Personal Reflections on Parenting, Lesbian History and Autism
Heidi Julavits knows where she’s going in DIRECTIONS TO MYSELF: A Memoir of Four Years (Hogarth, 287 pp., $27), or at least she has to believe she does.
In this narrative of parenthood and processing, there can be little room for doubt, except, of course, when it makes for good writing.
Julavits’s young son faces what she calls “the end times of his childhood” — her eldest already a teenager — and over the course of breezy Maine summers and tumultuous school years, she documents their relationship out of one part of life and into another.
To raise a boy in the current American climate is to reckon with much more than awkward growing pains: A sexual assault case lingers in the background of Julavits’s teaching life, her son learns what “slut” means, she regales her family with scary stories from her past, including an attempted murder victim stumbling, bloodied, onto her childhood porch.
