Elijah's Cup: A Family's Journey into the Community and Culture of High-Functioning Autism and Asperger's Syndrome
Author: Valerie Paradiz
Faced with her two-year-old toddler's precipitous bout with epilepsy and his puzzling behaviors, Valerie Paradiz took a bold and unusual path, coming to terms with and ultimately embracing the strange beauty of her son Elijah's special neurological disorder, which was diagnosed as Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism.
In Elijah's Cup, Paradiz tells the powerful story of her family's struggle with her son's disease, one characterized by social awkwardness, literal-mindedness, and a fixation with particular subjects and interests. Like attention deficit disorder (ADD), dyslexia, depression, and obsessive-compulsive disorder, Asperger's has exploded in diagnosis in the last decade, reconfiguring the known incidence of autism in the population with estimates as high as one in fifty people.
Ever since autism was "discovered" by researchers in the 1940s, the disability has been under the strict purview of professionals in medicine, psychiatry, and education. Like the deaf community, autistics themselves have had little voice in expressing their real experience and needs. They were framed as too "sick" to be conscious of their own internal lives, too "mentally ill" to possess an identity. All this has changed.
Today there is a blossoming movement of autistic self-advocacy groups and alliances that pose challenging questions to the medical status quo. A fascinating, independent expression of another way of life, full of quirkiness, hardship, and humor, has emerged. Elijah's Cup is a provocative and pioneering book that pushes the envelope of what we know about autism. Were Andy Warhol, Albert Einstein, and the comedian Andy Kaufman, whom we usually think of as brillianteccentrics, autistic? Can these figures serve as role models to this community?
Elijah's Cup offers a refreshing take on mental disability from the perspective of civil rights, history, and the arts. From encounters with the founders of the first civil rights organizations for autistics, who guide Paradiz and her son toward a sense of community and self-respect, and with visual artists, who share with Elijah their special ability to "think in pictures," Elijah reaches extraordinary heights in his sociability and emotional well-being.
In this utterly absorbing and inspiring narrative, Paradiz also reveals her own shadow syndrome, which afflicts many family members of autistics. She is a "cousin," a genetic link to her son's autism. Standing as she does on this cultural borderline, Paradiz is a sensitive translator between two worlds, revealing a groundbreaking insider's view of the beauty of minds hidden in the shadows of autism.
Publishers Weekly
This expressive and deeply felt memoir explores how the diagnosis of the author's son, Elijah, with Asperger's syndrome (a high-functioning autism) changed her life. As a young child, Elijah had delays in language and motor skills, and also suffered seizures. Paradiz, an assistant professor of German studies at Bard College, details the subsequent dissolution of her marriage (although she and her ex-husband are now friends) and her own depression, events triggered by the problems of coping with Elijah's needs. After Paradiz hired a babysitter with Asperger's syndrome and read several accounts written by people diagnosed as autistic, she understood that her son was a visual rather than a verbal thinker. (According to the author, Albert Einstein and Andy Warhol both had Asperger's syndrome.) This realization led her to provide Elijah with the repetitive activities he needed to enjoy his life. She describes their time together at Autreat, a camp for autistics that emphasizes self-advocacy, an idea that has been rejected by more traditional parents and teachers, who believe that autistics cannot know their needs. This is a moving personal story that highlights a new way of thinking about people diagnosed as autistic. (Apr.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
This insightful memoir by the mother of a boy with a high-functioning form of autism includes a history of the disorder, a look at present-day activists, and psychological profiles of well-known people the author believes were autistic. Paradiz (German Studies/Bard Coll.) views autism not as a mental illness but as a way of life with its own deep culture. While eloquently chronicling day-to-day experiences from her son Elijah's birth to age 12, she also records her struggle to understand the nature of autism and the unique way in which autistic people experience the world. By chance, she hires as caretaker for her son a woman with Asperger's Syndrome who recognizes that Elijah has the same condition and helps Paradiz cope with it. Her research leads her to the revelatory writings of two articulate, high-functioning autistic women, Donna Williams and Temple Grandin. When Paradiz learns that autism has a genetic component, she scrutinizes her family tree and concludes that her grandmother, her father, and she herself possess shadow traits that constitute what geneticists call "broader autism phenotype": intense preoccupations, a preference for solitary activities, a need for sameness in certain aspects of life. Searching for historical role models for her son, who develops a consuming interest in television, especially comedy and animated cartoons, she finds autistic traits in Einstein, whose language development was delayed and whose visual thinking was extraordinary, and in Andy Warhol, another visual thinker whose social interactions were often bizarre; similarly, while perusing a biography of Andy Kaufman, she sees signs of autism in the comedian's childhood obsession with televisionperformances. Not everyone will accept Paradiz's view that these individuals' talents and idiosyncrasies can be explained by autism, but her descriptions of her son's world and of the autism activists she comes to know are perceptive and enlightening. A valuable addition to the growing literature on this neurological condition.
Table of Contents:
| Preface | ix | |
| Chapter 1 | Elijah's Cup | 1 |
| Chapter 2 | The Gift of Loss | 16 |
| Chapter 3 | Perfect Strangers | 30 |
| Chapter 4 | The Coincidence of Sharron Loree | 44 |
| Chapter 5 | Nietzsche in the Bathtub | 59 |
| Chapter 6 | My Father Was a Yakker | 77 |
| Chapter 7 | Echolalia Fun Fun Fun | 98 |
| Chapter 8 | Balloon Days | 110 |
| Chapter 9 | Cartoons Don't Get Hurt | 130 |
| Chapter 10 | Life Under Glass | 153 |
| Chapter 11 | Playground Comedian | 175 |
| Chapter 12 | Cracking Code | 201 |
| Web Sites by and for Autistic People and for Autistic Advocacy | 220 | |
| Notes | 221 | |
| Acknowledgments | 232 | |
| Index | 236 |
Book about: Paid to Play or Illustrated Course Guide
Aromatherapy for the Healthy Child: More Than 300 Natural, Nontoxic, and Fragrant Essential Oil Blends
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This reference shows how essential oils can help parents raise healthier, happier children. Chapters cover every age from newborn to teen with aromatherapy remedies for typical problems -- from diaper rash to asthma to self-esteem. The book features information for pregnant mothers and physically challenged children and appendices with reference charts, safety data, and supplier information.
