Homing: A Memoir

In this heart-twisting memoir, a teen boy is the object of his mother's deep sexual urges. Does it cross the line into abuse? Is he responsible for her frequent retreats to mental hospitals? Can he ever forgive her? The son needs most of a lifetime to unravel, then free himself from, the mysteries of her demise.

Fourteen-year-old Mark Lyons awakens to his mother screaming at his father, threatening to tell the children her darkest secrets, including her sexual obsession with her son. The "Black Dog" soon drives her to mental hospitals, electroshock therapy, and addiction. Some days Mark is banished from home to avoid setting her off. He finds sanctuary in the greasy garage of his friend Richie and in training his pigeons to circle home to their roost. At seventeen Mark flees his home, but he never really escapes. As an adult he contends with guilt and rage and a profound fear of loving. Decades later, after circling back home time and again to reclaim his childhood, he finds a way toward peace and forgiveness.

In addition to its depiction of a teen trying to make sense of his crumbling world, Homing paints a brilliant portrait of Southern California in the late 1950s. If you have never cruised in a rebuilt '49 Studee to the Long Beach Pike, leaped over the dikes of orange groves while firing greenies at the kids from the next block, or worked alongside Mexican farmworkers, this book will take you there.

Mark Lyons' collection of short stories, Brief Eulogies at Roadside Shrines, was chosen as a 2015 Kirkus Book of the Year. He has also edited two bilingual books: Dreams and Nightmares/Sueños y Pesadillas, a memoir by a fourteen-year-old girl who fled Guatemala and traveled alone to the United States; and Espejos y Ventanas/Mirrors and Windows: Oral Histories of Mexican Farmworkers.