Exiting Nirvana: A Daughter's Life with Autism

by Clara Claiborne Park (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2001

  $3.27

  In her much-acclaimed book The Siege, Clara Claiborne Park described the first eight years of her autistic daughter's life. Now she brings the story right up to date in Exiting Nirvana, a moving and eloquent memoir of Jessy's adolescence and adulthood. Now in her early forties, Jessy Park still struggles with language, with hypersensitivities and obsessions, and with the social interactions that ordinary people take for granted but that she cannot understand. With the help of family, friends and teachers, she has achieved much more than her parents could possibly have hoped for. Her fascination with mathematics has been channelled into balancing her chequebook and calculating her share of the grocery bill. And she has developed into an accomplished artist, mixing her own colours to create astonishing paintings that transfigure the ordinary world into a magical rainbow universe; some of Jessy's paintings are reproduced in the colour plate section. Perhaps most importantly, she has overcome her social difficulties sufficiently to hold down a job, becoming an active contributing member of her family and community. Alternately startling and sobering, Exiting Nirvana is a deeply affecting testament to the patience and love that drew Jessy out of her serene isolation, and a fascinating excursion into an otherworldly mind.

• New

  Paperback
  2002

  $20.29

  Exiting Nirvana is a strong and affecting profile of an artist with autism, beautifully written by her mother...Skillfully weaving in theories of autism with the experience of raising an autistic child, Park goes beyond individual history to address the wider question of what it means to be human .--from the National Magazine Awards presentation.