WILD BOYS

Wild Boys details how Helena learned to be a better parent and reveals how we all can learn to have better relationships with our sons.The book also explores the challenge of disengaged youth from a mother’s perspective and offers an intimate insight into rarely chronicled aspects of youth work.

For too long Helena, a mother of four boys, had allowed her eldest son Joey to call the shots. By the time he was seventeen, Joey had left school early and was teetering on the wrong side of the tracks. Despite Joey no longer living in the family home, Helena did his washing, cooked his meals, handed over money for his groceries, and spent her nights driving him around town with music shaking the car.

With Joey on a first name basis with the local police, Helena needed to do something about his disruptive behaviour before it ripped her family apart.

Helena Pastor is a Dutch-Australian writer who is passionate about the social justice possibilities of her work. Through memoir and fiction, she hopes to influence the way people think and feel about topics including troubled youth, pregnancy and birth choices, growing up in an immigrant family, and recovering a lostJewish identity. Her writing has attracted two Australian Society of Authors’ Mentorships, along with a number of residencies at Varuna Writers’ House and Bundanon. She has extensive experience as an educator, and has worked withgroups ranging from Bosnian refugees to university-level creative writing students. Helena is also a songwriter and performer. She lives in Armidale and has four sons and a grandson