From the author of the best-selling The Mother Zone, comes a comic narrative about an over-anxious mother and her twenty-something over-adventurous son.

Home Free is about the last secret lap of parenting: getting through your kids’ twenties and learning how to let them go at the same time. The twentysomethings who invented the generation gap in the nineteen sixties have grown up to become hyperinvolved 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 twenties – while learning how to let go of them at the same time.

Marni Jackson is a Toronto journalist, author, and editor whose work has appeared in Outside, explore, The Globe and Mail, Rolling Stone, The Walrus, and Brick, among other publications. Her writing has won numerous National Magazine Awards and she is the author of three books of non-fiction. From 2006–2009, Marni was Rogers Chair of the Literary Journalism program at The Banff Centre, a month-long residency for professional non-fiction writers.

Marni Jackson's profile page

...lively and thoughful...

National Post

The narrative skillfully weaves together segments about Casey's young adult years with flashbacks to Jackson's own childhood...

The Western Star

A meaty read from the sandwich generation...Let's keep Jackson as our final generational treasure. With so many of the cultural giants we grew up with now reduced to ring tones and car ads, we need all the genuine treasures we can muster.

Globe and Mail