Dancing on his own

At some stage in every workshop on the art of memoir somebody raises the question of ethics, of privacy, and of who has the right to tell a version of a story. How far, the author of Reaching One Thousand asks, is she prepared to ‘sacrifice other people’s privacy’? What betrayals will she ‘perpetrate on others’? The author of this tender memoir has a son who was diagnosed with autism at the age of two. By the end of the narrative, the boy is about ten or eleven. The relationship between the boy and his mother, who is separated from his father, is the focus of the book. The author uses her own name throughout, but explains that she has changed all the other names in the story in the interest of privacy. She calls the boy ‘Ben’, as she did in the essay of the same name that shared the 2008 Calibre Prize and on which this book is based. Robertson discusses the fact that the characters in the story are people in her own life and yet are also ‘creations’ of her ‘fingers on the computer keyboard’; she lives her life with ‘dual vision’. She even admits that ‘Rachel’ is a created character, although a ‘partial self-portrait’. These questions of privacy and character creation are central for all writers of memoir, and Robertson comes back to them often, admitting that, as she writes, the writing and the living begin to ‘fold in upon each other’. She tells the story of her own rage at being betrayed by an ex-lover who wrote a novel in which her letters to him were included, and who sold copies of his letters to her to a library. She knows what it is to be a victim, while wishing to honour her son with a truthful account of his life and hers. It took six months of medical tests for Ben to be diagnosed. Robertson describes him as ‘anxious and frustrated, needy for comfort but unable to reciprocate affection’. He couldn’t play or communicate, and his only interests were objects and numbers. She reads widely on the subject of autism, and will not agree with a psychologist’s horrifying explanation that Ben’s passionate interest in numbers must be extinguished, quarantined, or integrated. She believes that in his numbers Ben can see ‘the intimate architecture of the world’. She doesn’t accept that anything about Ben can be described as ‘an error’. ‘The behaviours and ways of thinking that we group under the term autism seem fundamentally part of his character, not a mistake to be removed or an imposition to be fought.’ She advocates the view of a ‘neurodiversity’ in which so-called normal people are neurotypical and autistic people are neuroatypical. She states that ‘autism is still only a socially and culturally constructed concept’ designed to be a label for a ‘medical disorder’. Her point of view is supported by the anecdotes and the conversations she has with Ben, who is depicted as a lovable child, affectionate and entertaining. Yet when Robertson watches him with a group of children, she feels acute pain at the sight of him alone, dancing on his own. The reader’s heart goes out to her, to him, yet Ben seems able to cope cheerfully with the way things are. Robertson keeps coming round to the point that this is the way things are; that they must be accepted. The good humour and patience required by the parent of an autistic child is exemplified in the title of the book. Ben decides to collect and arrange one thousand objects in his bedroom. Fifteen of these objects are Thomas the Tank Engines, of which Ben has a vast collection. Of course, plenty of children have collections which could amount to obsessions, but there is a mysterious quality to the collecting in the case of autistic children. Ben’s love of numbers is even described as being mystical. Robertson wonders how she can help Ben to feel ‘at home’ in his world. This leads her to interrogate the notion of home, and her own sense of home. For this is Robertson’s memoir, as well as Ben’s story. In 1973, when the author was ten, her family left Keele Village in Staffordshire to move to Western Australia. A year after she separated from Ben’s father, she revisited the woods near her childhood home in Keele. Robertson felt she had discovered there her ‘landscape of home’. She wants Ben to know what home means. He is nine when she shows him pictures of the woods at Keele. She tells him that they were her childhood paradise. When Ben says this is his paradise, does he mean the two of them, the house, the garden, ‘or just the world as he knows it’? The world as Ben knows it has been faithfully recreated by Robertson in this refreshing tale of a mother and her autistic child. It will be welcomed by parents and teachers of children labelled autistic, because it delivers a great deal of common sense and clear-headed information, because of its frankness, and because of its vivid enactment of beauty at the heart of the relationship. It offers to the general reader insights into the life of a carer, and into the mysterious life and world of an autistic child.

Carmel Bird

From the New Issue

‘When we talk about the Middle Ages: Revisiting the power of periodisation’ by G. Geltner

‘“Thin labourism”: How is the Albanese government travelling?’ by Frank Bongiorno

Poet of the Month with David Brooks

Our Moon: A human history by Rebecca Boyle

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