A lot of the moms of autistic kids I met are so consumed with being their child's advocate that there's no room for anything else - least of all themselves. It's why so many marriages end in divorce, when a child is diagnosed on the spectrum.

The cost of growth is always a small act of violence.

I think there are readers out there and I don't think the book is dead. And more importantly I don't think readers have to choose between literary and commercial fiction.

This is what it always comes down to, I realized. There are the ones who believe, and the ones who don't, and caught in the space between them are guns.

A lot of the hallmark behaviors of autism - flat affect, stimming, not looking someone in the eye - could very easily be misinterpreted as signs of guilt.

You know, Michael, I used to sit around looking for a way to make sense of what happened, like there was some kind of answer I could find if I just looked hard enough. Then one day I realized that if there had been one, Dave would still be here. And I wondered if this...this feeling that I couldn't figure it all out...was what Dave had been feeling, too.

she told me she'd be a phoenix." The image of the mythical creature rising from the ashes glitters in my mind. "They don't really exist." "She said that depends on whether or not there's someone who can see them.