Demythologizing Autism Recovery: Eye Contact by Cammie McGovern

Nine-year-old Adam is not, as I noted briefly at the end of my post yesterday, the only disabled boy in Cammie McGovern’s Eye Contact. And neither is Adam’s mother Cara the only over-wrought, over-protective, mother of a disabled son. While Eye Contact can be described as “a novel about an autistic boy who witnesses a murder,” it is a novel about disability and living with disability and, such, a novel that demytholigizes autism recovery.

McGovern is the author of Autism’s Parent Trap, which appeared in the New York Times on June 5th in which she discusses the killing of Katherine McCarron by her mother. In her June 5th essay, McGovern wrote

Now, as the mother of a 10-year-old, I will say what no parents who have just discovered their child is autistic want to hear, but should, at least from one person: I’ve never met a recovered child outside the pages of those old books. Not that it doesn’t happen; I’m sure it does. But it’s extraordinarily rare and it doesn’t happen the way we once were led to believe.

According to her friend, Dr. McCarron was in despair in recent weeks because Katherine’s language had regressed markedly. Every parent of a child on the autism spectrum knows this feeling: I’ve done everything possible; why isn’t he better? The answer is simple: Because this is the way autism works. There are roadblocks in the brain, mysterious and unmovable. In mythologizing recovery, I fear we’ve set an impossibly high bar that’s left the parents of a half-million autistic children feeling like failures.

McGovern’s novel Eye Contact not only demythologizes autism recovery. It does something remarkable: Despite the sensational plot element of a murdered child, Eye Contact presents a realistic and a real view of life with autism, of what it is to be the mother of an autistic child who is getting older every day.

The community in which the narrative of Eye Contact takes place is a decent-sized town, suburban but not so fully developed that an ecological preserve—a wetlands area—and woods are easily reachable by children and, certainly, by middle-schoolers. Cara has lived in this town all of her life. She and Adam live in her deceased parents’ house; she briefly attended the local community college; she has connections from high school and old friendships with the policemen and the personnel of Adam’s school.

There is Kevin, who is seriously injured in a bike accident—”a little bit of brain damage,” as Cara’s fifth-grade teacher put it (p. 1). In her elementary and high school years, Cara is drawn to help Kevin and to Kevin himself, only to break off their friendship abruptly with consequences in both of their adult lives. There is the friendless, rather obsessive, very observant Morgan—perhaps he has Asperger’s?—and his environmental rights lawyer mother (a single parent, like Cara). There is Chris who has unspecified learning or other disabilities and is brutally hounded, and beat up, by bullies.

And of course there is Amelia, the ten-year-old (diagnosis unspecified) who, six weeks after joining Adam’s special ed class, walks into the woods with him and never walks out. Cara’s meeting with her mother (pp. 183 ff.) is the one moment in the novel’s narrative in which two mothers of disabled children speak, share, see themselves in each other.

The reader may indeed forget that the plot of Eye Contact unfolds in one town and that most of the characters are a familiar line-up of children, parents, teachers, guidance counselors, school administrators, aides, and policemen. Each of these characters is humanly, and fully, depicted as individuals with their own complex psyches (rather than the one-dimensional figures a middle school might think his elementary school principal was). When you’re the mother of a disabled, these are indeed the cast of charaters who fills your days and thoughts, and your child’s. And while nine-year-old Adam is surrounded by a phalanx of special ed teachers, aides, therapists, admistrators, psychologists, only two people seem to be helping the adult Kevin, Cara’s one-time best friend Suzette and Kevin’s aging, sad mother who has gone through her life wearing curlers in public.

Once a disability mother—an autism mother—–always a disability mother even when, as Cara does at the end of Eye Contact, one learns that part of being a mother is learning how to let go as one’s disabled child becomes a disabled adult, and a person on their own.