Questions Without Answers is a work of choral philosophy unwittingly composed by hundreds of children, edited by myself, and illustrated by Liana Finck.
My chief purpose, in assembling the text of the book, is to challenge the popular depiction of children as adorable idiots, instead portraying them as they are: intelligent, intuitive, inventive, weird, eloquent, philosophical, funny, wise.
When my son was very young, I wrote down some of his most interesting questions. (What does a gargoyle say? Do you like windows? What’s the white stuff inside a bean called?) I held onto the list for about five years, until I thought of crowdsourcing more questions and making a book of them.
In 2021 I hired two research assistants and began crowdsourcing questions online. Together we obtained more than two thousand questions. I winnowed the list to about a hundred. By then the brilliant Liana had agreed to do the art.
The book is my first collaborative book, but it’s similar to my other work in that it’s interested in brevity, compression, time, memory, and death.
If there’s anything I learned from this book, this is it:
Kids are interesting. Once I learned what children are really like, I wanted to create an artifact of their weird eloquence, which was such a surprise to me when I finally noticed it.
Kids aren’t cutesy. These questions are cute by the word’s original definition, swift and piercing. They cut to the quick.
Kids get death. Young children are here with us, yet they maintain an easy access to the supernatural realm—they walk in both worlds. My son’s most interesting questions all seemed, in some way, to be about death. Their ease with the abyss comforts me.
Kids are different. We all retain some of our kid-ness—but lose most of it.
–Sarah Manguso
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Images from the book Questions Without Answers by Sarah Manguso, Illustrated by Liana Finck. Text copyright © 2025 by Sarah Manguso. Illustrations copyright © 2025 by Liana Finck. Published by Hogarth, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
