Parenting & Family Quote by John Sladek

Sladek turns what could be a nostalgic origin story into a sly self-roast that doubles as a cultural diagnosis. The opening premise is deprivation: no phone, no ready-made social circuitry. But he refuses the standard trope of the misunderstood bookish kid by inserting a delinquent non-act: he was "too shy to smash any public phones". That gag matters. It skewers the romantic myth that rebellion is the only authentic response to boredom, and it frames shyness not as purity but as a constraint so strong it even blocks performative vandalism.

Then he lists the missing third places: no pool hall, no teen habitat with its own unwritten rules. The public library becomes less sanctuary than default setting, a civic space that quietly absorbs people who don't fit elsewhere. Sladek isn't praising libraries as temples of learning; he's pointing to how institutions meant to be neutral end up functioning as social safety nets for the introverted, the under-resourced, the misaligned.

The final turn - "and anyway, I told myself stories" - is the real engine. "Anyway" shrugs off the earlier material excuses and admits the deeper compulsion: narrative as self-made infrastructure. It suggests that fiction isn't a luxury product of comfort but a workaround, a private technology for getting through the day when other channels of connection are unavailable or intolerable. Read in context of Sladek's career in speculative, satirical science fiction, the line also foreshadows a writer suspicious of systems: when the world doesn't offer you a usable interface, you build your own, sentence by sentence.