Parenting & Family Quote by Gertrude Stein

Stein’s line lands like a parlor-room slap: not a rebuttal of communism so much as a diagnosis, and a deliberately unserious one at that. By shrinking a mass political movement into a private grievance, she mocks the grandiosity of ideological certainty. Communism, in this framing, isn’t an economic program or a theory of history; it’s a story someone tells about themselves. The verb “fancied” does the real work: it implies performance, self-mythology, even a kind of aesthetic indulgence. Not “had” an unhappy childhood, but imagined one, curated it, used it.

The subtext is classic Stein: suspicion toward explanatory narratives that pretend to totalize experience. Her modernist project often treated language as something that misbehaves under pressure; here she’s showing how political language can be a costume for personal temperament. It’s also a jab at the romance of suffering. If you can claim damage, you can claim moral urgency, and if you can claim moral urgency, you can justify the desire to reorder the world.

Context matters. Stein moved in elite, expatriate circles, watched Europe’s ideologies harden between wars, and lived through the era when “communist” became both a real affiliation and a conversational boogeyman. Her quip participates in that milieu’s cocktail skepticism: the fear that politics is less about material conditions than about wounded egos looking for a system that will make their pain sound like history. It’s funny because it’s reductive; it’s sharp because it reveals how often our public convictions are tied to private scripts we refuse to name.