Adults are stupid. We have too many prescriptions and qualifications. We're hypersensitive and overly sentimental. We worry too much about being offensive or inappropriate. And though these are not always bad things, they can really make our stories boring.
Kids are smarter because they know less.
They take life at face value, learning and behaving on a more basic level, which keeps them honest about themselves and their surroundings. And that honesty can be unsettling, especially when a kid starts to tell a really good story. Roberta Rohbeson, Lynda Barry's drug-addled, tortured, adolescent narrator, is one storyteller who's anything but boring. Roberta has killed more than one person, but no one knows that because she's too smart to let on. She identifies as a meat person because both her father and grandfather were in the meat industry.