Art & Creativity Quote by Robert Cormier

The sharpest sting in Robert Cormier's line isn’t literary; it’s domestic. He’s not describing hostile critics or snooty gatekeepers. He’s describing the peculiar dismissal that comes from the people who share your last name. The bluntness of “could hardly believe” turns success into something almost implausible, as if writing were a costume he put on rather than a vocation he earned. It’s a quiet indictment of how families can freeze you in an outdated snapshot: the kid you were, the role you played, the expectations they filed you under.

Cormier’s intent feels less like complaint than calibration. He’s puncturing the romantic story that art automatically brings validation, especially from “home.” By specifying aunts and uncles, he evokes a particular class of relative: affectionate, peripheral, socially influential, and often incurious. They are close enough to matter, far enough to never truly know the work. The detail that they “haven’t read my books” is almost beside the point; the deeper insult is that they don’t consider reading them necessary to form a verdict. Belief precedes evidence, and the verdict is: not you.

Context matters: Cormier wrote unsettling, morally complicated young adult novels that challenged comforting narratives adults like to tell about teenagers and about authority. That he wasn’t fully legible to his own family mirrors the themes he repeatedly explored - the way institutions (and households are institutions) deny people the identities they claim. The line lands because it’s intimate and unsentimental: the hardest audience isn’t the public. It’s the familiar.