The next day, she sits her son down for a talk. “Clearly, I said, if the two of us don’t pay close attention, our small boy might call girls sluts so his friends would like him better, and then, over time, he might come to think that girls were sluts, maybe especially the ones who refused to have sex with him.” Today’s word is tomorrow’s belief, and isn’t belief the seed of action? Her husband prefers a wait-and-see approach: “He trusted that, through example and education-and by staying vigilant-the two of us could limit certain negative outcomes and help him sort through the many competing messages the world can send a small boy on his way to adulthood.” Julavits finds this adamantly reasonable, and totally insufficient. Julavits discusses the situation with her husband. The brother said of this boy, according to my son, He hangs out with sluts! ” “His friend’s older brother was making fun of a boy in his grade who loved musicals and was only friends with girls. “He was so excited to share with me what had happened,” Julavits writes. Early in the book, her son-he is still six-comes home from a friend’s house boasting of a new word that he has added to his vocabulary. The world is full of countless bad influences, but there is only one Julavits to combat them. What power does Julavits-does any mother-have to set her son’s course? Some boys become loving, gentle, generous men. Julavits worries about what her child might do to the world. All parents worry about what the world might do to their children. “Eventually, whatever force has grounded this oscillation-from my perspective, me-fails to exert any power at all,” she writes. ![]() He’s barely old enough to tie his shoelaces, but already she fears that he is entering what she calls, a touch dramatically, “the end times of his childhood,” that period when he’ll start to test the bounds of his independence. Julavits has seen what growing up looks like-she has an older child, a daughter-and she mourns the loss of her son even now. But that six-year-old will one day be sixteen, then twenty, far from the sphere of a mother’s influence. ![]() In the chapter in which Turner appears, he’s only six. Read our reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction, updated every Wednesday. They are simply part of the air we all breathe. Julavits doesn’t mention Weinstein, or, for that matter, Donald Trump, and she doesn’t need to. We get glimpses of Brock Turner, the Stanford swimmer who was sentenced to six months in jail, in the spring of 2016, after being convicted of assaulting an unconscious woman outside a campus party, and of Paul Nungesser, the Columbia student accused of rape by his classmate Emma Sulkowicz, who, after Nungesser was cleared of wrongdoing by a university panel, carried a mattress around campus during the 2014-15 school year to demand his expulsion. Those private years happen to coincide with ones of public consequence-the period leading up to and immediately following Harvey Weinstein’s downfall, when the alleged grotesqueries of men, and a few notable boys, were thrust into the news. She’s interested in the formation of masculinity, how boys learn to do and to be, and in the development of one boy in particular: her son, who is five when the book begins and ten when it ends. “Directions to Myself” is full of scenes like this one, moments in which boys roughhouse and shit-talk, honing themselves against one another. I might have made a note of this episode regardless of what I was reading, but the fact that it was Julavits pinned it fast to my mind. Some inner voice had spoken up and told him to tone it down. “I’m not listening to your bitch ass,” one shouted at his friend, before glancing at me and sheepishly correcting himself: “-your ass.” It was an oddly tender thing, this boy the size and shape of a man tempering his bluster lest his use of the word “bitch” offend me, a stranger who belonged to the category to which it refers, when he meant only to demean his friend by association. So, a few weeks ago, as I was sitting on a sidewalk bench with “Directions to Myself” (Hogarth), Heidi Julavits’s new memoir, it seemed inevitable that a posse of teen-age boys should come strutting down the avenue, jostling and preening for their own benefit and that of the neighborhood at large. ![]() Life so often rhymes with reading what happens on the page primes our expectations for what we’ll find beyond it.
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