Exiting Nirvana

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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.

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