The Stories We Don’t Tell: My Mom On Raising An Autistic Child And Why She’ll Never Write About Me

March 8, 2018January 31, 2022 by Shannon Des Roches Rosa

Sarah Kurchak and her Mother Jane Kurchak [image: Cheerfully geeky selfie of the author, a white Canadian woman wearing glasses and also goggles on top of her head; and her mother, a white woman also wearing glasses plus a pinstriped blue collared shirt, tie, and white jacket.] Sarah Kurchak www.riskyfuel.com When I’m feeling particularly frustrated with my career, I offer to ghostwrite a memoir for my mom. It’s a slightly bitter, semi-serious joke. I’m mostly taking a shot at the fact that the memoirs that non-autistic parents write about raising their autistic children have a much better shot at getting published and selling than anything that I, as an autistic person, could ever hope to write about autism. But there’s also a little part of me that just wants that payday. (I can’t extend this offer to my dad, because he’s a fellow autist and no one seems particularly interested in…

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Autism

The Toxicity of “Autism Parent” Memoirs

March 3, 2018August 9, 2023 by Shannon Des Roches Rosa

We need more people to stand up and tell the world that exploiting your autistic child for “honesty” and profit is unacceptable, and that autistic people and their families deserve better than the constant barrage of misery and pain memoirs the publishing industry assumes to be our lot.

Disability

#AutisticWhileBlack: To Siri With Love’s Shallow, Dangerous Take on Forced Sterilization

January 23, 2018January 31, 2022 by Shannon Des Roches Rosa

Kerima Çevik intersecteddisability.blogspot.com theautismwars.blogspot.com Kerima Çevik, photo courtesy the author [image: Gray haired Afro-Latina woman next to a windowshade, looking to the left.] [Content note: Contains descriptions of involuntary medical procedure, including sterilization, on Black and disabled people.] I am trying to plow my way through Judith Newman’s autism parenting book To Siri with Love: A Mother, Her Autistic Son, and the Kindness of Machines. It is slow, painful reading. How can I explain my serious ethical concerns about yet another bestselling autism book that capitalizes on presenting the experience of disability from a parent’s reduction of a disabled individual’s worth to how he makes his mother and those around them feel? I can tell you that Newman’s passage about looking forward to acquiring a medical power of attorney so she could involuntarily sterilize her autistic son Gus tainted the rest of the book for me. A vasectomy, she says. That…

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Disability

Why To Siri With Love Is a Wrecking Ball of a Book

December 11, 2017January 31, 2022 by Shannon Des Roches Rosa

Maxfield Sparrow unstrangemind.com [Content note: possible triggers include: forcible sterilization of minorities including Autistic people, forcible gynecological experimentation on minorities, Judge Rotenberg Center, electric shock, stereotypes about Autistics lacking empathy or a sense of humor, stereotypes about Autistics or Black people lacking the ability to feel pain, snakes and feeding live rodents, harmful Supreme Court verdicts, dehumanizing of Autists, getting drunk, preferring drunkenness to talking with Autistic children, humanizing the author of a grossly dehumanizing book.] Come mothers and fathers / Throughout the land And don’t criticize / What you can’t understand Your sons and your daughters / Are beyond your command Your old road is rapidly aging. Please get out of the new one / If you can’t lend your hand For the times they are a-changin’. -Bob Dylan [image: Book cover: A blue background with informal font white text reading, “To Siri With Love,” with a photo of a…