Parenting & Family Quote by Margaret Mahy

There’s a quiet mischief in Mahy’s modesty here: she’s declining the cultural role of “youth whisperer” without surrendering her authority as a children’s writer. The line reads like housekeeping, but it’s really a boundary marker. She’s telling interviewers and readers: don’t expect me to perform proximity. Don’t demand that my imagination come with a demographic badge.

The intent is practical - she’s explaining why she may not be tracking the newest teen idioms or anxieties day-to-day - yet the subtext pushes back against a contemporary pressure on authors of young people’s books to act like embedded journalists in adolescent life. Mahy’s credibility isn’t framed as access to “the kids,” but as craft, memory, and the long view. By invoking family structure (grown children, young grandchildren), she places herself in a generational gap: close enough to youth to care, far enough to avoid the posture of trying to be current.

Context matters: Mahy built a career on fantasy and psychological texture rather than trend-chasing realism. Her work often treats childhood as a strange, serious interior country, not a marketing segment. So this remark doubles as a defense of fiction’s right to be timelessly odd. It also hints at an ethical stance: listening without pretending to inhabit someone else’s immediacy. In a literary culture that loves “authenticity” as a credential, Mahy offers something rarer - honesty about distance, and confidence that distance can still produce intimate books.