Valerie Gilpeer

Most of this memoir is that of Valerie, the mother. A few of Emily's writings are interspersed, becoming more prominent in the 2nd half of this book. If you are a parent who needs validation for your feelings upon learning of your child's diagnosis, you may appreciate Valerie's words. If you are another Type A personality, you will be supported by Valerie's actions on behalf of her daughter. If, however, you are struggling to make ends meet on a modest income, you may find yourself ashamed at not being able to provide so many choices to your own child with autism. Please let go of that feeling. We are each doing the best we can, and our children are not Emily.
The insight I gained from this is that meltdowns/aggressive behavior/self-injury can be caused by 1)emotions that overflow their capacity to contain them 2)frustration about not being understood, 3)anxiety.
One approach I have always maintained, which goes along with Valerie's approach, is to expose my son to as much good books (and music) as possible. In Emily's case, we see how this exposure, along with an education which taught spelling and grammar, allowed her to express herself with great variety once she had a breakthrough in typing.
Emily's contributions are enormously reassuring that there is an intelligent person hidden under autism, and that breakthrough can happen even as adult. She is, however, a very strong-willed person, and it is possible that not all people with autism will be able to muster the strength to work around their autism. Emily still (at the time of this writing) was unable to avoid all meltdowns or to control her almost continual vocalizations and finger-stims.
There was a lot of name-dropping by Valerie which I felt was egregious, along with her focus on what clothes her daughter was wearing. It would have been just as effective, for example, to talk about an encounter in a cafe without naming the cafe and explaining that it was a high-end popular spot. One wonders, also, how often concessions made for Emily's behavior (e.g. by airline stewards) were influenced by the amount of money her parents were able to spend. It would also be interesting to have read the full list of therapies her parents tried, and Valerie writes that they "used every behavioral, speech, social, psychiatric, occupational, and language...even the woo-woo suggestions", before finally coming to facilitated communication. I'm surprised they didn't try nutritional & DNA analysis, which are other popular & expensive offerings.… (meer)