“They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do.”
Philip Larkin’s immortal couplet from his 1971 poem “This Be the Verse” has been quoted so often it risks cliche, but it remains useful—it’s blunt without being cruel. Parents harm their children not only through malice or neglect, but also through love misapplied. That is the quiet, devastating truth at the heart of Homeschooled, the new memoir by Stefan Merrill Block, which examines how a childhood shaped by devotion and isolation can leave marks that take decades to understand. The book was recently chosen by Jenna Hager Bush of the “Today Show” as her January 2026 book pick.
(Block, an Accord resident, is also a co-owner of the Skate Time 209 roller rink. A launch party for Homeschooled will be held at Skate Time 209 on January 18 from 6-10pm.)
Block is best known as a novelist—his three works of fiction (The Story of Forgetting, The Storm at the Door, and Oliver Loving) circle memory, grief, and the strange ways families construct reality. With Homeschooled, he turns those tools inward. The book recounts his upbringing in suburban Texas in the early 1990s, when his mother pulled him out of public school and began homeschooling him—first as a temporary fix, then as a way of life. What unfolds is neither a polemic against homeschooling nor a simple tale of abuse. Block offers a careful portrait of a childhood lived inside what he later comes to understand as a closed emotional system: a mother and son bound tightly together, increasingly cut off from peers, institutions, and corrective outside voices.
A Dark Star of a Story
In our conversation, Block described Homeschooled as the story that had always been “the dark star” at the center of his fiction. “On some level,” he says, “the three novels I published before this book all kind of contained this story at their heart, even if it wasn’t directly spoken.” He had known, even in his twenties, that he would someday tell it. But he did not begin with a plan to write a memoir. He began writing after his mother’s death during the pandemic. “I had this feeling that this most critical relationship of my childhood life had suddenly vanished,” he says. “And as she was the only witness to those years, it felt like my childhood was vanishing along with her.”
Writing became a way to give those years permanence, but also a way to continue a relationship that had ended without resolution. Block described the early drafts as almost secretive, written “out of a sense of urgency,” until he realized he had produced something like 150 unedited pages. When he reread them, he had what he described as a startling realization: “I could see the character of myself as a child as separate from my current self. I started to root for that kid. I started to pity that kid.”
That urgency shapes the memoir’s tone. Homeschooled is written from a child’s point of view, but with an adult’s clarity layered on top. Block does not interrupt the narrative to correct his younger self or impose hindsight too heavily. Instead, the reader watches a sensitive, imaginative boy adapt to conditions he accepts as normal: days filled with reading, drawing, television, and intense one-on-one attention from a mother who believes fiercely in his exceptionalism and mistrusts nearly every authority outside the home.
A Suffocating Freedom
At first, the arrangement looks like freedom. Block’s education is led by curiosity rather than curriculum; books replace worksheets; afternoons stretch open and unsupervised. But gradually the costs accumulate. Friendships thin out. Social skills atrophy. The absence of structure becomes its own kind of structure—one that orients entirely around his mother’s moods, theories, and fears. What the child experiences as closeness, the adult reader begins to recognize as enclosure.
Block is acutely aware of the risk of caricature. His mother is not presented as a villain, and the book’s power comes from its refusal to simplify her. “I know that I was more loved than most children in this world get to be,” he says. “And on some level, I think being so loved is maybe the most important thing of all.” At the same time, he does not minimize the harm that love caused when it became controlling and isolating. “Her love sometimes came toxically at me,” Block says. “It imprisoned me—but it was also the way I got out.”
That tension—between gratitude and anger, affection and critique—runs throughout Homeschooled. It also explains why Block could not have written the book while his mother was alive. “My mother always received even implicit criticism as betrayal,” he said. “This would have been excruciating for her.” Only after her death could he tell the story honestly, without negotiating her response or protecting her from it.
The consequences of Block’s childhood arrangement come into sharp focus when he reenters public school as a teenager. That return—he calls it “the greatest trauma of my life until the pandemic”—shatters the illusions that sustained him at home. “I found out that I wasn’t so lovable to other 14-year-olds,” he says. “And I wasn’t such a great student. I wasn’t extraordinary in the ways I’d been told.” School was not salvation, but it was exposure: to peers, expectations, and a world that did not revolve around him.
Love & Condemnation
The memoir ends not with reconciliation but with authorship. As an adult, Block comes to see his mother’s life as tragic in a classical sense—shaped by fear so powerful it became destiny. Writing Homeschooled became a way of breaking that pattern, not by rejecting her outright, but by telling the story fully. “What I’m trying to show in this story is that you can be angry and condemning of the wrongs that a person has committed and still love them profoundly,” he says. “And that is okay. You don’t have to wholly condemn someone just because of the mistakes that they made. That ambivalence is the truth where a lot of us live.”
That commitment to nuance extends beyond the book. In December, Block published an op-ed in the New York Times calling for common-sense regulation of homeschooling. The piece does not condemn homeschooling itself; Block is explicit that many families choose it for good reasons. What concerns him is the lack of oversight in many states—conditions that allow homeschooling to be used to hide neglect or abuse. “This isn’t an attack on homeschooling,” he says. “It’s a call for the protection of children.”
The backlash to the op-ed, he notes, has been intense. Even modest proposals—basic wellness checks or minimal academic review—are framed as attacks on freedom. That defensiveness troubles him. Public education, he observes, absorbs critique constantly. Homeschooling, by contrast, has become resistant to scrutiny, even when that scrutiny is narrowly focused on child welfare.
Here again, Block’s position is shaped by lived experience rather than ideology. Homeschooling gave him time to read, to imagine, and ultimately to write. It helped make him a novelist. But writing was also a survival strategy. “A writer’s life is not a very social life,” he said. “It’s what I’m most comfortable with. But might I have been happier doing something else? I think it’s quite possible.”
That question lingers after Homeschooled ends. The book does not argue that a different childhood would have produced a better life—only a different one. Its achievement lies in articulating how profoundly early environments shape not just outcomes, but instincts: what feels safe, what feels possible, what feels like home.
Larkin’s poem ends with advice that is both glib and grim: “Get out as early as you can.” Block’s memoir offers a quieter alternative. You may not escape your parents unmarked. You may carry their fears and gifts long after they are gone. But with time—and honesty—you can learn to see them clearly, and begin to loosen their hold.
