Review | Heidi Julavits captures the ache of parenthood in a new memoir

Like “The Folded Clock,” Julavits’s memoir-diary published in 2015, “Directions to Myself” is purposefully aimless. It is one of those books that miraculously works despite its lack of definition, like Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy, or Emmanuel Carrère’s most recent book, “Yoga.” And if it works, who cares what it is? As if knowing this, Julavits’s son says he doesn’t want to read a book anymore because it’s “too fictiony.” When she asks him what he means by that, he says, “too realistic.”

Julavits gives herself the structure of four years, heading the first section of her book “Six,” for her son’s age at the memoir’s start.

As her son becomes more of a “boy,” she worries about his friends’ behavior and its impact on him. Will boys be boys? Should she step in, and how? On the campus of Columbia, where Julavits teaches, a female student carries her mattress to and from class every day as a protest against the university not punishing her rapist. In his statement, the accused says: “My mother raised me as a feminist, and I’m someone who would like to think of myself as being supportive of equal rights for women.”

“Clearly,” Julavits writes, “this man had been taught what he should think but he didn’t yet think it.”

She overhears her son’s friends say about a classmate: “He hangs out with sluts!” When she asks if they know what a “slut” is, the answer is of course they don’t. Another boy tells Julavits that the girl who has a crush on her son is “a disgusting old hag.” Her son redirects the conversation by asking her to tell them a scary story. She obliges, telling them about a group of zombies whose sickness is airborne. It makes them “say hateful things about total strangers. They even started to say hateful things about people they loved.”

In discussing young men who are accused of sexual assault or misconduct, a friend of Julavits’s wonders about mothering: “If I took the credit, then would I implicitly have to take the blame?”

In addition to the four years of her son’s life, Julavits uses her remote house in Maine and a book called “A Cruising Guide to the New England Coast” as maps to her memory. Getting lost on the water has the potential for real danger. Your boat can get stuck, the fog can overtake you. It’s easy to become disoriented. “My son asks how lost a person could get at sea,” Julavits writes. “What, he wonders, is the most lost anyone has ever been?” This leads to a discussion of Point Nemo, or the “oceanic pole of inaccessibility,” a point more than 1,600 miles from nearest land. The metaphor fits just well enough for Julavits to make her point. What is more destabilizing to one’s identity — farther from land — than motherhood? When she comes across an old cemetery on a hike, “one tombstone reads, as though it were also a cause of death: MOTHER.”

The subtitle of this book, “A Memoir of Four Years,” made me wonder if it might be a book about the pandemic, which it is not. It is, however, a book about loss, the daily minuscule cuts that come from raising a child, watching them change from a sweet, happy little baby suspended in your care to an individual navigating the treacherous waters of the real world. And somewhere in between, they call girls “sluts” and scream at the video game console about needing more ammo. “I am no longer his sole point of orientation and will never be again. He will not always be mine. This is the most disorienting,” Julavits writes. “The dispersing of the intensity of my love, by which I mean the heart-hurting, hourly need, for first my daughter, and then my son, feels like homesickness for homesickness.”

The last chapter in the book, “North,” describes her son’s birth. Julavits was more tethered to the earth, already a mother to her daughter. Unlike the floating unknown she had felt when her daughter was born, when she goes to kiss her goodbye so that she can focus on birthing her son, she realizes she has much more to lose. The danger is palpable. She is, whether she likes it or not, permanently needed outside her own desires. It is the strongest writing in an achingly rendered experience of parenthood. Rather than simply passing, time escapes from us, along with our children. And it makes its wounds along the way.

Jessica Ferri is the owner of Womb House Books and the author, most recently, of “Silent Cities San Francisco.”