Cathartic: A Guest Post by Stefan Merrill Block

When a mother’s love overshadows a son’s need for connection, a formerly homeschooled kid reflects on the complicated lessons he learned — lessons any parent can learn from. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Stefan Merrill Block on writing Homeschooled.

“Was it cathartic?” That, I’m discovering, is the number one question a memoirist gets asked.

When I think of writing Homeschooled, I certainly flash on images of myself at the desk that appear cathartic-ish: feverish bouts of writing, frequent sobbing into my laptop. I started writing Homeschooled in 2021, not long after my mom died, and at first I didn’t think of it as a book at all. I just wrote those pages out of a gut-deep need to put memories down on the page. Mom had died at the height of the pandemic, hundreds of miles away; having watched helplessly over screens, it felt to me like she simply vanished one day. For the four and a half years Mom had homeschooled me, she had been the only other witness to that critical part of my childhood, and after she was gone I was filled with this terrible feeling that if I didn’t immediately write down my memories, right away, it would almost be as if that part of my past vanished along with her. My wife and I had a toddler and a baby in our apartment at the time, and this writing came out in intense fits, mostly in whatever stray, rare hours (sometimes day and sometimes night) I could find, when the kids both slept. 

Still, I wouldn’t say any of that felt cathartic. Even after I’d put the memories down, I still carried the weight of them. In some ways they felt heavier than before, freighted now with grief. But I kept at it, this anti-catharsis, because it felt like the only way of fighting back against the forces of silence and disappearance. 

But then, after putting down tens of thousands of words, I went back to the beginning, and started to read what was there. It was a mess, but what I saw through the tangle of run-on and half-formed sentences was something I didn’t expect: I saw a boy on those pages, whose fate I began to care for. In seeing my own stories set down, I began to glimpse my experience not just as its writer but as its reader. And with each revision, I felt I was better able to see that boy more clearly, and I also found that I was able to worry for him, root for him, and even feel angry on his behalf in ways that I never had with my own raw, unfiltered memories. None of this was cathartic, but it was affirming and empowering. 

Publishing a memoir is an upending experience, and there are times when I wonder why I’ve put myself in that perilous emotional terrain. But then I think of that boy I met on the page, the boy who the adult version of myself can care for now, and I’m proud to stand behind him and his story.