Stefan Merrill Block, AB ’04, was in fourth grade when his mother declared him a creative genius and pulled him out of his Plano, Texas, elementary school to homeschool him. Just him, and not his older brother.
“Are you sure this is what you want?” his principal asked him as they walked out of her office. But with his mom hovering, Block simply said yes. At 9, he had neither the vocabulary nor the life experience to explain the complicated emotions behind the decision.
Thus began his five-year odyssey in homeschooling. It’s the story Block, an accomplished novelist, tells in Homeschooled (HarperCollins, 2026), a memoir of childhood and the suffocating lengths to which a mother goes to
protect and nurture her son.
“My mother thought she was giving me all the things she didn’t get. But one of the great challenges in writing this was wondering if indeed this experience was all in my head. And was this abusive in some way?”
Stefan Merrill Block
The subject matter is timely. An estimated 3.4 million U.S. children — roughly 6 percent of school-age kids — are homeschooled. Yet in many states, there remains little to no regulation, even as it grows in popularity.
Block’s homeschooling began in Texas in 1992, where there were few rules and no oversight, testing or accreditation. The “curriculum” his mother designed was loose, erratic and lonely. Aside from a few worksheets, Block was mostly left to his own education, which included reading and video games with only his mom as his social life.
Block survived his isolated elementary years and rallied in high school, where after a rocky assimilation back into public education he quietly built a resume that included winning a national science fair. By the time he matriculated at WashU in 2000, he was driven yet scarred by his homeschooled experience.
“I was completely focused on the idea of succeeding in college as much as I possibly could,” Block says. “I felt like I needed to succeed in order to protect my mother, to make what she had said about me come true for her.”
Success meant giving up his mom’s chosen-for-him pre-med studies after mentors like William Paul, professor emeritus of film and media studies in Arts & Sciences, saw his gift for writing and encouraged him to consider a different path. Paul pulled Block aside early in a class during his first year and told him, “You should be in the humanities.”
That gentle encouragement ignited a spark, and Block never looked back. He’d already written three novels to critical success when his mother died of cancer during the pandemic. He started writing about his mother as a way to deal with his complicated grief, and it grew into a memoir. A New York Times bestseller and a Today Show “Read With Jenna” selection, Homeschooled is a challenging yet rewarding read, and that’s intentional.
“I didn’t want to come to easy conclusions for the reader,” Block says. “This story is complex and unsolvable, and I wanted to give space and let the reader sort through the difficulty themselves.”
