There are some books you enjoy so much that you immediately and automatically buy the author’s next book as soon as it comes out. Such is the case with Heidi Julavits’s new book Directions to Myself: a Memoir of Four Years, which came out this summer. Her previous book, The Folded Clock, was surprising and delightful. I don’t even remember why I started reading it, but I found it funny and sharp and shorn of narrative cliche. It has the fragmentary scattershot nature of a journal but without the self-justificatory stuffing of a conventional memoir. Plus it’s funny.

The new book is a fragmented journal of her interactions with her son between the time he’s about five until he basically becomes a tween. The time chronology is a little furry. She has two children and the older one, a daughter, has cruised into adolescence, and the youngest, a boy — her baby — is quickly following, and this is her catalog of instruction to that boy. Complicating this narrative scenario is the sexual-political climate of the past decade, the Me Too movement and the cascading revelations of sexual misbehavior both small and large, petty and gruesome, that have come to light, with varying levels of actual consequence, and the book becomes charged. How to raise a man in a world like this?

I agree with Julavits on just about everything in the book and yet I left it feeling lukewarm. The writing is still sharp and sometimes funny, but the book grows static and repetitive, her narrative persona seems to lack self-awareness, and she comes across as overbearing. And it’s not that I’m uninterested in the subject matter. I also have two children, one boy and one girl, and sit there stunned at the kitchen table after another depleted meal wondering how these two humans will make their way through the world once they leave the house, what the world will do to them and what they will do in response. It’s too much, it’s like fractals, I just sit back and hope the patterns come out pretty.

Perhaps as a middle aged parent, I’m simply too close to the material to have enough distance to enjoy it. I found myself saying aloud to the book more than once, “Geez, Mom. Lighten up.” Every interaction with the son is so relentlessly pedagogical. Everything is a lesson about male threat and future behavior. I realize that it’s this way because that’s the very theme of the book, but it makes the reader question if Julavits is this relentlessly one note in life. Let him play his video games, or don’t. But quit giving in to upper-middle class tangible goods while trying to police his behavior on such goods while not also simultaneously recognizing that you’re trying to have it both ways. It put me in mind of Huck Finn and the Widow Douglas who is constantly trying to civilize poor old Huck. This book is from the widow’s perspective, which could be fun, but instead I just feel a little trapped by everything.

A recurring motif in the book is how people mistake the boy for a girl because of his long hair. This happens over and over again, and then a third of the way through the book, the motif expands and takes a slight, incomplete turn. A man has been watching the son play in a park and mistakes him for a girl, and the daughter corrects him. He then proceeds to argue with the daughter that her brother is in fact a girl. Then he walks away in a humph:*

“We watch him hurry away. . . . I could use this as a teaching moment, the lesson reducible to a single sentence. What an asshole that guy is.

Instead, my daughter sees an opportunity to teach me.

You know he wants to cut his hair, right? she says. He’s just scared to tell you.

We’ve had this discussion before.

That may or may not be the case, I say. However, I do want him to keep his hair long. While my reasons might not strike you as good ones, I want to tell you what they are. . . .

Reason one, I say. His hair is like the tree in your uncle’s yard, the one he wanted to chop down because it made his grass brown, which was no reason to cut down a tree, in my opinion, in the same way that strangers’ failures of imagination are no reason to cut your brother’s hair.

Reason two, I say. Which isn’t really a reason but more of a matter of interest. According to the websites I’ve begun to visit, because my old friend has suddenly started to believe in 9/11 conspiracies and the power of “the universe,” and I want to be able to knowledgeably discuss these things with her, the bones of the forehead are porous and allow light to transmit information to the pineal gland, also known as the Third Eye. Hair, according to these websites, should be kept long, so that it can be coiled or otherwise secured, thereby keeping unobstructed the lines of communication with the universe. . . .

Reason three, I say. Again, according to these websites, long hair produces calcium, phosphorus, and vitamin D, which enter the spinal fluid through the top of the brain, thereby promoting greater intelligence, brightened empathy, kindness, intuition, and the ability to sense enemies.

Your brother, I say, is very empathic and intuitive and kind, and maybe this is why.

My daughter rolls her eyes. She believes her brother’s displays of basic humanity are strategic ploys to make me love him more.

She then correctly observes: Her father, who is also empathic and intuitive and kind, is bald. . . .

Reason four: I refuse the implication, made by the uncle on the island [who warned the mother to protect the boy, along the lines of his prettiness and hair could make him a victim], that if I don’t cut my son’s hair, then his risk of being harmed is greatly increased, and so whatever future abuse he suffers is my fault and then, because he’s pretty, it’s also his.

Reason five: I’d recently had a dream in which I was following my son, on my hands and knees, across a ladder pitched horizontally over an abyss, and he’d slipped, and fell and I’d dropped to my stomach, and reached through the rungs, and caught him by the hair, and saved him.

Reason six: my students and I recently discussed what a writer could or could not imagine fictional people, who in no way resemble the writer, to feel. One of my students said, I’m one of those people who believes there are limits to empathy.

I’m one of those people, too. The fact is, most hours of the day, my son is not with me. He might encounter a stranger in a park and, as happened to my daughter and me, would not be believed, would actually be dismissed, if he corrected that stranger’s assumptions. His hair offered him a brief chance to experience what some never do. It helped him sense the enemy, and hopefully that enemy would never be me.”

I find myself becoming exasperated when I read this. I find myself judging Julavits as a mother rather than riding along with her as a narrator. The line between instructing the child and controlling the child is too fine. I find the final idea, that long hair will create a kind of radical gender empathy within the son, dubious. I don’t know what to make of the final clause, where the mother becomes the potential enemy, unless she is hinting at the possibility that her very instruction and protection is a Widow Douglas-like threat. The whole scene strikes me as preposterous, overdetermined, unreasonable, riveting, and maddening in terms of parental logic. I find myself arguing the entire walk home. I can’t tell if Julavits is joking or not, or how much she is joking and when.** Before I read the book, I would have disagreed with the writing student who said there are limits to empathy in fiction, but now afterward, perhaps he and Julavits are correct. Perhaps the problem is that I just don’t understand what it feels like to be a mother, to live under that totalizing atmospheric burden, a lifelong heat dome of danger. So what strikes me as unreasonableness on her part as a parent (a type of controlling, wacky, sentimental to the point of paranoid dream-logic), or unreliability on her part as a narrator (a type of inconsistency in tone and authorial irony), is actually my inability jump over that crevasse of understanding. I just don’t get it. I am just a dad, with short hair.

* I’m trying out a different way of formatting block quotations. The default way it’s done in this theme makes the quoted text too large and, furthermore, italicized, which for some reason today just seems entirely wrong.

** “I was making jokes no one got but me. I was making jokes that weren’t, technically, jokes.” The Folded Clock, p. 191.