Directions to Myself: A Memoir of Four Years

by Heidi Julavits

A sharply observed memoir of motherhood and the self, and a love letter to Maine, by a writer Eula Biss calls witty, sly, critical, inventive and whose mind Leslie Jamison calls electric.

That night, in his bed, I spread my son's palm wide and tried to read it. If the hand was a map that led to a future person, was there any changing the destination?

One day 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?

What follows starts to feel like uncharted waters. Rape allegations rock the university campus where she teaches, unleashing questions of justice and accountability. Julavits begins to wonder how to prepare her son to be the best possible citizen of the world he's about to enter. And what must she learn about herself in order to responsibly steer him.

Looking back to her own childhood in Maine, where she often navigated the coastline in a small boat relying on a decades-old sailing guide, Julavits takes us on an intellectual navigation of the self. Throughout, she intertwines her internal investigation with a wide-ranging exploration of what it means to raise a child in a time full of contradictions and moral complexity. Using the past and present as points of orientation, Directions to Myself examines the messy minutiae of contemporary family life alongside knottier philosophical questions of politics and gender. Through it all, Julavits discovers the beauty and the danger of telling stories as a way to locate ourselves, and help others find us.

Intimate, rigorous, and refreshingly unsentimental about motherhood and parenting, Directions to Myself is a love letter to Maine and a reckoning with the disappearance of childhood--her children's and her own--that cements Julavits' reputation as one of the most engaged and innovative nonfiction writers today.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Parenting, Biography Memoir, Audiobook, Biography

304 pages, Hardcover

First published June 27, 2023

About the author

Heidi Suzanne Julavits is an American author and co-editor of The Believer magazine. She has been published in The Best Creative Nonfiction Vol. 2, Esquire, Story, Zoetrope All-Story, and McSweeney's Quarterly. Her novels include The Mineral Palace (2000), The Effect of Living Backwards (2003) and The Uses of Enchantment (2006) and The Vanishers (2012).

She was born and grew up in Portland, Maine, before attending Dartmouth College. She later went on to earn an MFA from Columbia University.

She wrote the article "Rejoice! Believe! Be Strong and Read Hard!" (subtitled: "A Call For A New Era Of Experimentation, and a Book Culture That Will Support It") in the debut issue of The Believer, a publication which attempts to avoid snarkiness and "give people and books the benefit of the doubt."

In 2005, she told the New York Times culture writer A.O. Scott how'd she decided on The Believer's tone: "I really saw 'the end of the book' as originating in the way books are talked about now in our culture and especially in the most esteemed venues for book criticism. It seemed as though their irrelevance was a foregone conclusion, and we were just practicing this quaint exercise of pretending something mattered when of course everyone knew it didn't." She added her own aim as book critic would be "to endow something with importance, by treating it as an emotional experience."

She has also written short stories, such as "The Santosbrazzi Killer", which was published in Harper's Magazine.

Julavitz currently lives in Maine and Manhattan with her husband, the writer Ben Marcus, and their children

Reviews

[Lolly K Dandeneau · Rating 3 out of 5]

via my blog:
𝑵𝒂𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒆 𝒊𝒔 𝒂𝒍𝒘𝒂𝒚𝒔 𝒘𝒂𝒓𝒏𝒊𝒏𝒈: 𝑺𝒍𝒐𝒘 𝒅𝒐𝒘𝒏. 𝑻𝒊𝒎𝒆 𝒊𝒔 𝒎𝒐𝒗𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒒𝒖𝒊𝒄𝒌𝒍𝒚, 𝒘𝒉𝒚 𝒎𝒖𝒔𝒕 𝒚𝒐𝒖 𝒎𝒐𝒗𝒆 𝒔𝒐 𝒒𝒖𝒊𝒄𝒌𝒍𝒚 𝒕𝒉𝒓𝒐𝒖𝒈𝒉 𝒊𝒕?

In my experience, time moves quickest while you are raising your children. One day you have a newborn baby in your arms, the next they’re graduating high school. My firstborn is a boy, he is twenty-seven now, but I remember similar concerns. Children will be shaped by their peers, and anyone with a daughter and son knows there are differences in how they are influenced in the world they move through. I have both a son and daughter, and the conversations were often wildly different. As a mother, it is a tightrope one walks in knowing how and when to approach your child and offer your guidance, always there must be solid support. Even more so when they are with their friends, you must allow for a natural independence to develop while also protecting them. In this memoir, Heidi’s son is five years old and transitioning out of childhood, into another stage of development, one she has gone through already with her daughter but raising a son isn’t the same. There is a masculine pushing away that comes with time, boys embarrassed by their mother’s love and often ‘performing mock disdain’ in front of their pals. There is an artform to a mother still making sure her boy is okay but not in such a way that it’s obvious that is what she is doing.

How does one raise a boy, in a world of disgusting sexual violence, particularly against women? How do you stay vigilant in a world that bombards your child with competing messages about sexuality? Too reactionary and your child won’t trust you, and yet too little and your child will be lost. The incident with the word slut is just one conversation starter when her son is still young, and there is such a long road ahead. Older boys will always influence younger boys, short of plugging your child’s ears and closing their eyes, the world will come in and leave their mark in one’s psyche. It happens to us all. Short of living isolated on an island, they do not reach adulthood without the world blowing them about too. “The older boys are full of ideas that my son is thrilled to adopt. Not all of these ideas are good ones. The same is true of my ideas.” We know what we want to teach, but it doesn’t always come out nor is it always absorbed as we hope. She is grieving his growing up, and closer to his friends. It’s a natural progression, but not easy on a mother. Children must, though, learn self-governance, we can’t always be present to be their moral compass. How do we give them the skills they need to make the right choices? Surely all those mothers of boys and men who have committed offenses against women tried to teach their son how to be a decent human being too? Where did it go wrong? How do you prevent it?

Julavits writes of her own childhood on the coast of Maine, motherhood, teaching, and her marriage. As her children grow, she is no longer their center, “my homecoming is no longer the cause of anyone’s elation.” There is grief in knowing this passage of time can never be returned to. It’s an interesting journey, I think it’s easy to get lost. Where do you make a stand, where do you back off, at times you have to approach heavy subjects gingerly, particularly considering your child’s age. You cannot talk over a child’s head (understanding) and yet cannot ignore important topics that sneak in, sometimes too soon. One fact is, you will make mistakes and each child, regardless of their sex, are going to be different in how you teach them. The memoir jumped around here and there, the nautical theme may not work for everyone, but I could relate to her dilemma at times. It’s a tough, confusing world, even for adults.

Published June 27, 2023

Random House

Hogarth

[Abby · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mostly: Heidi Julavits wants you to know she's a very Good Progressive Mom, who won't let her son cut his hair (even though he begs her to) and talks often to him about Feminism and Gay People, now that he's been sucked into the world of gaming, while they wander off and on boats in and around Maine. I think this would have been more successful as more discrete, targeted essays about subjects, rather than the unfiltered and somewhat disorganized array of diary-like entries.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Julavits is a novelist and founding editor of The Believer. I loved her non-standard diary, The Folded Clock, back in 2017, so jumped at the chance to read her new memoir but then took more a year over reading it. The U.S. subtitle, “A Memoir of Four Years,” captures the focus: the change in her son from age five to age nine – from little boy to full-fledged individual. In later sections he sounds so like my American nephew with his Fortnite obsession and lawyerly levels of argumentation and self-justification. A famous author once told Julavits that writers should not have children because each one represents a book they will not write. This book is a rebuttal: something she could not have written without having had her son. Home is a New York City apartment near the Columbia University campus where she teaches – in fact, directly opposite a dorm at which rape allegations broke out – but more often the setting is their Maine vacations, where coastal navigation is a metaphor for traversing life.

Mostly the memoir takes readers through everyday conversations the author has with friends and family about situations of inequality or harassment. Through her words she tries to gently steer her son towards more open-minded ideas about gender roles. She also entrances him and his sleepover friends with a real-life horror story about being chased through the French countryside by a man in a car. The tenor of her musings appealed to me, but already the details are fading. I suspect this will mean much more to a parent.

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

[Vanessa Ya Lopez · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love memoirs & was excited when I saw this book on Instagram. This book was so hard to finish. I loved it’s premise of reflecting on mother/son love and it’s evolving relationship, but it fell very short.

The novel was chaotic and really hard to follow. It didn’t feel like a book really but rather a bunch of random thoughts combined randomly. I felt like I had adhd as it was so randomly organized. The narration also did not help as it was a bit monotonous.

[Karin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not sure what to make of this. I don't know if I, being the mother of a nearly 4 year old boy, can objectively read this. I also feel like there was a lot left unsaid here, the nearly total omission of her spouse for example, that felt odd to me.

[Lindsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book just about did me in. The relationship, worries, humor, and ache—all real, all sharp-eyed and exceptionally written. I wish every person involved with raising my son would read this.

[Diane Payne · Rating 5 out of 5]

While reading "Directions to Myself," I found myself thoroughly enjoying Julavits' memoir and how her memories returned me to my long ago days of raising a young daughter. The memoir takes place in their apartment near the university where she and her husband work and at their cottage in Maine, not that far from where she grew up. We learn a lot about sailing, her mother's navigational skills, and the author's navigational skills in parenting, in particular with her young son. I've read parenting essays about raising her daughter, who is just a few years older than the son, and the author points out, they are basically (poor paraphrasing) on their own after ten, and this is about those four years with her son, when she realizes how much her role of parenting will change.

The author doesn't try to make herself look like the perfect parent, quite the opposite, but I'm sure many readers will wish they had the complex conversations she has with children, and they probably have but just didn't notice. She's quite frank about sexuality, frightening stories, and inquisitive reflections with her children. Throughout the memoir, we see how often her son is mistaken for a girl. When her daughter confronts her by saying he wants his hair cut but he's afraid to tell the mother, she provides a list of reasons, some rather New-agey, and one wonders if this is in jest, and she's playing with her readers, or if the reasons are her true reasons, yet, when the book finishes, we never learn that her ten-year-old son has had a haircut.

The prose is not only playful, but poignant. I kept wishing I was reading this in print, not electronically, because I wanted to mark pages to reread later, which I never do with an e-book. I'm quite sure the folks in Maine will be thrilled to have this book on their shelves, as will most parents, and I've already suggested that my daughter order it for her cnf students next fall. It's that good for readers of all ages and places.

[Emily · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn’t enjoy this, although based on the book’s description it seemed like something I would’ve loved.

I suppose the maps/directions analogy did work, but it felt a little overdone by the end. Mostly, I felt cringey about the way she told stories about other people to make a point. These stories felt like cheap shots to me, and made me want to make sure I never share an elevator with her or sit next to her table at a restaurant.

I feel like there are other memoirs that better capture the fleeting moments of motherhood and/or what it’s like to parent a young boy. Easy Beauty by Chloe Cooper Jones comes to mind (and that’s not even exclusively what that book is about!). I’d skip this one.

[Ellie · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF. I gave up on this one as I wasn’t enjoying it and the due date at the library was fast approaching with multiple people waiting. The threads of storytelling were chaotic. This memoir seemed more like bits of randomness documented. The book summary also talks about the exploration of raising her son but after reading half the book, it seemed of little focus.

[Lucy Hodgman · Rating 5 out of 5]

i love heidi and the ocean and this book

[Joshua · Rating 5 out of 5]

Trying to help raise my own 12 year old boy in these darkening times and this beautiful book comes to me. Julavits, drawing on her own childhood by the ocean, in the water, learning practical survival and trying to impart the same to her own children, especially as her son’s childhood begins coming to a close, she touches on so many familiar to me feelings. The intensity, the fulfillment, the insanity, the edification of raising a young child, until slowly they are no longer a child and you are not needed, at least not in any way that claims your identity, your whole being. She mentions somewhere along the way noticing grief for her own childhood and her kids, both over. And that is what I feel. A chapter done, and bittersweet in its ending, until whatever comes next. Me and my son, a young man.

[James B · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks to Netgalley and Hogarth for the ebook. Over a period of four years the author sees her son slowly, and then swiftly, shed his adolescence. A professor whose college has recently been thrown into turmoil with rape allegations, the author wonders what she can do for her son before she releases him out to the world. She tries to be there for him, question him without always testing him and share the stories of her life that shaped her, including a childhood that was rich with life on the local seas.

[Madeleine Kaubrys · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 - As a girly who enjoys a good memoir, I was intrigued by the description of this book and sold at “a love letter to Maine,” but I just couldn’t really connect or get into it unfortunately. Even though I thought her writing was creative and poignant at times, and I related to the way she questions things (and it raised thoughtful personal questions about how I’d raise my nonexistent children in today’s world), it kind of felt like I was reading diary entries in a way that wasn’t enjoyable? Maybe I’d relate or appreciate this book more if I was a parent.

[Tracy Foedisch · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a mother’s internal
monologue. I had one, too, as a mother. The poignant part of the book was at the last. The sadness felt by a mother watching her child grow away is very real. I understand and feel that.

[Cherise Wolas · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved the experience of reading this book. About life and motherhood and the perils of raising a son, about Maine, navigating life, and more. Smart, incisive, and several times I laughed out loud.

[Ali Alhassani · Rating 3 out of 5]

Honest and well written account of a mother figuring out how to raise her son who is 6-10. She feels this is the age where he becomes more independent and starts to drift from her. There are examples galore of how navigating the waters in their small Maine coastal town are metaphors for parenting and for living life in general. The title refers to her idiosyncratic way of giving directions to friends. She gives them tailored instructions based on stories about the place. "A place is defined by the stories people tell to help others safely find it." The title refers, I think, to the directions she gives her son, to know her and to learn from her.

[jennifer]

The best parenting book I’ve read (which is to say, the only one I’ve really related to).

[M. Sarki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Please read my review of this exceptional book here:
https://rogueliterarysociety.com/f/di...

[Margot · Rating 4 out of 5]

A memoir about being a mother to a son, between the ages of 7 and 11, years when it still feels like you can have an influence, before an easy connection is lost. I do love Julavits's writing. She is the perfect of example of 'show don't tell." She never says how do I make sure my son doesn't grow up to hate women? How do I protect my sensitive son against the harsh world? How do I make sure my son knows who I am outside of being a mom? But over and over again, those questions come up in the interactions she describes as she worries about her son entering gaming culture, as she recounts different relationships and friendship he has with other children, as she works to share her knowledge of boating and the sea with him. There is no clear timeline to this book. There is no clear storyline either. It is episodic and at times you feel lost, just as the writer does, and that felt honest for a book reflecting upon parenting.

[Patricia Geller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Julavits is a gorgeous wrier so I persisted in reading what she calls “a memoir of 4 years”. I loved her observations of the natural world, stories of her childhood but her obsessed focus on her son made me cringe. I dearly loved and love my children and grandson but if I was the object of her obsession, I would cringe. So I both loved her writing and found much of her focus cringeworthy. She barely talks about her older daughter, feeling she already lost her to the larger world. She writes, teaches, is comfortable on the water, seems happy in her marriage and has friends but her need to install her essence into her son made for strange reading. Will seek out what of hers I haven’t read as she writes beautifully.

[Kendra · Rating 1 out of 5]

While the writing in t his book can be interesting and beautiful, the whole memoir is so self-indulgent and so risk-averse that it made no difference. Julavits equivocates about important issues like rape and engages in magical thinking to justify her actions or lack thereof. Ultimately, what was the point of the book? It felt like a betrayal of other women, of professors, of adults as a whole.

[Kelly Pramberger · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was difficult for me to get into. I wanted to give right in but for some
Reason the writing was making it hard for me to enjoy the story.

I do appreciate NetGalley for providing me an ARC and I hope the book is a success.

[Bookreporter.com Biography & Memoir · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heidi Julavits has two children, but when her son was five, she began to wonder if she was the right person to parent him through the intensely strange and difficult world in which we live. DIRECTIONS TO MYSELF is a series of personal essays in which she tries to answer that question.

Being a parent is a confusing ordeal naturally, a state of being that makes you doubt yourself (if you’re doing it right) and constantly reassess your qualifications for helping a young human find their way in the greater world. What do they need to know? What do they not need to know? What can you teach them, and what do you have to let the world teach them? How do you prepare a young soul for the harangues and pushbacks in the world? How do you preserve their own unique characteristics in a world in which “fitting in” requires most of us to mask our true selves in public situations? Julavits, a native New Englander, sounds pragmatic in her stories, but underneath there is a running current of anxiety and apprehension fueled by love and wonder.

Into this world of wonder comes a steady source of difficult and historic traumas that affect everyone --- from the #MeToo movement and Harvey Weinstein’s downfall to the story of Brock Turner, the Stanford swimmer who was sentenced to six months in jail for attacking an unconscious young woman outside a college party, and Paul Nungesser, the Columbia University rapist of classmate Emma Sulkowicz, who spent a year after her assailant went free to ensure that her outcry would be heard by dragging her mattress with her all around campus.

This is the backdrop for DIRECTIONS TO MYSELF. Julavits teaches at Columbia and watches these men’s exploits from a front-row Manhattan seat. She references many things and doesn’t name any of these people, but she doesn’t have to. We all know who she’s talking about and how their horrors have informed the lives we all lead as parents.

Julavits has conviction and confidence one day, and none the next. “Eventually, whatever force has grounded this oscillation --- from my perspective, me --- fails to exert any power at all,” she writes. How is she going to prepare her son not to be this type of man, the toxic masculine? Will love help? Discipline? Even a kindergartener is learning the ways of the world every day in a special context, and it hurts her to see that his innocence takes a hit from the other parts of his world when she is not with him to stop it.

A conversation based on the word “slut” and what it really means prompts a long discussion with her husband on how to handle the fact that a young classmate’s older brother has now introduced yet another chink in the armor of childhood --- the overheard word and an explanation of something he’s not ready to understand. What is the right action? What will guide her boy to the better, more polite, kinder side? The answers are never cut and dried.

These incidents are interspersed with a look back at Julavits’ own upbringing in Maine. Even in a land where the specifics of life are hard enough to use up all your brain cells, far away from fads and other ridiculous influences to children’s innocence, Julavits remembers how hard it was to exist in the world when it wasn’t a 24-hour news fest with a technology that was just brimming with unnecessary and disturbing information for kids.

There is a comfort in reading how the child’s (and adult’s) mind wanders around the strange, regardless of the specifics of the world in which they live. There always will be new normals for each subsequent generation, and Julavits is smart enough to use her literary ability to bring us into her world and leave with something new to think about, but without the proselytizing of a self-help book. DIRECTIONS TO MYSELF is a meaningful collection of considered and straightforward dives into the topics that keep all parents up at night.

It seems that Julavits' son will be just fine.

Reviewed by Jana Siciliano

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

She has quite a way with words. I'm not surprised to see from the book jacket that she's a novelist, as some of the individual scenes were really vivid and memorable (ex. one in which she's trying to write a memo re performance review of one of her faculty colleagues while her son plays an aggressive video game just on the other side of thin wall and makes random distracting "wait. get that guy! NOOOOO" noises - i practically wanted to crawl into the page and ask her son myself to keep it down).

Balanced against that, i'm also not surprised she's a novelist in the negative sense, for me as a 99.5% nonfiction reader. That is, a large percentage of the time I didn't care what happened, and an even larger percentage of the time I couldn't tell what she was talking about. I flashed back several times to 10th grade English class, fretting that someone was going to ask me what the theme or symbolism was in some superficially mundane scene -- a person is driving, and the drive takes longer than they expected because so many roads around here are poorly marked, and she can sense her son's impatience, so it's a good thing they packed snacks, and then she parked in parking lot #6, so...............wait, what? is this going to be on the test? What was I supposed to make of it?

Thankfully, I'd wake up each time and realize there is no test anymore, and I could allow myself to skip ahead to next chapter.

[Tess · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've been a fan of Julavits writing for years, and was especially intrigued by this memoir as I knew it covered years where she teaches at Columbia University while I was working there. With Columbia being in the news these past few months, much to my frustration, it still made me a bit nostalgic so I decided to finally pick this one up.

The book is mostly about raising a son to be progressive, feminist, and open-minded in a world that does not want men to be that way. Sexual assault on Columbia's campus in the mid 2010s was a controversial and frustrating issue, and yet another way the administration poorly handled student protests and keeping students safe. Julavits uses this a little as a background to her teaching her son to be a good person, and I appreciated that.

However, the memoir gets to be a bit repetitive over time and I found myself skimming through the second half. As someone who is about to be a Mom for the first time, I appreciated the experimental, internal narrative about raising children the way you think they should be raised vs. how the world will mold them regardless. But the book lacked cohesion and a central theme for me to latch on to.

[Lisa Phillips · Rating 3 out of 5]

A beautifully written book that raises the most pressing questions of parenting today: how to usher our children, in particular our sons, into adolescence in an era of smartphones, gaming, porn, and misogyny? She aptly captures the helplessness and the intense, complicated nostalgia of this generation of parents, who grew up free of today's tech and want desperately to raise children who find joy in play, in the natural world, in getting away. This book is more about questions and reflection than guidance, and that didn't bother me. What did was the feeling (which I often have in memoir and essays) that a good deal of the book is about forcing meaning out of small moments--the drives to and around Maine, the junk shop scouring, etc. I wanted this memoir to get somewhere, especially given its concern with the critical problems of sexual violence and misogyny, and it kept wandering the metaphorical back roads. I also think this may be a book for a life stage--that if you are a thoughtful parent watching a child, particularly a son, on the brink of adolescence, you will feel seen by this memoir, but if you aren't, this book's power may not be as great.

[Amber Trac · Rating 3 out of 5]

The writing, though at times sacrificing clarity for artistry, is beautifully woven. Part of the author’s goal was to write a love letter to the East Coast, and she certainly achieved that. I found myself longing for places I’ve never been based on her descriptive language.

I also enjoyed being immersed in some of the more subtle, shifting feelings that are brought about by motherhood that Julavits described so well. Again, this is something I have never experienced first-hand, but was brought into experiencing by reading her words.

Much of the content on parenting and the struggles women face bordered on insufferable. In a lot of ways, this book taught me how I don’t want to parent my future children. Nonetheless, I always appreciate hearing from perspectives that I don’t necessarily agree with. This book was a worthwhile read.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to Goodreads for the ARC of this title.

Julavits's latest work deals with the relationship between memory or personal history and raising young children, particularly a young son. She grapples with the kind of person she was, where she came from, and the kind of person she wants her son to become. As a reader pathologically averse to anything related to children, I was perhaps not the audience for this book (something that was not clear to me when I entered the giveaway!). However, Julavits is a spectacular writer. The formal qualities of her book are instructive - she takes multiple ideas and produces something coherent and novel. Her sentences are masterful. I recommend this book if it looks interesting and you can bear reading about the exploits of children.

[Kathleen Hulser · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful, imaginative approach, where thoughts are expanded into incisive essays on the vicissitudes of human experience, small things revealing large terrain. The author's deft writing seems effortless, as she channels the voices that play hide and seek in our heads. Although presented as modest and quotidien her "journal entries" add up to an impressive grasp of what makes humans tick: the good, the bad and the ridiculous. Julavits is especially gifted at writing about her children, she respects them, while treating them as rare sources of uncontaminated (or is it precontaminated?) responses to dilemmas. Her ability to do anthropology on the family is both hilarious and richly rewarding.

[Charlotte · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is about many things, but centered on her son who moves from about seven to ten in the course of the book. I learned a few things from this book, one is that I might be a contrarian. I need to work on that.

Here's a conversation she has with her 9 year old son:

"I don't want to be immortal, he says.
Why? I ask.
If I were immortal, he says, I'd have to keep making new friends. Also a person would have to keep learning different ways of being alive.
What do you mean, I ask.
One century, you're walking on two legs, he says, and the next century you're riding a hover board.
He returns his eyes to the book.
That would be hard, he says. If the world completely changed, and you had to keep changing, too."

This really hits home at the moment.