The Autism Detective: Eye Contact by Cammie McGovern

I was up at 3am last night reading Cammie McGovern’s novel Eye Contact, but not to find some fact or bit of information about autism, as has often been the case when I have stayed up in the dark hours of the night reading books and websites.

I stayed up because Eye Contact is a compelling read as literature, and as autism lit. You can learn a lot about autism and about life in Autismland by reading Eye Contact, though McGovern is never didactic, never inserts information about ABA, the gluten-free casein-free diet (p. 187), or the causes of autism without making it all part of her narrative.

Being an autism parent requires one to be a detective with a careful eye trained on the habits, the patterns and the details of one’s autistic child—-one has to try (as much as is possible) to step into the shoes of an autistic person and see things from their mindset. (All the while knowing that one may be wrong, but a parent has to try.) One has, that is, to acquire an autistic world view and then the “mystery of autism” seems not so mysterious at all—or does it?

And this is precisely what Cara, mother of nine-year-old Adam, does in Cammie McGovern’s novel Eye Contact. Cara must become such an “autism detective” not only to understand and help Adam on a day-to-day basis but also because Adam is a witness to the killing of one of his classmates, Amelia in the woods behind their elementary school. And Adam, brought in for questioning at the police station, is not only silent, but stimmy:

He’s up on his toes, humming and keening, wriggling his fingers in his beloved peripheral vision, looking like a grown version of the toddler she [Cara] remembers before intensive therapy, eight hours a day, dragged him out of his shell. ……. In the past, some of these stims have revisited periodically—Adam will hum for a minute, do this business with his fingers—but in five years she’s never seen all of them appear at once and take over, lock him up in this way. (p. 36)

While the main suspense of the plot of Eye Contact is to find out who killed Amelia, a parallel plot is that of how to get Adam to provide an account of what he saw. “For Adam, language has always been a struggle. His first words didn’t come until he was three…” (p. 19). It is Cara’s knowledge—won by hard experience in Autismland—that makes her able to “read” Adam’s echolalic language and to trust his tape-recorder perfect memory for sound and visual detail when he is questioned by the police and asked to identify a suspect in a line-up.

And yet, even though Cara knows Adam so well that she knows that he can talk about the terrible crime he has seen, the real knowledge that she has gained at the end of Eye Contact is how little she in fact knows about autism, and about Adam.

In the last week she [Cara] has realized that having so many answers has only opened up more questions, harder ones to answer: How did Amelia convince Adam to go with her?…… She thinks about her impulse to probe, to find out everything she can about Amelia who will, in the end—whatever she finds out—be just a girl, a ten-year-old with a mysterious mix of strengths and deficits, calculation and innocence. She could accumulate details, a thousand scraps of information, and still never know what was said in the bathroom, what was sung on the swings. Maybe in the end what she’s after doesn’t have much to do with Amelia at all. Maybe what she wants is Amelia’s perspective—what she saw in Adam, what drew her to him, because the real mystery of Cara’s life has always been the same one: Adam. (p. 285)

And Cara’s being able to acknowledge her ignorance about some aspects of her son and of his life is tantamount to her admitting to herself that Adam is, indeed, a separate person. He will always be her disabled son (and Cara is not the only mother of a disabled child in Eye Contact) but he is Adam, autistic, different. Cara learns to let go. She learns that it is the “real mystery of Cara’s life,” of her own life, that she needs to figure out and that somehow Adam—that mothering an autistic boy named Adam—has helped her to understand this, to know something more about herself.