Clara Park: Exiting Nirvana

«An eloquent memoir…. A loving and lovely book…. Park’s analysis of Jessy’s seemingly impenetrable systems is fascinating».

Kevin Riordan, New jersey Courier Post

«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».

David Royko, Chicago Tribune

«This book will help both parents and professionals to have a greater understanding of the mind of a person with autism».

Temple Grandin, Ph.D., author of Thinking in Pictures and Other Reports from My Life with Autism

«A fascinating journey into the autistic mind… The anecdotes are compelling, the turns of phrase quite elegant».

Sara Solovitch, San Jose Mercury News

«Immensely readable. A frank, honest telling of how a mother refused to surrender A unique and invaluable case study of the nature of autism».

Richard Nunley, Bersshire Eagle

«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».

Jeffrey L. Geller, M.D., M.P.H., Psychiatric Services: A Journal of the American Psychiatric Association

«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».

Kathleen Quill, Ed.D., Director, Autism Institute, and author of Teaching Children with Autism

«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».

Freeman Dyson, the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and author of Origins of Life

«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».

Donna Marchetti, Cleveland Plain Dealer

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 achieved.

It shows, too, how at least some of what might be called the defects or strangenesses of autism can also become singular strengths. Jessy is incapable of lying, or of detecting lies; the concept of deceit is unavailable to her. She herself is such an innocent that she cannot comprehend the concept of innocence. She is extremely literal-minded. She was wholly incapable at first — though is now capable to a small degree — of putting herself in others’ shoes, of sensing their positions or perspectives, for it seems to be of the essence with Jessy, as with all autistic people, that she is «mind-blind», or lacking in so-called theory of mind.

Jessy has been subject, from an early age, to sudden enthusiasms (her word) or obsessions (the medical word, which she has happily embraced), going from numbers and colors and unusual sounds and words to radio dials and heaters, to certain roads and houses, to atmospheric anomalies and the night sky. These obsessions, elaborated by an incessantly active and systematizing mind, have led Jessy to construct amazingly intricate systems in which weather, mood, flavors, colors — a dozen variables — are all interconnected and correlated with one another. (Jessy can instantly learn a word like «correlation», because this is already a concept she possesses, when, in contrast, she cannot read the expressions on people’s faces, or the intentions in their voices, cannot comprehend why she cannot instantly evict someone from a restaurant table she considers «hers», and is generally blind to all social meanings.) Though idiosyncratic, Jessy’s systems bring to mind the elaborate, pseudoscientific systems of numerology and astrology.

In the past twenty years, Jessy’s obsessions have been transformed, or transmuted, into paintings — paintings, at first, of radio dials and heaters (very fresh, brilliantly colored, a sort of Pop Art), and now exquisite paintings of houses and churches, in which an uncanny accuracy of line is combined with colors of surreal brilliance. Night scenes are her favorites, in which buildings stand out incandescently against a dark sky — cobalt, or ultra- marine, or (her favorite) «purplish black» — and in which every major star is portrayed in its exact position and magnitude.

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