‘What would it take for you to be happy?’: Excerpts from the book Questions Without Answers

The illustrated work features over 150 queries posed by children, crowdsourced by author Sarah Manguso. Take a look at some of the most intriguing.

“The questions are cute, like anything that a child does. But they are also cute by the word’s original definition – from the word acute: swift, piercing and they cut to the quick,” Manguso says. (Art from Questions Without Answers: Liana Finck; Text courtesy Sarah Manguso)

Many of the questions relate to death; many others relate to parents’ lives before they became parents. (Art from Questions Without Answers: Liana Finck; Text courtesy Sarah Manguso)

Each question is accompanied by illustrator Liana Finck’s minimalist, playful line drawings. The art was a collaborative process, says Finck. “My initial idea was to make them funny but very ornate, to fill the page,” she says. “It was Sarah’s idea to have them very simple. Eventually, we wanted the drawings to serve as sort of punchlines.” (Art from Questions Without Answers: Liana Finck; Text courtesy Sarah Manguso)

There’s an ease with which queries in the book navigate ideas as wide-ranging as dogs having chins, the colour of a clown’s poop and why one can’t change one’s birthday. And there are questions that adults struggle with every day. (Art from Questions Without Answers: Liana Finck; Text courtesy Sarah Manguso)

(Excerpted with permission from Questions Without Answers by Sarah Manguso, illustrated by Liana Finck, published by Hogarth, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House; 2025)