Exiting Nirvana

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1: A Daughter's Life with Autism
How to begin? In bewilderment, I think - that's the truest way. That's where we began, all those years ago. That's where everyone begins who has to do with autistic children. And even now, when my daughter is past forty...

Chapter 1: A Daughter's Life with Autism : Part 2
But Nirvana at eighteen months? That's too soon. Yet I must start with that happiness, if only because, in those bad years, it was so thoroughly denied. Only in a few psychoanalytic backwaters is it still believed that the autistic child

Chapter 1: A Daughter's Life with Autism : Part 3
When Jessy was small there were no real explanations for the condition Leo Kanner, the noted child psychiatrist, had identified in 1943 and called Early Infantile Autism. He had observed and described those eerily detached children; he had thought

Oliver Sacks called The Siege: A Family's Journey into the World of an Autistic Child "one of the finest personal accounts of autism, and still the best-beautiful and intelligent." Now, in Exiting Nirvana, Clara Claiborne Park continues the story of her daughter Jessy. In this moving, eloquent memoir, we see Jessy's progressive journey out of her isolated "Nirvana" into the world we all share. It is an honest and captivating story of emergence, perseverance, and love.

Jessy Park, now an adult, still struggles with language, with hypersensitivities and obsessions, and with the social interactions that ordinary people take for granted but that she cannot understand. With the help of family, teachers, and friends, Jessy has achieved more than her parents could have hoped for. She has left behind the extraordinary repetitive calculations of her autism for the utilitarian tasks of determining her share of the grocery bill and balancing her checkbook. She has grown into an accomplished artist-her astonishing paintings transfigure the ordinary world with the rainbow colors of Nirvana. More important, she has overcome her social handicaps enough to hold a job, becoming not a burden but a contributing, active member of her family and community. Exiting Nirvana is a luminous, moving story about the making of a self and what it means to be human, an account Jessy's mother must tell for her, since she cannot tell it for herself. But most of all it is a remarkable story of growth, not only in Jessy but in everyone who has touched her and whom she has touched.

Clara Claiborne Park is the author of several books, including The Siege: A Family's Journey into the World of an Autistic Child, and is a prominent speaker about autism. She won the 1999 American Society of Magazine Editors Award for Feature Writing for her American Scholar article "Exiting Nirvana." She recently retired from the English Department at Williams College and lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

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