Directions to Myself

"One day Heidi Julavits sees her son silhouetted by the sun and realizes 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 who am I as a mother? What comes next, Heidi realizes, suddenly starts to feel like uncharted waters. As her son continues to grow up, rape allegations rock the university campus where she teaches. She begins to wonder how she can prepare her son for the world he's about to enter. And what must she learn about herself? Returning to her own childhood in Maine, where she often navigated the coastline, Julavits takes us on an intellectual journey of the self, intertwined with a wide-ranging investigation of what it means to raise a son in our fraught cultural times. Examining the messy minutiae of family life alongside the knottier philosophical questions of culture, politics and gender, Julavits comes to realize that the directions forward must always come from deep within ourselves. Intimiate, rigorous, and refreshingly unsentimental, Directions to Myself is a brilliant examination of what makes life rich and mysterious by a writer whose work has been called "fascinating" (Washington Post), "scathingly funny" (Los Angeles Times), and "exquisite" (New York Times)"--