The Anti-Romantic Child: A Story of Unexpected Joy
by Priscilla Gilman
Just because I am way out of practice, here is the blurb to give you a sense of what I was walking into reading this book: "The daughter of literary agent Lynn Nesbit and the late theater drama critic Richard Gilman crafts a beautifully sinuous and intensely literary celebration of the exceptional, unconventional child. Her son, Benjamin, was born when she and her academic husband, Richard, were in graduate school at Yale, where she was still working on her dissertation on the Romantic English poet William Wordsworth. As "Benj" grew older and failed to hit the usual milestones of children his age, exhibiting brilliant but "odd" behavior such as an obsession with numbers, aversion to physical affection, fastidiousness, inability to feed himself, and echolalia, Gilman realized these were "uncontrollable manifestations of a disorder," namely hyperlexia. Falsely reassured by their well-intentioned pediatrician, the couple finally sought professional therapists, and after they relocated to Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where both got teaching jobs at Vassar, Benj made marvelous progress in school. Throughout her narrative, Gilman extracts from many of Wordsworth's poems, which comment on innocence and loss and gave Gilman tremendous succor during Benjamin's early development, making for both charming and studious reading. Her thoughtful memoir involves the breakup of her marriage, rejection of an academic career, and move to New York City to work in her mother's literary agency as much as it delves lyrically into the rare, complex mind of the unusual child."
When I read the description of this book, I immediately downloaded it on my Kindle and started reading with abandon. I "liked" the author on Facebook, I read her blog. Her son sounded more like Henry than any other child I have read about in the countless books I have read and half-read about Asperger's and hyperlexia. To be honest, as I raced through the text, her son reminded me eerily of Henry in many ways. Her reaction to noticing his differences was so familiar, and I could relate in many ways to being caught off-guard by this completely alternate parenting universe that had opened up and swallowed our family.
I can't say that I really liked the book, or that I could recommend the book, however. To be fair, my aversion came over time, and it was near the end of the fast and furious reading I was doing that I realized a few things:
1. I was, quite literally, skipping over all her chatter about Wordsworth, romantic poetry, allusions to literature, meaningful metaphor, etc., because they seemed, frankly, contrived. It had begun to remind me of something that seemed like a great idea, one you hatch in those moments of academic passion and work over and over in your head to the point that the brilliance of that tiny spark has been lost. Not because that spark wasn't brilliant, but because you have just taken it too far, and have stretched it too thin. It reminded me, in many ways, of my Master's thesis, or many of the "brilliant-at-the-time" papers and projects from college.
2. I like to think of myself as a potential writer. This book was precisely the kind of thing I'd write. Starkly, it demonstrated to me all the reasons it's not the best idea for a mama, who is very smart and well-read, but who doesn't have anything genuinely insightful and fresh to say, to write a book. It got kind of boring. I'll explain why below.
3. It was absolutely a memoir. Full stop. I think on some level I was expecting a memoir that also had genuinely valuable and insightful information for me as a parent of a similarly situated child, or something universal and profound. Maybe that was in there and I missed it since I didn't connect with the Wordsworth, but it was most certainly a memoir. Maybe I'm too close to the feelings to see how they are universal, or to feel touched in more than a "dear lord, that's us" sort of way. I wanted it to be more than a memoir, and it wasn't. The author seems like an incredibly lovely person, but it's really just a cut above what I write in my head as I fall asleep at night (with more literary allusions, which do make it far more intelligent than what happens in my head, but not necessarily more interesting).
4. My complex relationship with social media has really complicated my relationship with this book. I think I liked the book better right when I finished it, in part because I had not gotten daily updates, quotes, gushing reviews, and media clips posted by the author to her Facebook page. Again, she seems like a genuinely lovely person (she personally responded to me when I sent her a note saying that I related to her experience because our sons were so similar), but there is something about having daily updates, quotes, book tour updates, and even personal contact that makes me feel even more like this was just like the book that I had rolling around in my head, but she had the mom who is a literary agent so she got to write it. I've said on many occasions that even though I feel like all the stuff in my head is brilliant, the reality of it is that no one needs to hear all that, and I kind of feel like the filter would be a benefit here, but her mom got her a book deal.
5. (For the record, I get the hypocrisy of blogging about my feelings about this book, and I really get the hypocrisy that is what follows.) My own wish to have the book have some kind of resolution for her son, or for her, made me feel stressed out when it never came. She found peace in not having a solid diagnosis, and accepting his differences, and modifying her life in ways she never expected; but I couldn't get there with her. I was looking for some peace for myself, through her experience, but I wanted it to be reassurance that her son is OK, that he is doing great, and that Henry will do great too. It was like the book wasn't romantic enough for me in the end, and like I wanted reassurances or tips that would somehow get my family to a place of peace. I felt her when she wrote about the fear and the bitterness, and the frustration and confusion early on in her journey with her son, but it's as though she lost me somewhere around my own real-time experience. And now, with the updates and whatnot, I have no interest in her real-time experience, because I don't want that to be my destination.
In may ways, refusing to give solid definitions and diagnoses to her son, or to the challenges he has, Gilman does contribute a genuinely helpful (if maddening) portrait of the "spectrum" of autism, and all it's related disorders, syndromes, "-isms," "-ias." Definitions are crude tools, and it is a continuum that defies easy labels, even when your child seems to be displaying textbook symptoms. Give it a couple of days, and something will fall out of place. It is a puzzle, a spectrum, it's complex and annoying all at once.
Like I said, I didn't really like the book, and I can't really recommend it because I didn't really like it, but at the same time... it's stuck in my head, and I can relate more than I want to. Maybe that means it's good, and i am just cranky. Certainly possible with this one.
Next week: Lighter fare reviewed! I'm deciding between the apocolyptic vampire-zombie book and delightfully cheesy British murder mystery... Or possibly Cormac McCarthy. We'll see what inspires.
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