One summer Heidi Julavits sees her son silhouetted by the sun and notices he is at the threshold of what she calls "the end times of childhood." When did this happen, she asks herself. Who is my son becoming—and what qualifies me to be his guide? The next four years feel like uncharted waters. Rape allegations rock the university campus where Julavits teaches, unleashing questions of justice and accountability, as well as education and prevention. She begins to wonder how to prepare her son to be the best possible citizen of the world he's about to enter. And what she must learn about herself to responsibly steer him.
Purposefully. aimless ... A book about loss, the daily minuscule cuts that come from raising a child ... An achingly rendered experience of parenthood.
Though thematically knotty, Julavits’s writing is a life raft: elegant without sentimentality ... Her prose is buoyed by a sharp sense of humor ... Directions to Myself is less a memoir of parenting and more a memoir of developing personhood.
Julavits describes this feeling perfectly ... A series of vignettes, an open airing of the worries and fears of a woman in the 21st century, an ode to books and streams and rocks and artifacts and to family.
