The Autism News | English


Long-time writer Tom Fields-Meyer is used to writing stories about families who have overcome some difficulties. For years, he wrote People magazine’s human interest features, the emotionally resonant pieces tucked behind the celebrity news. Today, with the release of Following Ezra: What One Father Learned About Gumby, Otters, Autism, and Love From His Extraordinary Son, Fields-Meyer turns his focus on himself and his own family. I spoke with the author about his new book:

What is Ezra’s understanding of what you do to make a living? My assumption is that you approached him to talk about turning his story — his and your story — into a book before you sold the rights and planned to print. What were his feelings about being made the subject of a book? Did he have any concerns?

Ezra has known from the time he was quite young that his mother is a rabbi and his father is a writer. Like a lot of kids, he didn’t have a great understanding of what my wife and I actually did all day at work. Then, I wrote the final story in my twelve years at People magazine, a piece about raising Ezra — in particular our regular visits to the Los Angeles Zoo. I told him I was writing it, but I wasn’t sure how much he understood at the time. At age 11, Ezra wasn’t much of a reader of anything besides Simpsons comic books and animal encyclopedias.

The day I brought the issue of People home, I was shocked when he grabbed the magazine, sat down at the dining-room table and slowly made his way through the entire story. At the end, he stood up, smiled, and said, “That’s a very good story about me.” I was delighted.

That article became the seed of Following Ezra. Before I sent my proposal to my agent, I discussed the idea with Ezra, and basically asked his permission. He loved the idea. I told him that it might be helpful to many parents of younger kids with autism, and he liked that, too. I was concerned that some of the funny stories about things he did as a younger child — say, the time he went up to an obese neighbor and asked him how he got so fat — might be embarrassing. Ezra would just say, “No, that’s okay. I’m not embarrassed. I don’t do that anymore.”

The book opens in the summer of 1999, but this is not just a flashback to help set up the narrative. The story covers a lot of ground between the mid-’90s, when Ezra was born, and his bar mitzvah 13 years later. Were all of the vignettes that make up the individual chapters written relatively recently, at the time you decided to put them down in book form, or have you been writing all along?

Since we first started noticing differences in Ezra when he was a toddler, I’ve been taking notes. Not for a book, but to figure him out, to try to understand his mind, how we could help him, what to expect — and what the future might bring.

Many of those notes took the form of emails I wrote to myself, to my wife Shawn, to my parents and in-laws and others who cared about Ezra. (Age 7: “Last night I was making waffles with a new waffle iron. He kept grabbing letters from the fridge and taking them into the playroom. When I went to tell him the waffles were ready, he had spelled out ‘dinosaur’ on the train table. ‘Yeah! I spelled ‘dinosaur!’ That’s how you spell ‘dinosaur!””)

After a while, I felt like a foreign correspondent or an anthropologist, reporting on the custo ms and practices in an exotic land. (Age 6: “Will only eat a banana one way: whole. I open, pull the peel halfway down, hand it to him. If it breaks before he eats it, he screams: ‘You broke it!’”)

TheAtlantic

Please share your reaction! Give your opinion by filling out the form below.

Share this news with friends, family, or colleagues by clicking on the shortcuts below: