Author Stefan Merrill Block has spent his career circling the same untold story—his own. After publishing three novels that highlight themes of family, memory, and alternate realities, the author finally confronts the story at the center of it all: his isolated homeschool years with his mother. In this conversation, Block discusses the emotional intensity of narrating Homeschooled, the healing conversations with family that followed, and how sharing his truth has transformed his closest relationships.
Rachael Xerri: Homeschooled is your first memoir. You’ve previously published three novels, Oliver Loving, The Storm at the Door, and The Story of Forgetting. What made you want to share your personal story now?
I feel like all three of my novels were orbiting the same dark star that I couldn’t quite let myself describe or even name. But at last a moment came when I had no choice but just to put it down: the true story beneath those other stories. That moment came in 2020, just after my mother’s death. It was the peak of the pandemic, we had a newborn baby in the house, and I was in grief over the loss of Mom, but I was also surprised by how clearly I felt another kind of grief. Since Mom had been the only other witness to those years we spent homeschooling, I just had this terrible feeling after she died that somehow that critical part of my past was vanishing along with her. All I could do to fight against that feeling was to write my memories down. And that’s really how this book started, just out of a need to put something of those years on the page.
"This was an enormously healing experience."
What was the writing process like for you for your memoir?
The first draft came out very quickly, at an almost feverish pace. I wrote a lot of pages, certainly more than 500. I wasn’t at all sure I was even writing a book, just that it felt necessary to re-inhabit those memories and moments—and that it was exhilarating to learn how much I could still recall. Still, those pages themselves were a mess, without any real structure or shape. But I was curious to see what those pages might look like if I tried to revise and polish them, and that’s when I discovered something I didn’t expect. I discovered that when I read back my own memories as a story in a manuscript, I could have a sympathy for the boy on the page that I never could quite have for myself off the page. I felt myself rooting for him and worrying for him.
This was an enormously healing experience, and it also started to make me believe I was writing a book. Still, many more months of revision were ahead of me, and I relied on feedback from early readers more than I ever had before. I also reached out to family and to others who had known Mom and me in those years. These conversations were necessary as research, but they were also a way to open up a dialogue with people I love about what this story contains. That part was sometimes tough. Waiting for my dad to read the manuscript for the first time was the toughest moment of all. But on the other side of a few hard conversations, I see now how deeply many of my closest relationships had been transformed—and in many ways liberated—by sharing my truth.
Are there any themes listeners will find in Homeschooled that were present in your previous fiction works?
All of my books on some level deal with the complexity of mother-child relationships, and I feel like this book is my most direct exploration of those dynamics yet. I also realized while writing this book that almost everything I’ve written shares a very particular theme: They all have a trapdoor or a portal buried somewhere inside the story. They all have some way to cross from an ordinary day-lit world into another and more fantastical one. Those other, imagined places were where my mind so often went in the isolation of my homeschool years, so they play a significant role in this book as well. But there seem to be portals in everything I write.
This is also your first time narrating one of your audiobooks. Was there anything you learned about yourself during the recording process that stood out to you?
I loved recording this audiobook! Reading my work aloud has always been a critical part of my writing process, and with the busyness of my dad life these days, audiobooks have probably become the way I most often read. Through the ears, increasingly, that’s how I experience books, and so in some ways I feel like I actually wrote this book to be read aloud. What I did not expect was the emotional intensity of sitting in a small booth and reading my story aloud for hours and hours, day after day. But I was very lucky to work with a wonderful director, Michael Bader, who kept pushing me to keep a familiar, relaxed tone, as if it was just the two of us in a room, sharing stories. Michael also encouraged me not to hold back in the more intense sections of my story, and I was surprised by what this reading let loose in me.
"What I did not expect was the emotional intensity of sitting in a small booth and reading my story aloud for hours and hours, day after day."
My hope is that the audiobook feels like a very honest conversation with the listener, in my own voice. I hope it feels intimate, direct, sometimes a little playful, but with nothing held back.
Is there anything else you would like to share with listeners today?
I guess I’d just like to add that what I most hope is that listeners might find something of themselves in my story, and that they might feel a little inspired to think about how they’d tell the story of their own lives—and maybe even write that story down! Writing this book and revisiting that long-ago time—especially those moments that had lingered too long in silence—was a profoundly clarifying and healing experience for me, and I can think of no greater achievement than helping to spur others to do the same for themselves.
