Parenting & Family Quote by Marion Zimmer Bradley

At 13, you were old enough to be blamed, wanted, and recruited into adult narratives - that’s the chilly dare packed into Bradley’s line. It’s framed as a question, but it’s really a trap: if you answer no, you validate the speaker’s premise that adolescence is basically adulthood; if you answer yes, you sound naive, sheltered, or dishonest. The sentence is doing social work, not descriptive work. It polices maturity, insisting that vulnerability is a luxury other people got.

The intent is to collapse the moral distance between childhood and adulthood at the exact age where that boundary matters most. “I wasn’t a child” isn’t a memory so much as a credential: I learned early, I survived early, so don’t patronize me - and don’t scrutinize what happened to me or what I chose. The tag “were you?” pretends to invite solidarity while actually pressuring the listener to surrender their own definition of childhood. It’s a quick, intimate form of rhetorical coercion: agree with me and you’re one of us; disagree and you’re judging.

In a cultural moment that regularly romanticizes “coming of age,” this line weaponizes that romance. It suggests that precocity equals consent, that insight equals readiness, that hard experience equals grown-ness. Read against late-20th-century debates about teens, sexuality, and agency - and, unavoidably, against Bradley’s posthumous notoriety around abuse allegations in her family - the quote can sound less like empowerment and more like preemptive self-exoneration. The brilliance and the danger are the same: it’s compact enough to feel like truth, and slippery enough to excuse almost anything.