Summary Of Exiting Nirvana By Clara Claiborne Park

646 Words3 Pages

The biography called, Exiting Nirvana: A Daughter's Life with Autism was written by Clara Claiborne Park. This story was written about her autistic daughter's life. Clara talks about how her daughter, Jessy as an autistic adult. Jessy was born in the late 1950s, autism was not well understood during this time. Jessy was officially diagnosed with autism at the age of three. When Jessy was six and seven she could only put together two or three words and could hardly understand what her family was saying to her. Later, in the story, Clara tells how Jessy is still struggling with language, and with hypersensitivities and obsessions, and with the social interactions that most of us take for granted. However, at the same time Jessy is achieving more than her parents could have hoped for. Clara talk about Jessy's obsession with numbers and how she is better with number then she is. In the book, they include different photographs of Jessy's calculations with different number sequences. In …show more content…

Jessy was the third child of the Park family and she was the youngest. In the family, Jessy parents have started to age, she helps keeps the house in order. Jessy does the vacuuming, laundry, ironing and other household chores for her family. During the early years, Jessy language was unknown to other people that weren’t her family. Even though Jessy couldn’t speak the best English her family knew what she was trying to say. Jessy’s mother, Clara made a system where she would file whatever Jessy said or did. In the book, Jessy said some and Clara filed that action under verbal. Then stated what would we do without this system. In this book the mother didn’t talk about how the family would cope with Jessy condition. After reading this book I can infer that Jessy was the center of the parent’s attention. I’m saying that this is actually true, but it just sounds like it from what I