Abstract
Collaborative memoirs by co-writers with and without autism can enable the productive interaction of the voices of the writers in ways that can empower rather than exploit the disabled subject. Carly's Voice, co-written by Arthur Fleischmann and his autistic daughter Carly, demonstrates the capacity for such life narratives to facilitate the relational interaction between writers in the negotiation of understandings of disability. Though the text begins by focusing on the limitations of life with autism, it develops into a collaboration which helps both writers move toward new ways of understanding disability and their own and one another's life stories.
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Endnotes
1 Alison Piepmeier (2012), for example, praises parent memoirs about raising children with disabilities which “articulate the importance of interdependence as a human condition, and that it should be recognized as part of what it takes to be a citizen and a full person.”
2 As Melanie Yergeau (2013) has pointed out, “Autism has long been ‘understood’ as a trope for incommunicability (Pinchevsky 2005) and as an organizing metaphor for social isolation and bodily imprisonment (Bettelheim 1967).” Douglas Biklen’s book Autism and the Myth of the Person Alone (2005) takes on the stereotype that “the person classified as autistic is, and perhaps is content to be, alone,” by including chapters by writers with autism diagnoses which “describ[e] autism as a social construct behind which lie complex and layered relationships between individuals and society” (1).
3 The “overcoming” story emphasizes the medical model of disability, which figures disability as a “deficit…[or] an individual burden and personal tragedy” (Linton 1998, 11) that must be overcome or “fixed.” The social model emphasized by many disability studies scholars, on the other hand, “defin[es] disability relative to the social and built environment, arguing that disabling environments produce disability in bodies and require interventions at the level of social justice” rather than medical intervention or extraordinary individual effort (Siebers 2008, 25). Inherent in the movement from the medical to social model is the possibility for autism to be seen as something other than a deficit, and for people with autism to be understood in more nuanced ways.
4 Carly also explains the meaning of her message, “HELP TEETH HURT”: she had been feeling sick and did not want to participate in therapy that day, so she tried to communicate that she was feeling nauseated and had thrown up in her mouth. “In my head, I was just trying to think of a word that would describe what had just happened in my mouth. In hindsight, I should have written the word mouth, but I was just a kid” (2012, 367). Carly’s explanation assists, again, in seeing her as a person with feelings and thought processes, and also adds her side of the story of this key moment, since, she says, “I have never been asked about what was going through my head the first time I spelled” (366).
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Orlando, M. Double Voicing and Personhood in Collaborative Life Writing about Autism: the Transformative Narrative of Carly’s Voice . J Med Humanit 39, 217–231 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-017-9496-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-017-9496-7