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"The Monster Inside My Son" is so intimate. Can you write about the decision not to incorporate much in the way of outside material into this piece?
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My editor Sarah [Hepola] and I discussed this at length. I did quite a bit of research, first personally, then for the purpose of writing the essay. But what I found was confusing and inconsistent. There was no one definitive study from, say, the NIH that linked autism with violence. There were a couple papers on the Web, but when I contacted the authors of those they either did not respond or declined to be interviewed.
In the end, what Sarah and I decided was that it would be irresponsible to throw out some random statistic then use my personal situation to illustrate it. Instead, I simply told my story, with all of its darkness and questions, and let readers take from it what they would. It's all I felt qualified to do.*
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You write that you felt reluctant to "break the silence" about your son's spiral into violence. Can you speak a little to that reluctance? What do you hope to accomplish with this piece?
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The question of WHY to publish something so personal comes up nearly every time I do [it]. Here's my benchmark: An essay should never be therapy or catharsis or a platform on which to make some point. I write when I feel there is a reason for other people to hear and/or experience what I have to say.
In this case, the Sky Walker incident convinced me there are other people out there, living in silence or even lying to themselves, feeling ashamed (as I did); and the only way to begin solving this thorny, multi-faceted problem of autism and violence—which I believe stems largely from the way people with autism are treated in our society—was to open a dialog. So I did.
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Journalists often try to find human elements in the demons of their stories, yet the language you use—from "slithering" to "golem" and "the warty beast from a Grimm fairy tale"—clearly reinforces the monster reference in the title. Can you explain your strategy?
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Autism is a mysterious condition and it's always fascinated me that fairytales and myths have referred to it for hundreds of years. The changeling story almost certainly is about autism. Ancient rabbis were said to "conjure up" golems from dust—creatures without human feeling who became (nonetheless) saddened and violent when they realized how alien they were from the rest of the world.
During the worst months with my son, I read these stories looking for answers but [was] also comforted by the fact that people had been puzzling over tragedies like ours seemingly since the beginning of time. I suppose some of that just leaked into the essay, because it was the way I thought.
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The various narrative pieces you've written about your son for Salon.com have such different conclusions. Do you regret any part of the disparities between the pieces? Is there anything in them that you would change?
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I've fretted terribly over this: For years, my essays always ended on a hopeful note. One of the reasons I so resisted writing “The Monster Inside My Son” was that I could not find a "happy" ending. I felt in some sense that I was betraying readers who've looked to me for years to be a certain kind of advocate.
It was, however, those very readers who seemed to appreciate the honesty. Life is not consistent. And if memoir is to be honest, it has to cop to those ragged ends and changing circumstances. Given that everything I've written was the truth in its time, no, there's nothing I would change.
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Some publications struggle with the use of the first person by reporters. What do you see as the purpose of first-person narrative journalism?
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First-person narrative is tricky. Most of it, frankly, is awful. In my opinion there's way too much spilling of personal stories all over the Internet, to no real end. But the essays that DO genuinely enlighten and illuminate—these are extraordinary, and necessary.
I read a piece last year by Kevin Baker, the historical novelist, about being tested for the gene that causes Huntington's Disease, and it just knocked me sideways! It was about family, about fear of the known and the unknown, about how one identifies a sense of self. It was magnificent. I aspire to that sort of relevance.
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