Among the books I am currently reading, When My Heart Joins the Thousand by A.J. Steiger is a particularly intense read. It’s a Young Adult novel told in the first person by main character Alvie Fitz.
Alvie is autistic and one of the intense aspects of this book is that when Alvie was 11 years old, her mother committed suicide by driving her car into the water. Her mother’s intention had actually been murder-suicide; she drugged Alvie and put her into the car with her but, once the car was in the water, Alvie managed to escape.
This incident represented the embodiment of “Autism Every Day,” a particularly nasty video produced in 2006 by Autism Speaks. In it, a real-life mother, Alison Tepper Singer, described how she “contemplated driving off a bridge with her autistic daughter Jodie Singer” (Wikipedia, n.d.). “It’s only because of Lauren, because I have another child, that I didn't do it,” Singer said (Wikipedia, n.d.).
The video was subject to outcry within the autistic community, especially with the real-life case of a child, London, who was thrown off a bridge. London’s mother apparently got the idea from watching that reprehensible video (Sequenzia, 2014).
London’s killing was just one of many documented incidents in which a parent killed their child; often portrayed by coverage in the media as if the killing was somehow justified: to the point that self-advocates had to “defend [their] right, and the right of disabled people, not to be murdered” (Sequenzia, 2014).
But this is the power in Steiger’s book, to push back against hateful beliefs and practices that damage autistic lives. In it, an autistic child is not killed through murder-suicide; she manages to escape and her voice is the one that gets to shape the narrative around what her mother tried to do to her.
References:
Sequenzia, A. (2014, Nov. 11). “Please don’t murder us” shouldn’t be controversial. Autism Women & Nonbinary Network. https://awnnetwork.org/please-dont-murder-us-shouldnt-be-controversial/
Steiger, A.J. (2018). When my heart joins the thousand. HarperCollins Publishers.
Wikipedia. (n.d.) Autism every day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism_Every_Day
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