Parenting & Family Quote by Carol Ann Duffy

Duffy plants her flag in a troubling, fertile territory: the gap between two childhoods, hers and “Ella’s,” as if memory were not a private attic but a shared corridor you can pace, trespass, and renovate. The sentence is deliberately spare, but it carries a whole ethics debate inside it. To “write in that space” is to admit she’s not simply recalling her own past; she’s staging an imaginative encounter with another child’s interior life. That’s where the heat is: childhood is culturally treated as off-limits, both sacred and vulnerable, and poetry’s job is often to go exactly where polite speech gets nervous.

Naming “Ella” makes the confession intimate and slightly forensic. It isn’t “a child,” it’s a particular child, which raises the specter of appropriation: whose story is being told, and who gets to tell it? Duffy anticipates the reader’s recoil with that disarming second line. “I know it all sounds a bit sinister” functions like a half-smile, half-warning. It’s self-aware, but not apologetic; she’s acknowledging the power imbalance embedded in adult narration, the way an adult writer can loom over a child’s experience, shaping it into art.

Context matters: Duffy’s work often turns on voice, persona, and the uneasy commerce between empathy and ventriloquism. Here, the “sinister” isn’t melodrama; it’s the honest admission that writing across innocence is always a little haunted. The line dares you to stay in that discomfort long enough for the poem to do its real work.