I married two weeks after my 18th birthday, far too young, and by the time I was 23 I was a single mother of three small children, Sean, Daniel and Victoria, living in a prefab house.

Townsend compresses a formative stretch of her early adulthood into a stark, chronological self-portrait: youthful marriage, rapid motherhood, then single parenthood under materially modest conditions. The specificity of ages, children’s names, and the “prefab house” grounds the statement in lived reality rather than literary persona, underscoring how responsibility and hardship arrived early and at speed. Read against her later career as a comic novelist, the line also hints at the tension between public wit and private struggle: the circumstances described are not romanticized, but presented plainly, as a baseline from which resilience, independence, and eventual creative authority had to be built.