Homeschooled

Stefan Merrill Block was nine when his mother took him out of school, convinced that his teachers were stifling his creativity. She was also reluctant to lose time with a son who seemed to be growing up too fast, so she began teaching him in the family's living room. Apart from his formal math lessons, though, Stefan was mostly left to his own devices and to his mother's unpredictable whims. One of them was a plan to win back the early years of her twelve-year-old son by bleaching his hair and putting him on a crawling regimen.

This memoir looks back at his time in both conventional schooling and education at home. It traces how the homeschooling movement began and how far it spread across America, and it draws on Block's earliest memories of his mother to portray a dysfunctional bond between mother and son. It also follows his return to public school, an experience that was jarring but revealing, and the bullying he endured there.

The final stretch of the book is an emotional journey toward forgiveness, love and hope, shaped by Block becoming a parent himself. Written with the feel of a novel, it is both a portrait of a mother and her son and a look at a little-noticed corner of American education. The tone is moving and funny, and at its heart is a son's struggle to choose his own life and the cost of his mother's all-consuming love.