"It's true, I had an extremely delicious life, but that was my life at home, and perhaps because I was only a child, or for whatever reasons, I found the company of others, especially other boys, quite terrifying and upsetting"
About this Quote
“Extremely delicious” is a disarming phrase: sensory, indulgent, almost comic. Mathews uses it like a spoonful of sugar to carry something far more bitter. The line stages a split-screen childhood. On one side, home as private banquet - pleasure, safety, maybe even a kind of aesthetic richness. On the other, the outside world, where “the company of others” isn’t merely awkward but “terrifying and upsetting.” That escalation matters. He’s not describing shyness; he’s describing social contact as threat.
The subtext is about how comfort can become its own trap. A child who is richly fed by domestic life - emotionally, materially, imaginatively - may arrive in peer society without the usual calluses. “Especially other boys” sharpens the point: boyhood culture is often a training ground for cruelty disguised as play, a place where hierarchy, performance, and humiliation are currency. Mathews doesn’t moralize; he adds the hedging clauses (“perhaps,” “or for whatever reasons”) that mimic a grown narrator still unable, or unwilling, to pin down the cause. That vagueness feels honest, and it suggests another layer: the adult’s suspicion that the “delicious” home might have been insulated, curated, even complicit in his later fear.
Contextually, it also reads like a keyhole into Mathews’ broader sensibility: the writer as someone formed not by public belonging but by private intensity, who later turns that estrangement into art. The sentence works because it refuses the tidy trauma narrative. Pleasure is real. Fear is real. Childhood is both, and the discomfort lives in the seam.
The subtext is about how comfort can become its own trap. A child who is richly fed by domestic life - emotionally, materially, imaginatively - may arrive in peer society without the usual calluses. “Especially other boys” sharpens the point: boyhood culture is often a training ground for cruelty disguised as play, a place where hierarchy, performance, and humiliation are currency. Mathews doesn’t moralize; he adds the hedging clauses (“perhaps,” “or for whatever reasons”) that mimic a grown narrator still unable, or unwilling, to pin down the cause. That vagueness feels honest, and it suggests another layer: the adult’s suspicion that the “delicious” home might have been insulated, curated, even complicit in his later fear.
Contextually, it also reads like a keyhole into Mathews’ broader sensibility: the writer as someone formed not by public belonging but by private intensity, who later turns that estrangement into art. The sentence works because it refuses the tidy trauma narrative. Pleasure is real. Fear is real. Childhood is both, and the discomfort lives in the seam.
Quote Details
| Topic | Fear |
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