The Autism News | English


There are many memoirs out there, many stories by individuals about their journeys as parents of disabled children, and some are good, some are great, and others are neither. Some writers are polished and offer their journeys with a luminosity of prose that leaves your soul fed. Other memoirs, while polished and offering a distinct voice, a unique insight, leave you with a heavy heart, a soul weighed down by the limbo, the purgatory, the family finds itself in. Osteen’s tale, One of Us, does that: leaves the reader weighted and yet lost.

Mark Osteen’s memoir of raising a severely impaired son on the spectrum and the decision to place him at a residential school is not an easy read. It’s well-written, it’s detailed (perhaps too detailed with its descriptions along the way of people he and his wife had issues with), and it’s brutally honest. It is not a book for parents new to the journey; it just isn’t. It’s a book for those willing to bear witness, ready to hear the reality of what autism is for some families, for whom happy endings are not in sight, whose burdens, whose choices, are grim ones.

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