A mother’s attempt to nourish her son’s creativity turns sour in HOMESCHOOLED, novelist Stefan Merrill Block’s honest, heartbreaking and at times harrowing memoir of his years as a homeschool student and his relationship with a complex, demanding parent.

When Block was a child in the mid-1990s, his family moved from Indianapolis to the sprawling Dallas suburbs. Plano is “a place so brand-new it still smells of fresh paint and sawdust,” and his elementary school “seems to be a kind of factory for the processing of our young brains.” Young Stefan isn’t exactly happy at school, but he’s content to fade into the background, reading books on the sly and making up his own stories inspired by authors like Roald Dahl. But his eccentric mother, adrift and jobless after moving to Texas for her husband’s career, decides to make Stefan’s education her primary project.

Emboldened by a changing legal landscape that gave parents the right to educate their children at home, Stefan’s mother pulls him out of public school, a decision purportedly made in his best interest. But even as a child of 10, Stefan can sense that something deeper is at work. His mother had long seen herself as “an essentially smart person who had been failed by school.” For her, homeschooling “was a vision of ultimate educational liberty, and a way back to the best part of her own childhood, when she might have become anything.”

"...[an] honest, heartbreaking and at times harrowing memoir of [Block's] years as a homeschool student and his relationship with a complex, demanding parent."

Though he’s hesitant about the homeschooling plan from the start, Stefan is also alert to his mother’s mercurial moods and driven by a desire to make her happy. So he plays along. Thus begins a five-year odyssey that leaves an increasingly lonely Stefan isolated from his peers, as well as his distant father and his older brother, Aaron, who continues to attend public school. (Stefan’s father is a psychologist, but in an ironic twist, he is unable or unwilling to confront his wife’s obvious mental health struggles.) Meanwhile, Stefan becomes locked in an uncomfortable relationship with his loving but intense mother, whose desire to keep her son close threatens to smother him.

Soon after his homeschooling journey begins, Stefan discovers “just how wildly far Mom’s concept of ‘schoolwork’ might stretch.” Aside from some math lessons, he’s mostly left to his own devices, free to do what he pleases as long as he presents his mother --- who “likes it most when I ‘express’ myself through stories and artwork” --- with some evidence of his creative brilliance. Otherwise, there are lunches out, trips to stores and other mundane errands disguised as educational opportunities. 

Block writes with insight and sensitivity about the strange formlessness of those days, the awkward transition from childhood to adolescence, and his mother’s desperate desire for him to remain her “blond angel.” She bleaches his hair in an effort to bring back the locks he had as a toddler, and at one point she insists that at home he move about on his hands and knees, a directive based on a bizarre theory that he can “crawl [his] way to better handwriting.”

As HOMESCHOOLED progresses, it becomes clear that Mom’s homeschooling project is less about nurturing Stefan and more about binding him to her permanently. Her own unresolved trauma is projected onto her youngest child. She fears the dangers that she believes lurk outside the home and resents even minor gestures towards independence, inevitably seeing them as a “betrayal” that can only be forgiven after multiple, groveling apologies.

Eventually, Stefan insists that he return to public school. But when he enrolls in one of Plano’s massive high schools, he realizes how much crucial time he has missed. He’s both educationally behind and socially crippled. It doesn’t help that his mother drops him off with a portable typewriter for notetaking and a rolling file cabinet instead of a backpack --- humiliations that seem designed to send him running for the comfort of home.

Gradually, and at times painfully, Stefan learns to navigate the high school hallways and, later, the world beyond Plano. But his relationship with his increasingly unstable mother continues to haunt him, as does his unusual childhood. Even as an adult building a successful career as a novelist, he keeps himself apart from other people, a legacy of the hours spent sequestered in his childhood bedroom. He’s still “a boy in the thrall of those lonely years, which never really ended.”

In the decades since Block’s mother decided to take charge of his education, homeschooling has gone from a fringe practice to a mainstream choice. The deeply personal HOMESCHOOLED is neither an indictment nor an endorsement of the practice; Block acknowledges that for some families, homeschooling could be the right choice. But his memoir shows clearly what can go wrong when a parent, even a seemingly well-intentioned one, removes their child from school. In high school, the diligent and motivated Block was able to make up for the deficiencies of his early education. Other kids may not be so fortunate. And though he eventually excelled academically, he struggled with lingering psychological damage.

His mother’s fierce, demanding love shapes his life. Even well into adulthood, he feels responsible for her moods, fearing that “it’s only my constant presence in Mom’s life that keeps her from something very dark or even dangerous.” There’s no doubt that Block’s mother cared deeply for her child. But her way of showing her love caused real damage. Sadly, as Block grows up and starts a family of his own, his mother retreats into her own paranoid world. Yet even as their lives diverge, they remain bound to each other. And her unwavering belief in her son’s creative promise is ultimately fulfilled. “Her love might have become the cage where I was raised,” Block writes towards the end of the book. “But it had also been the key to get myself out.”