National Network for Equitable Library Service

From the author of the best-selling The Mother Zone comes a comic narrative about an over-anxious mother and her 20-something over-adventurous son. Home Free is about the last secret lap of parenting: getting through your kids’ 20s and learning how to let them go at the same time. The 20-somethings who invented the generation gap in the 1960s have grown up to become hyper-involved parents who can’t stop worrying about their adult kids. Many of the kids are still living in the basement, bussing tables instead of going to business school and depending on their parents for emotional support. Just when they thought family life was on the wane, parents are back on deck with their children; at the same time many are often coping with their own frail or dying parents. Is this the new, improved face of family, where kids still depend on their parents for stability, friendship and guidance in an increasingly unforgiving world? Or has this era of over-invested parents, living vicariously through the achievements of their children, bred dependency in the new generation? Home Free is an intimate, candid, reflective and comic memoir that focuses on this new and undefined stage of family life: the challenges of helping our kids navigate their 20s—while learning how to let go of them at the same time.