Home Schooling with a Difference

David Gilmour’s passion for his child in his new non-fiction book The Film Club: A True Story of a Father and Son displays the wavering incandescence of a self-conscious single human being trying to bring the little knowledge he has of the world to his precious child to provide him some insight into the largely invisible future.

The Film Club is the story of Gilmour home schooling his very unhappy teenage son, Jesse, in an unorthodox fashion. When he realizes that his child is miserable and that school is not working for Jesse, he proposes a deal. Jesse can leave high school and he does not have to get a job or pay any rent as long as he agrees to watch three movies a week with his father and swear off drugs (it half works). Gilmour is able to do this because he is largely out of work during the duration of the home schooling—a problem that creates the possibility of the father-son film club of the title, but which terrifies the author and leaves...