An Evening with Stefan Merrill Block
Reading and Discussing his new memoir, Homeschooled
Thursday, February 19, 2026
6:00 - 7:00 PM
Blue Heron Books
High Falls, NY 12440
Stefan Merrill Block was nine when his mother pulled him from school, certain that his teachers were “stifling his creativity.” Hungry for more time with her boy who was growing up too quickly, she began to instruct Stefan in the family’s living room. Beyond his formal lessons in math, however, Stefan was largely left to his own devices and his mother’s erratic whims, such as her project to recapture her twelve-year-old son's early years by bleaching his hair and putting him on a crawling regimen. Years before homeschooling would become a massive nationwide movement, at a time when it had just become legal in his home state of Texas, Stefan vanished into that unseen space and into his mother’s increasingly eccentric theories and projects. But when, after five years away from the outside world, Stefan reentered the public school system in Plano as a freshman, he was in for a jarring awakening.
STEFAN MERRILL BLOCK grew up in Plano, Texas. He is the author of three novels: The Story of Forgetting, The Storm at the Door, and Oliver Loving. Stefan’s fiction has been translated into ten languages, and his stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker Page-Turner, The Guardian, NPR’s Radiolab, Granta, and many other publications. He lives with his family in upstate New York, where he is a co-owner of Skate Time, a local roller rink.
"Homeschooled unlocks the door to a private universe in a carpeted house in Plano, Texas, occupied for years by just middle-school-aged Stefan and his mother. Block is unflinching in both his honesty about his unhappiness and his profound love for the mother who didn't want to let him grow up. An important book for our current world, Block's brave story will help a lot of people feel less alone. An instant classic." —Emma Straub, New York Times bestselling author of This Time Tomorrow
“Novelist Block delivers a wrenching account of his traumatic homeschooling in suburban Texas… Lyrical, harrowing, and politically pointed, this is both a moving coming-of-age story and a clarion call for reform.” –Publishers Weekly
“Stefan Merrill Block’s Homeschooled is a love story and a domestic horror story, so insightfully written that you can’t always separate its loving aspects from its horrifying ones. Its depiction of familial terrors, all inflicted in the name of devotion, driven by the all-too-human need for more devotion, and yet more, raised the hairs on the back of my neck. I didn’t fully realize I’d read it in a single sitting until it became clear that dusk had fallen, and it was time to turn the lights on.” —Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author