A Moving Memoir for Lone Star Loners

Middle school, high school, college – these defined educational stints, relatively short compared with the expanse of adult life, are often the stuff that lifelong labels are made of. How these bracketed years impacted you, or who you were during them, gets permanently folded into your life story in some way or another.

For author Stefan Merrill Block, it wasn’t necessarily one of these more universally recognizable educational chapters that became defining, but a self-imposed – or, rather, mother-imposed – five years, from fourth through eighth grade, during which he was homeschooled. 

Block opens his memoir with one of those sticky childhood memories where the overwhelming emotions and the grandiose logic of youthful decision making are still sharply felt decades later. Standing on a cliff’s edge above a meandering suburban creek in Plano, Texas, a 9-year-old Block contemplates what level of injury would provoke an adequate shock to his mother’s system. Since moving to Plano, she’s been moody and distant, no longer the “fun mom” all the other kids envied back in Indiana. A prepubescent Block can’t figure out what’s come over the eccentric, whose home-cooked health theories grow increasingly paranoid. 

When his cliffside tumble doesn’t do the trick, a general sullenness endears Block to his conspiring mother. What, to his childhood mind, begins as an attempt to draw closer to her ends in Block being pulled out of school and spending five years drawing science-fiction monsters, reading by the pool, and wandering the mall. Actually, he does do a good bit of math – but even as a youngster, Block frets over the potential pitfalls of the education he’s receiving as his mother clings to what’s left of those reliant years of childhood, growing increasingly determined to isolate her son from the outside world. 

Throughout the chapters of his fourth book, Block unwinds the impact these years out of school had on his eventual return to institutional education, his social and family life, and his identity. Dipping seamlessly into sociological and historical conditions, Block offers a peek into the history of homeschooling in the United States and a critique of the lack of legal and educational oversight that left him isolated in his mother’s grasp. Writing many years later from New York, the Texan landscape of Block’s childhood provides a refuge and, as he ages, a timestamp, as Plano’s ravenous development reshapes the creeks and flatlands that sheltered him. With an empathetic depth and a sharp sense of humor, the musing writer gracefully places his experience within the bounds of the country, city, and family history that shaped it, while keeping tight narrative reins on his autobiographical account.

We readers follow the familiar arc of growing up and gaining agency through Block’s eyes, made ever more stark by the intense period of closeness and the lingering, constraining  connection between the boy and the woman who raised him. Though, like so many of us, the author clearly has his qualms with his maternal upbringing, he remains lovingly neutral and nearly forgiving in his description of her worsening alcoholism and subsequent deterioration, drawing out some of her worst moments against a backdrop of insecurities and anxieties even as he squirms to assert boundaries as an adult. 

In those moments, and plenty of awkward others, Block presents an affable, relatable self-described character, full of the semi-precocious angst of loners and try-hards, teacher’s pets and outcasts, that anyone who’s struggled to fit in remembers all too well. The homeschooled label that, in time, helps the writer shortcut his experience and find community, is inessential to the story’s resonance, but critical to Block’s patient advocacy for homeschooling standards “to ensure students’ safety, wellness, academic proficiency, access to diverse perspectives, and ability to socialize outside the home.” His thoughtfully placed, contextualizing research broadens the insight of this compassionately funny, thoughtfully constructed memoir.

Stefan Merrill Block speaks at First Light Books on Thursday, Jan. 29. 

This article appears in January 16 • 2026.