An Empty Nest, Sooner Than Expected

With our son out of the house, my husband and I provide our own teenage ambience

Susan Orlean
Human Parts
Published in
3 min readFeb 22, 2021

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Low view of a teen doing a jump on a skateboard on the sidewalk.
Photo: Daniel Wirtz/Unsplash

My son, completely at wits’ end with Zoom education, left for boarding school last month, so my husband and I became, a few years ahead of schedule, empty nesters. I had not yet given this phase of my life much thought; my son is in 10th grade, so I had assumed I had…

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Susan Orlean
Human Parts

Staff writer, The New Yorker. Author of The Library Book, The Orchid Thief, and more…Head of my very own Literati.com book club (join me!)