A Book That Brought Me to Tears and Kingsolver's Backlist

While we’re about to enter the “ber” months and summer is winding down with Labor Day, time feels different here on Guam. Our leaves don’t turn crunchy and golden, fiery, and bronze. We will get a breeze in the dry season, and the humidity will break, but we won’t have sweater weather. Instagram has me missing the East Coast, especially the Long Island fall festivals and the mountains of western Virginia. I want apple cider and to wear my Ugg boots (yes, I’m basic) and to feel that change in the air. I suppose I’ll settle for baking with cinnamon and apples and pecans and maybe, just maybe, even pumpkin.

In today’s edition, I have a book review I cried while I wrote, a modern classic I enjoyed, and a backlist book I struggled through.

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Autism Out Loud: Life with a Child on the Spectrum, From Diagnosis to Young Adulthood by Kate Swenson, Adrian Wood, and Carrie Cariello

I love that this is not necessarily a guide, an advice column, or a memoir. I love that this is three stories across a spectrum. I love that it wasn’t a story about savant superheroes OR tragedies but rather the realistic victories and worrying realities of parenting a child on the autism spectrum. My brother has Asperger’s Syndrome. His vocabulary was high for his age, and he could tell you every fact about Pokémon when he was in elementary school, but he had to learn about sarcasm, jokes, and social skills. He spent years with OT, PT, and speech therapy teachers. He battles anxiety and OCD that makes doing simple things he loves a tearful struggle. He left traditional schooling because he was so defeated in third grade, but he flourished in homeschooling with my mom. College was never in the cards for him. A full-time job was never in the cards for him. He lives at home with my parents, and, one day far in the future, he will live with me. He is so funny, compassionate, and smart. He goes to Dungeons and Dragons and trading card game tournaments and has hours-long conversations with friends on the phone. He’s come such a long way, but there is so much that he won’t do. He won’t get married and have kids or have his own apartment or a driver’s license. Am I so proud of him? Of course. Do I worry about what life will look like in ten, twenty, and fifty years for him and us? Yes.

Autism Out Loud captures the confusion, the grief, the small and large victories, the frustrations, the losses, and the joys of living in a family before and after an autism diagnosis. I appreciated that each of the authors had a son on a different part of the spectrum with different strengths, different struggles, and a different path. Meeting one person with autism is meeting one person with autism, and there is never an implication that their personal experiences are the cookie cutter same as someone else’s. But, in broad strokes, their experiences are universal across the autistic community. They speak across the timeline of childhood and all that they learned and wished they had known. Valuably, they recognize and amplify how an autism diagnosis impacts siblings, parents, and the individual in different ways. I cried in my car listening to their fears of what will happen after they die and their sons will have to navigate the world without them for the first time. I’m crying now as I write this sentence thinking about navigating the world with my brother without the endless patience and wisdom of my parents.

If you’re a parent with a child on the spectrum, a sibling, or someone who works with the autistic community, this book is an invaluable resource that provides relatable, honest, and detailed stories and experiences. Navigating a diagnosis is scary and full of “what if’s” and “what comes next’s,” and the world needs more testimonies like these that make autism seem a little more clear.  

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbra Kingsolver

Kingsolver’s most famous novel is devastating, poetic, transportive, immersive, and complex. It follows a missionary who drags his unwilling family into the rural depths of the Congo for all the wrong reasons. The narration rotates between the four daughters, each with a unique voice and ideology that grows and changes over time. Starvation, natural disasters, social unrest, and political turmoil push and pull the family in different directions, and the reader watches them dragged apart and together and along the bumpy, unpredictable, arduous paths of life.

The writing qualifies as poetry just as much as it does prose, and Kingsolver has a keen eye for detail and emotion. While the book initially had me wondering where the heart and momentum would lie, I was hooked about a third of the way in. The decisions on how to survive and, more tragically, who will survive haunt and shape the characters and readers, and there is a lot of good book club material here. I know very little about the Congo’s history, but Kingsolver is clearly well-versed in a period of discontent, fragile new beginnings, and conflicting ideologies.

Unsheltered by Barbra Kingsolver

As much as I enjoyed Demon Copperhead and The Poisonwood Bible, I literally had to drag myself through the depressing, rant-filled slog of Unsheltered. The story follows two timelines that are supposed to be in conversation and reflect one another as characters struggle with finances, crumbling homes, and difficult family dynamics. However, the narrative focused on the past felt irrelevant, uninteresting, and burdened by the, at the time, controversial topic of evolution. While I love parallel and converging timelines as a literary tool, it felt like yet another opportunity to lecture the reader, slow down the narrative, and add a sense of mystery that didn’t live up to its potential. The present-day narrative was weighed down by self-righteous speeches and debates about political and economic ideological ideals, and I, like the protagonist, felt as though I were being lectured at every turn. I quickly tired of the rebellious daughter’s pro-socialist agenda and the political criticisms. Did the story have potential? Absolutely. Was it wasted on being a soapbox? Yes. The subtlety and emotional connections I felt in her other books was lacking with this heavy-handed diatribe.

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Baking: I will admit that cupcakes aren’t a healthy food, but adding four bananas to them helps a little…right? I recently made this recipe for banana cupcakes with chocolate frosting, and I love the subtle depth the banana and cinnamon add. I’m not the biggest fan of vanilla cake because it’s so—how shall I put this—vanilla, so I enjoyed the extra boost of flavor in these.

Cooking: I attempted to make gnocchi with roasted butternut squash, sage, and wilted spinach, but it ended up being some very dressed up mashed potatoes instead. I flew a little too close to the sun thinking I had mastered the gnocchi steps, so I’ll have to go back to the basics for my next attempt. A more positive dinner this week was my mom’s recipe for turkey Salisbury steaks that really elevate the classic “TV dinner” into something healthier and more satisfying.

Doing: Our friends have gotten us into pickleball, and while the rain has made it difficult to consistently play, we’ve enjoyed the friendly competition. I had looked skeptically at pickleball for years, but it has some of my favorite aspects of tennis in a faster-paced, lower-impact game.

Watching: Tom is officially caught up on all the Downton Abbey episodes and movies, and we’re ready to watch the final installment in a couple of weeks. The trailers are already making me feel emotional, and I’m hopeful we’ll end on a characteristically optimistic note rather than a death knell of modernity and downsizing.

Listening: After an extended break from audiobooks (partially due to the broken AC in my car that necessitates rolled down windows 90% of the time), I am back into them thanks to the book club I joined and a buzzy celebrity memoir I was able to listen to on Spotify.