PrefacePopular culture sells parenthood as an experience of sweet, meek, mind-numbing duty, a selfless erasure in service to the next generation. I was prepared for big feelings, a love like none other, quiet music swelling as I nestled the beloved babe.
I wasn’t at all prepared for how intellectually interesting it was to spend time with a young child. I realized happily that it was a project in translation, in how to understand and communicate with a creature who possessed intelligence but limited experience. The baby had a particular cry for milk that differed from his other cries. When he was slightly older but still preverbal, when he was finished eating, he waved his hands over his plate. He used that same signal when he wanted to stop whatever activity he was doing—playing a game, getting his teeth brushed. Sometimes I used the sign to tell him that we needed to stop doing something. It never failed to register.
I learned that children are dizzyingly fast-learning engines of art and experiment. I watched my child make sense of the world not as a simple-minded cherub but as a measuring, remembering machine. The idea that children were actually less limited than adults, smarter than we are in every measurable way except in accumulated experience, was humblingly new to me.
Before I started spending time around children, I thought that people who paid close attention to these simpletons were people who had decided not to be interesting anymore. I thought that people found their own children fascinating simply because they’d been biologically hypnotized into loving them. Once I learned what children are really like, I immediately wanted to create an artifact of their weird eloquence, which was such a surprise to me when I finally noticed it. During this period of my education, my son, Sam Chapman, was my first and most essential teacher.
Before he was capable of conversation, I thought I already knew what a preschooler would say because I’d seen it represented so tediously in advertisements and crappy entertainment. But by the time Sam was about four years old, I was writing down almost everything he said, shedding my indoctrination as I went.
He was indeed cute, too, as when he tried to pick up a freckle from my forearm or played at feeding a piece of pancake to his toy truck, but the cute things he did always had a hint of the abyss about them. His most interesting questions all seemed, in some way, to be about death; it was Leanne Shapton who pointed this out to me plainly.
In 2021 I opened a Twitter account and posted a single tweet:
What’s the best question a kid ever asked you? Within twenty-four hours I had more than a hundred questions. Within a week I had hundreds more. I asked some famous friends to retweet the tweet. I asked everyone I knew to ask everyone they knew. I read multiple iterations of the if-God-is-everywhere conundrum and multiple accusations of pregnant women having eaten their babies, but I also had the privilege of reading a lot of accidental poetry and philosophy in multiple languages. Death was a common topic. So was birth. I was surprised to receive so many questions about necks and chins.
The poet Kenneth Koch, who taught at Columbia University for many years, also taught poetry to young children at New York City’s P.S. 61 in the late 1960s. He wrote three books on teaching poetry to young children, including many examples of the poems that arose from his prompts. When I teach creative writing, I always bring in a few poems from his anthology
Wishes, Lies, and Dreams and mix them in with my more recognizable texts. I love asking, with a straight face, if anyone has read the work of so-and-so, and then to announce that the author was seven years old when she wrote the poem we’ve just discussed. My students are impressed and a bit unnerved.
Very young children, younger even than Koch’s elementary school students, might not be old enough to write poems themselves, but they have access to imaginative worlds that are just as interesting, and just as notable a fount of worthwhile literature.
The word
literature might first suggest to the lay reader a Shakespeare play or a Tolstoy novel, but I’ve spent much of my writing life composing and delighting in very short literary forms, among them the short poem, the very short story, and the aphorism. There’s always something a bit magical about one great standalone line. The aphorist James Richardson writes, “No one will ever write a novel by accident. A poem, too, takes time. But if I say ‘Pick a word’ and you say one, where did it come from? You certainly don’t say you ‘wrote it’ or ‘created it’—more like you chose it, or it chose you. One-liners must be in the middle of that spectrum.” One-liners, among them the one-line questions that constitute this book, float somewhere between thinking and writing, where verbal but preliterate young children dwell. That place is the origin of this text.
My chief purpose, in assembling the text of this book, is to challenge the popular depiction of children as adorable idiots, instead portraying them as they are: intelligent, intuitive, inventive, philosophical, funny. Their questions are a work of found choral philosophy, a collective subjectivity that disappears from most people’s lives by kindergarten.
Like all minimalist art, Liana Finck’s drawings look easy because they are simple, but her work’s apparent looseness and spontaneity belie the rigor from which it is borne. She’s a master at rendering huge concepts with a few strokes of the pen and maybe a word or two. Her sensibility is a perfect match for this text: playful, quick, brilliant, weird. She contains big feelings in small packages, and she resists received ideas as completely as children do, though in the latter case it’s only because they haven’t heard of them yet.
Young children are here with us, yet they maintain an easy access to the supernatural realm—they walk in both worlds. Most preschoolers don’t yet understand that they’re performing for an adult audience that desperately wants to write them off as sentimental. The questions I included in this book are the ones that seemed the least contaminated by that adult audience. These questions are cute by the word’s original definition, swift and piercing. They cut to the quick.
I return to these questions when I need a little effortless wisdom. Their ease with the abyss comforts me. They present corpses, rocks, beards, and graves as more or less emotionally equivalent, and they show me that anything can be interesting if you look at it from the right angle. They remind me that when I feel bound up and inarticulate, when I have nothing to add, I too might begin with a question.
Sarah Manguso
Los Angeles, 2023
Copyright © 2025 by Sarah Manguso; Illustrated by Liana Finck. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
