Clara Claiborne Park
Exiting Nirvana
A Daughter’s Life with Autism
Praise for Clara Claiborne Park’s «Exiting Nirvana. A Daughter’s Life with Autism»
To Jessy,
who once couldn't talk and has spoken so much of this
And to the memory of Ernest C. Pascucci
«An eloquent memoir…. A loving and lovely book…. Park’s analysis of Jessy’s seemingly impenetrable systems is fascinating».
«As much as Exiting Nirvana succeeds in bringing us into the world of autism, perhaps its greater accomplishment is in making us reconsider whatever we thought we knew about what it means to be human in the first place».
«This book will help both parents and professionals to have a greater understanding of the mind of a person with autism».
«A fascinating journey into the autistic mind… The anecdotes are compelling, the turns of phrase quite elegant».
«Immensely readable. A frank, honest telling of how a mother refused to surrender A unique and invaluable case study of the nature of autism».
«An extraordinarily well-written, moving account of a mother’s struggle not only to bring her daughter into the world but also to teach her how to have an extraordinary life… The readership of this book is virtually the universe of readers. Anyone interested in child psychiatry should grab this book immediately. Any parent of a special-needs child of any kind will glean much from this book. Anyone interested in existential questions of being can learn from Clara and Jessy’s journey together. I would make this book required reading in the curriculum of every discipline in the mental health field».
«I adore Clara Park and often reread The Siege to maintain my professional focus in times of overwhelming doubt about how to help children and their families Now she touches my mind, heart, and soul again through her poetic voice in Exiting Nirvana… There are insights into autism that can only be gained through the time-honored words of a mother’s love».
«A masterpiece. Clara Park’s earlier book The Siege was also a masterpiece, but the two masterpieces are quite different. The first was about childhood. The second about maturity. Now we have prose instead of lyrics, serenity instead of passion. Clara has navigated through the storms and come safe to shore. Her daughter Jessy has grown slowly into self-awareness, and Clara’s work is done».
«A beautifully written portrait of a little understood illness.. Park has told Jessy’s story with clear objectivity but also with a mother’s warmth, sharing the bewilderment, frustrations, and triumphs of life with an autistic child. A keen observer of detail, she has patiently unraveled many of the mysteries of Jessy’s behavior, both for herself and the reader. Though this is a book about Jessy, it’s also indirectly about one of Jessy’s most fortunate accidents of fate — her remarkable mother».
Foreword
In 1967 a remarkable book was published — The Siege, by Clara Claiborne Park, an account of her daughter’s first eight years. It was remarkable on several counts: it was the first «inside» (as opposed to clinical) account of an autistic child’s development and life; and it was written with an intelligence, a clear-sightedness, an insight, and a love that brought out to the full the absolute strangeness, the «otherness», of the autistic mind. It also brought out how much an empathetic understanding could help to lay siege to autism’s seemingly impregnable isolation.
Jessy Park — «Elly», as she was called in The Siege — is now past forty, and Clara Park has now given us a sequel that is, to my mind, more remarkable still. The Siege could only relate the beginnings of a life, whereas Exiting Nirvana gives us a story forty years long, the whole of Jessy’s unfolding from the almost mute eight-year-old she was in 1967 to the richly gifted, though still clearly autistic, human being she is today.
Over the years the Parks have studied as well as loved Jessy. They have kept detailed records of every stage of her development — the development of her language, her emotions, her interests and moods; of her capacities (or incapacities) for understanding other people, the social world; of her capacities for logical and systematic thought; and, not least, of her varied and singular (and sometimes hugely complex) obsessions and «systems». There is more «data» on Jessy, I suspect, than on any other autistic human being who has ever lived. And from this richness, Clara Park — a superb observer no less than a devoted parent — has distilled a lucid and beautifully wrought narrative, full not only of her own deep observations and thoughts, but of poignant and funny anecdotes of every kind («A book should consist of examples wrote Wittgenstein»), and the strange, mad poetry of Jessy’s own words. It reveals the life and mind and world of an autistic person with a depth and detail never before
