Daniel Isn't Talking

This is a novel by Marti Leimbach, but it’s based loosely on her own experiences, in that her child has an autism spectrum disorder. It doesn’t say that anywhere on the cover though, which is a pity, because you can forgive bias in personal experience, and this is a biased story. It’s told in the first person – from the mother’s perspective – and it covers her marriage break-up, her work with her son over about a year, and her new relationship with the ABA therapist. She’s an American in the UK (which is a good metaphor for being thrust into a new world where you feel uncertain, just like becoming a mother of a child with a disability), and her husband when he leaves her keeps her in such poverty that she has to sell the furniture to pay for the ABA therapy. Her psychologist thinks she has personal issues, and no one will tell her what’s wrong with her son or what to do with it.

I can see that this book would provoke very strong emotions. For example, the mother secretly thinks it’s the MMR needle that caused the autism, which is valid because it’s still actually a fairly widespread belief among families. The choice of an ABA-style approach would annoy both pro and anti ABA people; because ABA people always think that their approach is the “one true thing”, which annoys the anti-ABA people, while the pro-ABA people would be annoyed because the therapist’s approach in the book isn’t pure Lovaas. Even the concept that having a child with autism will alienate your partner and destroy your marriage would annoy families and probably a lot of fathers as well. But I suppose provoking strong emotions is a good thing to do if you want people to read your book.

Again – you can tell it’s American from the first sentence. Those short clear journalistic sentences, that particular timing where there’s a summary sentence left at the end of a paragraph like a jolt. Easy read. Honestly, someone, surely, must have done some research into this era of writing. I was reading (and won’t review because I won’t finish it because it sucked) a British book which was so obviously British from the first breath but also used the short, clear sentence thing. It’s a late 20th/ early 21st century marker. I can’t wait till writers move past it to something more lyrical.

This is a good novel in that it’s an overview of the feelings that parents must face when they get a diagnosis of autism. (I do have to wonder if Early Intervention services in the UK are that bad – maybe they are, though. You’d think they’d have some sort of Autism Association which would guide families through some of the maze at least.) It’s good for people who don’t know anything about autism, because it’s fairly accurate on what the difficulties are for the children. For families who do have a child with autism, it’s likely to be a love or hate book. It’s not particularly positive. There’s very little out there that shows the uniqueness of a person with autism – apart from stuff they’ve written themselves. Because, of course, they don’t see themselves as broken or alien.