Editorial Content for Directions to Myself: A Memoir of Four Years

Heidi Julavits has two children, but when her son was five, she began to wonder if she was the right person to parent him through the intensely strange and difficult world in which we live. DIRECTIONS TO MYSELF is a series of personal essays in which she tries to answer that question.

Being a parent is a confusing ordeal naturally, a state of being that makes you doubt yourself (if you’re doing it right) and constantly reassess your qualifications for helping a young human find their way in the greater world. What do they need to know? What do they not need to know? What can you teach them, and what do you have to let the world teach them? How do you prepare a young soul for the harangues and pushbacks in the world? How do you preserve their own unique characteristics in a world in which “fitting in” requires most of us to mask our true selves in public situations? Julavits, a native New Englander, sounds pragmatic in her stories, but underneath there is a running current of anxiety and apprehension fueled by love and wonder.

"DIRECTIONS TO MYSELF is a meaningful collection of considered and straightforward dives into the topics that keep all parents up at night."

Into this world of wonder comes a steady source of difficult and historic traumas that affect everyone --- from the #MeToo movement and Harvey Weinstein’s downfall to the story of Brock Turner, the Stanford swimmer who was sentenced to six months in jail for attacking an unconscious young woman outside a college party, and Paul Nungesser, the Columbia University rapist of classmate Emma Sulkowicz, who spent a year after her assailant went free to ensure that her outcry would be heard by dragging her mattress with her all around campus.

This is the backdrop for DIRECTIONS TO MYSELF. Julavits teaches at Columbia and watches these men’s exploits from a front-row Manhattan seat. She references many things and doesn’t name any of these people, but she doesn’t have to. We all know who she’s talking about and how their horrors have informed the lives we all lead as parents.

Julavits has conviction and confidence one day, and none the next. “Eventually, whatever force has grounded this oscillation --- from my perspective, me --- fails to exert any power at all,” she writes. How is she going to prepare her son not to be this type of man, the toxic masculine? Will love help? Discipline? Even a kindergartener is learning the ways of the world every day in a special context, and it hurts her to see that his innocence takes a hit from the other parts of his world when she is not with him to stop it.

A conversation based on the word “slut” and what it really means prompts a long discussion with her husband on how to handle the fact that a young classmate’s older brother has now introduced yet another chink in the armor of childhood --- the overheard word and an explanation of something he’s not ready to understand. What is the right action? What will guide her boy to the better, more polite, kinder side? The answers are never cut and dried.

These incidents are interspersed with a look back at Julavits’ own upbringing in Maine. Even in a land where the specifics of life are hard enough to use up all your brain cells, far away from fads and other ridiculous influences to children’s innocence, Julavits remembers how hard it was to exist in the world when it wasn’t a 24-hour news fest with a technology that was just brimming with unnecessary and disturbing information for kids.

There is a comfort in reading how the child’s (and adult’s) mind wanders around the strange, regardless of the specifics of the world in which they live. There always will be new normals for each subsequent generation, and Julavits is smart enough to use her literary ability to bring us into her world and leave with something new to think about, but without the proselytizing of a self-help book. DIRECTIONS TO MYSELF is a meaningful collection of considered and straightforward dives into the topics that keep all parents up at night.

It seems that Julavits' son will be just fine.