Andy the Irish Play Therapist: Talking about Autism in Daniel Isn’t Talking (3)

The plot of Daniel Isn’t Talking by Marti Leimbach turns on a rather fantastic device, namely, the appearance of Andy O’Connor, the County Cork-born play therapist who, after one glance, tells Melanie, the novel’s autism mother protagonist, that her son Daniel is “‘not MR, no’” and talks about how Daniel will talk, one day (p. 127). And while an autistic child being of normal intelligence and being able to talk might seem good stuff enough for a plot—for a plot verging on fantasy, indeed, to those of us parents whose children seem not to understand so much and can barely talk, or cannot talk at all—this is not what makes the plot of Daniel Isn’t Talking something of a fantasy.

It is the Irish play therapist Andy himself who, on first meeting Melanie and Daniel, seems to be

…just about the more self-assured, cockiest young man I’ve ever laid eyes on, hanging his jacket on the high end of a door, stripping his shirt of its tie. He unclips his cuff links and rolls them across the table like dice. Then he kicks his shoes off, pulls his shirttails out of his trousers, undoes the button at his collar. (p. 128)

These details are meant, I think, to suggest Andy’s whole-hearted enthusiasm for his work, teaching autistic children, for getting down on the floor and setting up train tracks. Read out of context as I have quoted them here, these details could be misread as the prologue to a bedroom scene, and not one where Thomas the Tank Train wallpaper hangs on the walls. And, as the story of Daniel Isn’t Talking unfolds, the more adult type of bedroom scene is precisely what arises between Melanie and Andy in what she herself describes as something other than a “normal relationship” (p. 263). And, while Melanie’s personal relationship with Andy, her son’s main (and, indeed, one and only) therapist, may add an unexpected twist to the story of an autism mother set on helping her child, this relationship casts a puzzling shadow over Daniel’s progress.

As I noted in my post Autism Chick Lit, Daniel Isn’t Talking is a novel about an autism mother that tells a story very similar to that in such books as Beth Kephart’s A Slant of Sun: One Child’s Courage and in Catherine Maurice’s Let Me Hear Your Voice: One Family’s Triumph Over Autism. (Maurice’s book—with its claims of not one but two autistic children recovered through ABA and its author’s use of a pseudonym both for herself and her children—is the subject for its own analysis and I will attempt one in the future.)

To “recover a child from autism” might seem to be almost a fantastic—-a fantasy—-plot for an autism novel. More than a few autism advocates and bloggers have raised fears about the very notion, not to mention the possibility, of “recovering or curing a child from autism.” My own understanding of the brains of autistic persons like my son Charlie as being differently wired leads me to think that, while there are many skills that Charlie can learn that enable him to function very well, he will always be different, and I have no problems with that, I should underscore.

“Recovery from autism” has been the selling point behind more than a few, if not many, autism books (Maurice’s Let Me Hear Your Voice; Karyn Seroussi’s Unraveling the Mystery of Autism and Pervasive Developmental Disorder). Many autism books have as their angle a specific treatment or therapy that will have “amazing” results in curing one’s child. An autism novel with a plot along the lines of the movie Lorenzo’s Oil might seem the first to come to mind, and the autistic child’s no longer being an autistic child the fantasy happy ending.

Daniel making great gains in his speech and play skills, such that he “‘will not need a special school’” (p. 272) is not the fantastic end to Leimbach’s novel. The fantasy ending is Melanie, autism mother, not only falling in love with Daniel’s play therapist, Andy, but Andy becoming a sort of substitute father for both Daniel and his sister, Emily, in addition to their mother’s lover. And while this situation—a reconfigured family, with a not so autistic boy and a charming, Irish (instead of British) “father”—makes for a happy ending as far as the narrative of Daniel Isn’t Talking, the relationship between Melanie and Andy seriously undermines the kind of educational therapy/treatment that has helped Daniel to make his gains.

Andy is a fantasy character. He is, again, Daniel’s only therapist; he ends not charging Melanie for his sessions with Daniel. And for an autism mother to be going to bed with her son’s chief therapist and, we are led to assume, her son’s main educational advocate, is not only an unrealistic situation, but one with more than a few conflicts of interest on the horizon.

In her essay “Living Through The ‘Autism Years’ ” on the Autism Speaks website, Leimbach writes that:

Daniel Isn’t Talking is not a memoir—very few of the events of the novel ever happened in my life – but the time of my son’s diagnosis had a particular feel to it, a rawness, a panic, and a call to courage that was unlike anything I had ever experienced. It is because of this – what would you call it? – emotional content that the novel is autobiographical. It contains within it exactly one aspect of my life: what it felt like to be me. What it feels like now.

I have been asked in interviews how the novel differs from my own life and I can answer that question very easily: my real life was not sexy or funny, while the novel is both. In my real life I never fell in love with a therapist or threatened my husband’s lover with the prospect of babysitting my son.

Indeed, most of us autism parents live lives that—regulated by therapy appointments, IEP meetings, bathroom mishaps that don’t happen in the bathroom, tantrums in public places, no time to meet a friend for coffee because no babysitter able to take care of our kids can be found—are indeed far from “sexy.” And yet, I do find my own version of “Autism Every Day”—-to borrow the title of the Autism Speaks video—as depicted on Autismland to be frequently funny, if only because it is better to laugh when you’ve got a mess on the floor to clean up than to cry. And as for “sexy,” there is something to be said for the moments when you, an autism mother, find youself all but entering the men’s room to make sure that your nine-year-old son has found the urinals, not touched the wrong stuff, and washed his hands really well—not to mention earlier moments when said child was four years old and undid the latch of the bathroom stall and flung wide open the door, so that you, autism mother, were as exposed as you might ever dread to be.

Autistic children, autistic persons, autistic characters (like Christopher in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, which has been much praised and much critiqued) make any piece of writing, fiction or non-fiction, interesting, compelling, a page-turner. There is no need to have a cute Irish therapist to make an autism narrative interesting.