A heartbreaking and empowering debut memoir about a mother's all-consuming love, a son's perilous quest to discover the world beyond the front door and the unregulated homeschool system that impacts millions like him
Stefan Merrill Block was nine when his mother pulled him from school, certain that his teachers were "stifling his creativity." With no background in education and no formal training, she began to instruct Stefan in the family's living room. Beyond his formal lessons in math, however, Stefan was largely left to his own devices and his mother's erratic whims. She forced him to bleach his hair and to crawl like a baby in a strange and regressive attempt to recapture his early years.
Long before homeschooling would become a massive nationwide movement, at a time when it had just become legal in his home state of Texas, Stefan vanished into that unseen space and into his mother's increasingly eccentric theories and projects. But when, after five years away from the outside world, Stefan reentered the public school system in Plano as a freshman, he was in for a jarring awakening.
At once a novelistic portrait of mother and son, and an illuminating window into an overlooked corner of the American education system, Homeschooled is a moving, funny and ultimately inspiring story of a son's battle for a life of his own choosing, and the wages of a mother's all-consuming love. "Homeschooled unlocks the door to a private universe in a carpeted house in Plano, Texas, occupied for years by just middle-school-aged Stefan and his mother. Block is unflinching in both his honesty about his unhappiness and his profound love for the mother who didn't want to let him grow up. An important book for our current world, Block's brave story will help a lot of people feel less alone. An instant classic."-Emma Straub, New York Times bestselling author of This Time Tomorrow
"Stefan Merrill Block's Homeschooled is an often touching, often disturbing, but always engrossing examination of a mother's love and the ever-shifting ways in which we view our own histories. Clearly told with the steadiness of a masterful writer, Block guides us through the complications of going from being a cloistered, homeschooled child to a parent himself, and how the complexities of his own upbringing shifted his world. Told in tight, confident prose, Block pulls readers into a childhood where education and control intertwine in unsettling ways, a confounding life oscillating between affection and oppression. This is an urgent, wrenching, fantastically told tale that is also filled with hope, much the same way a heart can both break and hold fast under the weight of a mother's touch."-Isaac Fitzgerald, New York Times bestselling author of Dirtbag, Massachusetts
