Chelsea Clinton has lived an unusual life, but the stories she shared in her speech at the Democratic National Convention Thursday night were meant to make her, and her parents, seem more ordinary. Pop culture helped in that effort. She spoke of Hillary reading Goodnight Moon to Chelsea and Chugga Chugga Choo Choo to Chelsea’s daughter. She referenced Bill binge-watching Police Academy with her. And she brought up a classic science-fiction novel:

I remember one week talking incessantly about a book that had captured my imagination, A Wrinkle in Time. Only after my parents had listened to me would they then talk about what they were working on, education, healthcare, what was consuming their days and keeping them up at night.

It is quite, yes, ordinary that teenage Chelsea might have been smitten with Madeleine L’Engle’s 1963 book, a young-adult fiction touchstone. But it’s possible to read greater significance into the mention of this particular young-adult-fiction touchstone on the night when her mother became the first female major-party presidential candidate.

“Bookish girls tend to mark phases of their lives by periods of intense literary character identification,” wrote Pamela Paul in a 2012 New York Times column. “For those who came of age any time during the past half-century, the most startling transformation occurred upon reading Madeleine L’Engle’s Newbery Medal-winning classic, A Wrinkle in Time. … It was under L’Engle’s influence that we willed ourselves to be like Meg Murry, the awkward girl who suffered through flyaway hair, braces, and glasses but who was also and to a much greater degree concerned with the extent of her own intelligence, the whereabouts of her missing scientist father, the looming threat of conformity and, ultimately, the fate of the universe.”