Exiting Nirvana: A Daughter's Life with Autism - Softcover

Park, Clara Claiborne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0316691240 ISBN 13: 9780316691246

Publisher: Back Bay Books, 2002

Synopsis

Exiting Nirvana" is a strong and affecting profile of an artist with autism, beautifully written by her mother. . . . Skillfully weaving in theories of autism with the experience of raising an autistic child, Park goes beyond individual history to address the wider question of what it means to be human".--from the National Magazine Awards presentation.

About this title

About the Author:

Clara Claiborne Park is the author of several books, including The Siege: A Family's Journey into the World of an Autistic Child. She recently retired from the English Department at Williams College, and she lectures.

From Publishers Weekly:

HThirty-four years after The Siege, Park's account of her autistic daughter's first eight years, she delineates Jessy's journey from being a barely verbal child to an adult fascinated with language and the mind. According to Park, Jessy exhibits many of the idiosyncratic mathematical obsessions associated with autism, but has fewer verbal skills than other autistic people. A superb artist, she stuns viewers with her dynamic paintings, which sell well. Her stable and happy life consists of painting; working in the mailroom at Williams College, where until recently her mother taught English; cooking; and doing most of the housework in the home she shares with her aging parents. Though a blessing, these achievements are fragile; Jessy can never live alone, she speaks English as if it were a second language and, equipped with even less understanding of emotions than most of us, cannot truly grasp nuanced human interaction. Park has been both mother and anthropologist, recording verbal and social breakthroughs and setbacks, administering praise and succor. She describes the serene insularity of the autist's "Nirvana," and observes collisions between the autistic and external worlds. She's urged Jessy to enter, "yet never entirely," the extraordinary dailiness inhabited by nonautistic people. In incisive, often exquisite prose, Park affords entry into Jessy's and her own remarkable journey between the two. Illus. (Mar. 8) Forecast: Oliver Sacks, who featured Jessy in his PBS series The Mind Traveller, has contributed an enthusiastic introduction to this deserving book, which will appeal to readers of Karyn Seroussi and Bernard Rimland's Unraveling the Mystery of Autism and Pervasive Developmental Disorder (2000) and Temple Grandin and Oliver Sacks's Thinking in Pictures (1996); expect healthy sales.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Back Bay Books
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0316691240
• ISBN 13: 9780316691246
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240