Autism: NOT a Curse But Much Love

Her son’s diagnosis of autism is thus both vindication and curse.

So writes Sara O’Leary in Talking back to autism, a review of Daniel Isn’t Talking, the novel by autism mother Marti Leimbach about an autism mother, Melanie Marsh who

…. knows that something is wrong with her son. He doesn’t respond to his own name, can’t or won’t talk, and cries incessantly. Melanie is racked with anxiety and sleep-deprived; some think that maybe there’s something wrong with her.

Thus, the reviewer characterizes an autism diagnosis as a “vindication and a curse”: The autism mother in the novel is not crazy or hysterical but dead-on right about what is “wrong” with her son–the “curse” of autism.

In Leimbach’s writing, Melanie’s “fierce mother-love” for Daniel is the force that drives his treatment and also the narrative. Indeed, O’Leary describes Daniel Isn’t Talking as comprised of three love stories, Melanie’s lost love for Daniel’s father (their marriage dissolves), that “mother-love,” and her falling-in-love with the Irish Andy O’Connor, one of Daniel’s therapists.

With all that love–some lost, yes, but more gained–in Daniel Isn’t Talking–it seems both misleading and downright incorrect to call an autism diagnosis a “curse.”