Parenting & Family Quote by Kate DiCamillo

In a culture that treats marriage and parenthood like the default setting for adulthood, DiCamillo’s line performs a quiet act of resistance: it refuses the tidy equation of “single and childless” with “lonely” or “unfinished.” The sentence is built like a rebuttal disguised as a personal update. She leads with the labels that society tends to turn into a deficit, then immediately fills the space with evidence of abundance: friends, kinship, children she loves.

The phrasing matters. “Single and childless” is blunt, almost bureaucratic, echoing the language used on forms and at family gatherings where people assess your life like a checklist. Against that, “lots of friends” feels deliberately plainspoken, even a little defiant in its simplicity: not a consolation prize, not “close colleagues,” just friends, in quantity and presumably in depth. Then comes the pivot that does the most cultural work: “an aunt to three lovely children.” It frames care as a role, not a reproductive outcome, and claims a kind of parent-adjacent authority without asking permission from the traditional family script.

Coming from a beloved children’s author, the context sharpens the point. DiCamillo writes about tenderness, oddball belonging, and chosen family; here she’s also living that ethic. The subtext is a corrective to the sentimental narrative that children are only meaningful if they’re yours. She’s asserting a life organized around connection, not conformity, and doing it without apology or manifesto.