What To Read

In Homeschooled, fiction writer Stefan Merrill Block turns to memoir, recounting the years he was pulled from a Texas public school and educated at home by a fiercely loving, increasingly erratic mother, well before homeschooling went mainstream. A Tertulia Staff Pick and a Read with Jenna selection chosen by Jenna Bush Hager to open the year, the book blends dark humor with unsparing clarity to examine devotion, isolation, and the cost of growing up unseen.

Praise for Homeschooled

"Novelist Block delivers a wrenching account of his traumatic homeschooling in suburban Texas... Lyrical, harrowing, and politically pointed, this is both a moving coming-of-age story and a clarion call for reform." - Publishers Weekly

"Through this poignant memoir that seamlessly blends humor, anger, and sadness, readers will appreciate Block's journey from homeschooling to adulthood." - Booklist

"Like Tara Westover's Educated, a compelling and horrifying account, leavened with flashes of rueful humor." - Kirkus Reviews

"It is fitting that Homeschooled is narrated in the present tense. Evidently, Block’s childhood memories are still possessed of a sharp immediacy. The past is never really over for someone subjected to such scarring humiliations during his formative years." - The Washington Post

Read on for an excerpt from the book.

DOWN ON ALL FOURS

“No time like the present,” Mom tells my brother, but still Aaron doesn’t budge from his seat.

He’s holding tight to his lunch bag as he gazes out the window at Shepton High, a school that seems bigger than any school should rightly be. Shepton is a huge redbrick complex that looks more like some sort of shipping depot or factory, and the students heading for the front doors look like bona fide adults. Today my brother will join them for his first day of freshman year.

“Okay,” Aaron says, checking and rechecking the contents of his backpack.

I can’t blame him for wanting to put it off, even if just for a few seconds longer. Though Aaron never told me about the torments of his middle school years, I got the gist. At Renner Middle School, apparently, the waters were everywhere infested with bullies, and a computer kid like my brother had basically been a tossed bucket of chum. From Mom, I know that he was once shoved into a urinal, that in shop class someone beat him with a pipe. These stories always made me feel guilty, like I’d just stood aside and let that bathroom-shover do his thing to my brother.

After two and a half years of homeschooling –two and a half years spent almost exclusively in my mother’s company, away from other kids-- I know I wouldn’t ever have been able to come to Aaron’s defense if I’d been there with him at middle school. At twelve, my greatest social skill is to charm a forty-something lady with a fancy vocab word insouciantly deployed. Still, it definitely doesn’t seem right that he suffered there while I spent my school days poolside with a paperback. At the same time, I’ve been jealous of his suffering. Aaron’s ordeals seem like the survivalist novel I’ve recently read, like Hatchet. His trials would make him stronger, heroic even.

When finally Aaron hops out from the car, I’m astounded by his courage, the way he just walks off without so much as turning back. And how will I ever possibly go to Shepton High myself? If anything, each year I spend at home with Mom is bringing me closer and closer back to infanthood. After she pulled me out of school, Mom spent a great deal of time applying hair lighteners in an attempt to return my brown hair to the bright blonde of its baby color, and she often likes to cradle me in arms in the water, singing to me as she carries me around the pool.

“Unschooling” is what Mom likes to call her approach to my home education. She first encountered that term in the work of John Holt, one of the founders of the modern home-school movement. Holt, like Mom, was a leftist with a long anti-authority streak. “Schools are bad places for kids,” John Holt once wrote, a sentiment Mom agrees with wholeheartedly, at least when it comes to a kid like me. Mom has labeled me an artistically inclined “global learner,” and she has made it her mission to give me “unstructured” education in which I can be free to “pursue passions.” My brother, on the other hand, is what Mom calls a “linear learner,” and she has decided that he’s better suited for the rigid structure of the public school. So off he goes each morning into that terrifying space, as Mom and I spend have our “freeform” days. I’ll do an hour or two of my correspondence math course in the morning, then spend the day with her hopping around the libraries, cafes, and shops of our town. Or else we’ll just stay at home, doing our “project time,” which usually means a lot of reading and drawing poolside, as Mom applies a fresh bottle lightener to my hair. In Texas, I’ve learned, “homeschooling” means that no outside adult will ever even come to check up on me, or to see if I’m learning at all.

The last couple years have been rough for Mom. When we moved from Indianapolis to Plano, Texas, she lost her social life and her good job editing a children’s magazine, just as her mother began to develop dementia. We both still long for our old home in Indianapolis, where Mom would have had her best friend Rachel, and my brother and I would have had Rachel’s two boys, our own best friends Caleb and Benny, to help us through this hard moment. But now Rachel and her boys are hundreds of miles away, reachable only by the occasional long-distance phone call whose cost drives up Dad’s blood pressure. As a replacement for Rachel, Mom has apparently chosen me. “You are better than any grown-up, Stef. You are more than all I need,” Mom has told me more than once.

I’m proud that I can help her, but the longer I spend at home with her, the more impossible it seems that I might ever go back into the world. Today should be my first day of seventh grade, and if I miss all of middle school, there’s no way I’ll be able to go to high school, and so how can I ever hope for college? And so what future will I ever have but to stay here forever, a middle-aged man in the passenger seat of his mother’s minivan?

After dropping off Aaron, Mom drives us off for our traditional “Back-to-School” breakfast at a French restaurant called La Madeleine. It’s not too late, I’m thinking. The new school year is just a day old. Aaron has mentioned that each student has two weeks to change classes before the schedule is set. And so I must do the brave thing now.

Tomorrow, I decide. I will tell Mom tomorrow that I’m going back to school. 

That night, I’m in front of the TV upstairs, sprawled out on the carpet. I crank the volume, an old rerun of The Dick Van Dyke Show is about to start, and I want nothing more than to escape into the simpler lives of the Petries. Dick Van Dyke has just done his hop around the ottoman when Aaron throws open the door with such force I’ll later find a dent in the wall.

“It’s Caleb,” Aaron says.

“What is?”

Aaron says the word to me then, the word for what has happened to Caleb, but it’s wrong, and makes no sense at all. Caleb is a kid. In fact, he’s an especially restless kid who can’t stop moving. Death means eternal stillness. These two categories do not overlap, so there must be a mistake. But then I find Mom sitting on the stairs, trying to keep the cordless up to her ear. Through the receiver, I can hear an awful, almost animal sound, like the wail of doomed prey as the predator’s fangs go in. “Rachel,” Mom is telling her best friend. “Try to breathe now. Just take a breath. You are going to hyperventilate.”

Caleb’s heart stopped in the middle of a basketball game. A doctor in the stands reached him seconds later, but by then he was already gone. Something called “heart arrhythmia” is the only way any adult can answer the why that I already know I will carry with me the rest of my life.

“There are some things in this world that are just too awful to share with you,” Mom tells me, and flies by herself to the funeral. Since Dad has to work each day, I spend a good part of that week alone in the house. Mom and Dad have sometimes left me at home for short errands, but I’ve never passed a whole day there without a grown-up. My first solo days in the house and my first true experience of grief are one and the same, vast and empty, the animating presence vanished. It’s been years since I’ve seen him, but Caleb’s low laugh, his boyish confidence, is still so clear to me. Yet apparently he is nowhere now. Something shifts in the air. Maybe it’s just the AC system powering down, but right now the quiet of this house is unbearable. I make two fists and scream, a scream as loud and as long as my body can make, a sound like warfare or like something is being torn open inside me, but when it’s over, there is only the ticking of the wall clocks.

That Friday, when we pick up Mom from the airport, her last days hang like a weight upon her, making her steps heavy, her movements slow. “How was it?” I keep asking. “What was it like?” Even now, I still somehow expect that the news cannot be as terrible, or as final, as it seems. 

“We cried,” Mom tells me. “Rachel and I just cried and cried.”

By the time Monday comes around, Mom doesn’t seem to have any enthusiasm for the day’s math. She has no errands to run, no lessons to deliver to me on home economics or the art of interior design. In my room, I spend the day with our gilt-edged volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica. By lunchtime Tuesday, I have a poster board display ready, which I’ve titled in Sharpie, The Stages of Grief.

“See,” I tell her, pointing to the panels with a yardstick. “I think I’m still in Denial, while you are already in Depression. You’re way ahead of me.”

Her smile is awful with sorrow. “My brilliant boy. Come here.” She holds me close for what could be a whole minute. “I will never, ever let anything bad happen to you,” she says into my hair. “You don’t ever have to worry about something like that, alright?”

“Okay.”

“I wouldn’t ever survive it, you know. You are all I need in the whole world, and I couldn’t live without you.”

“I’ll be fine,” I say.

Silently, she rubs a thumb over my cheek. “My little Stef-er-effy, who is getting too big,” she says, and pushes away a tear. “God, I need the sun. I need to photosynthesize.”

After those days alone— days imagining what it means for Caleb to be dead, wondering about death more generally— I don’t now mind the way she holds me like a baby out there in the water as she hums “Proud Mary.” 

“I know how this will sound,” she tells me. “But last time, I think, we just used way too much hair lightener. Let’s just try a few drops, or we could even think about diluting the formula . . .”

New Research, the headline says, but I can’t read more before she snatches it back.

”What is that?”

Mom looks through the article, reading it back to herself. Whatever it contains has apparently excited her enough to drop it over the typewriter where I was revising a murder mystery I’ve been trying to write in verse.

“Apparently, science has found that there is a connection between an infant’s crawling phase and the development of fine motor control. Crawling, Stef. Turns out, it’s a much more important stage than anyone knew. And what I was just thinking is that the thing about you and Aaron, neither of you were big crawlers. It was mostly a lot of scooting around, and then you were walking. Which got me wondering.”

I grin, glad to see her eyes bright again. “Wondering what?”

“Your handwriting. And your brother’s too. Remember I’m your mother, and I’m only telling you this because I love you, but the fact is that it’s just terrible. Honestly, it’s the only thing that I think could ever really hold you back in life. But who’s to say it isn’t too late? Who’s to say that you couldn’t still crawl your way to better handwriting?”

“You want me to crawl?”

“It could be a major breakthrough. This could be revolutionary.”

“But like you want me to crawl all the time?”

“Just try it,” she says. “I’ll tell Aaron he has to, also.”

She stands, pulls me to my feet. “Down, baby,” she says, laughing for what feels like the first time in a long while.

“Goo, goo, ga, ga?” I ask, dropping to my hands and knees.

She nods, looking pleased. “That’s the way. Come on, we’ll try a few laps around the house.”

Mom doesn’t let me stand the rest of the day, and when I wake in the morning, she’s upset to find me walking down from my bedroom. “It’s not going to work if you don’t really commit,” she says. And so— other than that day’s trip to T.J. Maxx— wherever I go, I do so on all fours. Luckily, our house is mostly carpeted, in a mid-pile white crazed with stains, and the rug burn is bearable, for a while at least.

The next morning, I go downstairs butt first, scooting backward on my hands and knees. From the kitchen counter, Dad crunches on his Grape-Nuts and laughs. He seems to take a sitcom-esque pleasure in Mom’s theories, and always he humors them. Most of all, he’s harried, overworked, and careful not to upset her. By 7:30 he’s out the door.

For the whole next week, and the one after that, wherever I go in the house, I go on my hands and knees. When Aaron comes home in the afternoons, Mom makes him crawl too. But Aaron can move through his school days on his feet, so his palms haven’t gone as red and raw as mine have, and his knees aren’t yet as blue or swollen.

Looking at myself in the mirror one morning, I’m glad I can see that swelling, evidence that I should be allowed to walk upright. But Mom thinks she sees some improvement in my script, and she reminds me that this process will take time.

“You and Aaron are the first Crawl Students ever. You are going to be the poster children for this. What we should be doing is preserving your handwriting each week to demonstrate the improvement.”

Aaron’s handwriting has been an issue at school, something that has required the intervention of a specialist, and I’m sure he’s eager for the quick fix Mom promises, but I wonder if he too has his doubts? Aaron, I think, would never tell me his real opinion of Mom because he knows I’m a traitor. When, after weeks on a Dorito-based diet Mom invented for him (the chips’ fat, she theorized, would quell his sweet tooth), Aaron at last confided in me about his skepticism and his Dorito- related nausea, I went straight to Mom with his secret misgivings. When he woke the next morning, she was perched on the edge of his bed for one of her “talks.” I’m not proud of it, my eagerness to betray Aaron to Mom, but I can’t seem to stop myself from doing whatever I can to keep my spot as Mom’s favorite. And so even now, when we’re both down on all fours, Aaron and Imight share a skeptical look or two, but we never say a thing about it. And worryingly, Mom won’t even take up the topic of how long we might still have to crawl. The thought of further months or even years of crawling makes it unbearable, all that hot pain in my hands, my ankles, my knees. It’s a very lonely kind of dread, and it’s in moments like these that I like to conjure an imaginary friend. She lives in the future, where she is reading the story of my life. The future reader of Stefan Merrill Block: A Boyhood is pitying me right now for sure, and taking notes on my resilience.

As I stand naked in front of the bathroom mirror, however, this future reader couldn’t help but notice other worrisome new features. A few fine hairs have finally begun to sprout over my penis and in my armpits. I cover my faint new pubic badge with two fingers and say, “Boy,” and then I uncover it and say, “Man.” I know what’s coming. Two years ago, I was shocked by how suddenly hair colonized my brother. If she hasn’t already noticed it, Mom is sure to see my armpits in our pool times. I know how, just like the browning of my hair, it will break her heart, and I know that I can’t do that to her in her grief.

I find a pair of rust-pocked Fiskars and begin to snip away at my armpits. The effect is almost perfect, and so I also cut away my first few pubes for good measure. But then why am I watching myself cry now, a little pitifully, in the mirror? Maybe it’s because I know that an old pair of safety scissors won’t be enough to stop time for Mom? Maybe I’ve finally reached the Depression stage, and I’m crying for Caleb? Or maybe I’m crying because it’s October already, and Caleb’s death means that Mom now needs me here so badly that there’s no way I’ll ever make it back for seventh grade? Whatever their exact reason, the tears are like blood from a cut or a bruise from a fall or the track of scars I’ve been secretly making on my hip with the tip of a compass. They are proof of pain, and so I carry on until I feel I’ve cried enough for it to be officially registered by my one-day reader. I slip on my shorts, drop to my hands and knees. 

As the poor replica of my blond baby self, I crawl back downstairs, to Mom.

Excerpted from Homeschooled by Stefan Merrill Block © 2026 by Stefan Merrill Block, used with permission by HarperCollins/Hanover Square Press.

Like what you've read? Check out Homeschooled by Stefan Merrill Block.