Parenting & Family Quote by Frank Leslie

Childhood is supposed to be a soft-focus myth: sunlight, scraped knees, a world buffered by adults. Frank Leslie takes that postcard and tears it clean in half. The first clause is a provocation - “I never had any childhood” - and then he doubles down by defining the term the way a culture sells it: “sunshine and freedom from care.” That’s the trapdoor. By naming the ideal so plainly, he exposes it as an exclusionary luxury, not a given stage of life.

The second sentence lands with tactile cruelty. “Starved and pinched” isn’t poetic gloom; it’s bodily language, the vocabulary of hunger, cold, and scarcity. He’s careful, too, to qualify the deprivation: “as far as love and merriment go.” That phrase hints at a world where survival may have existed, even discipline or duty, but warmth was rationed. The subtext is not only personal sorrow but social indictment: some children are raised inside an emotional economy where affection is as limited as food.

As an artist, Leslie is also telling you something about his instrument. People who grow up “pinched” often develop an exacting eye: they notice what’s missing, what’s withheld, what others take for atmosphere. The line reads like an origin story for a sensibility - not the romantic trope of suffering-as-genius, but a harder claim: the work comes from having to translate deprivation into meaning because no one translated it for you.