem for her and perhaps her husband.

I think her whole demeanor has changed. She looked happier and brighter and said a great weight had been lifted from her.

I can see that this is true. It’s a big lift for me as well.

I understand my boundaries. The issues with her mother have to go to a trained therapist.

Some encouragement about reading and getting the right books in her head is my natural turf.

It is rarely this easy to help someone.  Reading issues are often complex and painful.

This is something worthwhile to get into until I can return to the Mansion and Bishop Maginn High School in a month or so.

I know of two farmers in my country who are illiterate but whose families don’t know if – they are good at looking at a newspaper and computer screen and winging it.

The tutoring has to be done in secret.

Cindy was aching to read and just needed some encouragement to push her into trying. Her own space to read in helped – it was safe – and her reading the stories aloud seemed to make her comfortable.

I showed her an app that pronounces words out loud that people type into them. She says it makes the reading even more worthwhile.

She’s not ready yet to let her husband and daughters hear her read, but she’s working up to it. But she’s on the way; I will stay with her.

Take your time, I said. This is all your show. No need to look back. The 4th grade doesn’t really matter now.

It did, she said, while I couldn’t read.

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Photo: Cindy going over her new books.