"I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It's probably because they have forgotten their own"
About this Quote
Atwood’s blade here is sharpened on a familiar sentimental myth: youth as the golden season, all open doors and unburdened laughter. She punctures it with a sly psychological turn. The line isn’t just contrarian; it’s an accusation. If adulthood keeps insisting that youth is “freedom and joy,” it’s less a report than a coping mechanism - a curated memory that flatters the present by outsourcing happiness to the past.
The specific intent is to reverse the direction of nostalgia. Instead of treating youth as inherently carefree, Atwood suggests it’s often the period most tightly controlled: by parents, schools, money, hormones, social hierarchies, and the constant surveillance of being evaluated. Freedom, in that light, looks less like a birthright and more like a privilege you might not access until later, if at all. Joy becomes episodic, not ambient.
The subtext is where Atwood is most Atwood: memory is political. “They have forgotten their own” implies not innocent amnesia but selective editing - the adult mind smoothing over the humiliations, the powerlessness, the fear of not fitting, the dread of a future you can’t yet steer. The myth of happy youth lets societies romanticize the young while simultaneously dismissing their suffering as drama.
Context matters: Atwood’s work repeatedly interrogates who gets to define reality, and whose experience is waved away as unreliable. This quote reads like a small thesis statement for her broader project: question the stories that comfort the powerful, especially when those stories require erasing what it actually felt like to be young.
The specific intent is to reverse the direction of nostalgia. Instead of treating youth as inherently carefree, Atwood suggests it’s often the period most tightly controlled: by parents, schools, money, hormones, social hierarchies, and the constant surveillance of being evaluated. Freedom, in that light, looks less like a birthright and more like a privilege you might not access until later, if at all. Joy becomes episodic, not ambient.
The subtext is where Atwood is most Atwood: memory is political. “They have forgotten their own” implies not innocent amnesia but selective editing - the adult mind smoothing over the humiliations, the powerlessness, the fear of not fitting, the dread of a future you can’t yet steer. The myth of happy youth lets societies romanticize the young while simultaneously dismissing their suffering as drama.
Context matters: Atwood’s work repeatedly interrogates who gets to define reality, and whose experience is waved away as unreliable. This quote reads like a small thesis statement for her broader project: question the stories that comfort the powerful, especially when those stories require erasing what it actually felt like to be young.
Quote Details
| Topic | Youth |
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