Q&A with Hannah Pittard

Hannah Pittard is the author of the new novel Listen to Me. She also has written the novels Reunion and The Fates Will Find Their Way, and her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including The American Scholar and McSweeney's. She teaches fiction at the University of Kentucky.

Q: Your new novel, Listen to Me, takes place over the course of 24 hours. Were there particular challenges involved in writing a novel that takes place over a condensed time frame?

A: I wouldn’t call them challenges so much as choices. When you’re working with a deliberately distilled moment in time, the decision between what should be scene and what should be summary becomes an incredibly important one. I wanted this to be a tight, fast novel in which every word and every moment mattered. 

Q: You write that the inspiration for the book came from a road trip you and your husband took. What made you decide to write a novel based on that trip, and what role did the ongoing storm play for you?

A: I started the book while waiting for edits on my second novel. It was a way for me to keep my mind occupied so I couldn’t obsess over the project, which at the time was out of my control.

The night we drove through a storm, we stayed at a hotel without power. I didn’t sleep, if at all. In the morning I thought, This would be a pretty good set of circumstances for a novel… My bad luck (storm, hotel without power) turned out to be lucky and obvious inspiration. 

Q: The perspective in the book switches around at times. Did you plan that from the beginning?

A: Yes. This is the story of two people. It’s a conscious exploration into the limitations of any relationship, no matter how intimate. We can never truly know another person. Fact. 

Q: How was the book's title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

A: The title comes from The Iliad, which is the story of the last weeks of the Trojan war, which lasted something like 10 years.

Homer's use of time is relevant to Listen to Me because, by the end of his “song," though the present action is technically concerned only with those final weeks and with the battle between Achilles and Agamemnon, the story of the entire war has been told.

It’s a beautiful narrative technique that, in a very small way, I’ve mimicked. Listen to Me is the story of a single day of a 10-year marriage, but my hope is that—by the end—an entire life together between two people has been evoked. 

Q: In our previous interview, you mentioned a historical novel you're working on. How is that project going?

A: What a funny question! What if I were to say, NOT WELL!? But it is going well. It’s going very well. I turned in a first draft (incredibly rough) this summer. I’m working (very happily) on edits now. Houghton Mifflin expects to publish in the summer of 2018. 

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I appreciate you and your readers!

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. For a previous Q&A with Hannah Pittard, please click here.

Oct. 7

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Oct. 7, 1849: James Whitcomb Riley born.

Q&A with Christopher Goscha

Christopher Goscha is the author of the new book Vietnam: A New History. His other work includes Vietnam: Un etat ne de la guerre and Thailand and the Southeast Asian Networks of the Vietnamese Revolution. He is an associate professor of history at the Université du Québec à Montréal.

Q: You write that "the United States was hardly the first 'great power' to send their warships into the waters off Vietnam's coastline." How do you see the U.S./Vietnam War fitting into Vietnamese history overall?

A: Because of its overland connections to Southeast Asia and its maritime opening to the Pacific and Indian Oceans, Vietnam has always tempted bigger powers to intervene.

The Chinese empire ruled northern Vietnam for almost a thousand years beginning around the first century BCE. As the Chinese empire’s southern most province, Vietnam served as a gateway for China’s trade with Indian Ocean markets extending to India and the Middle East.

The Vietnamese secured their independence in 939, but briefly lost it again to the Chinese in the early 15th century as the Ming dynasty recolonized Vietnam as part of a wider expansion that sent Chinese armadas across the Indian Ocean as far as Africa and the Red Sea.

The Vietnamese regained their independence and then pushed their own empire southwards to benefit from trade with the Indian Ocean world.

Following the Chinese naval withdrawal in 1433, a new set of European imperial powers soon expanded into the region via the Pacific and Indian Oceans. These Western empires adopted increasingly aggressive policies towards Asia in the 19th century when the French colonized Vietnam and the British confiscated Singapore, Burma, and Malaya.

Meanwhile, the Americans crossed the Pacific Ocean to take the Philippines from the Spanish while the Japanese focused their colonial attention on Korea and Taiwan. The Americans were part of a larger Euro-American and Japanese colonial assault on Asia.

The French were aware of the strategic importance of their Vietnamese colony in this wider imperial competition. In the early 20th century, they finished building the deep-water port of Cam Ranh Bay, located off the southeastern coast of Vietnam.

Russian warships dispatched from the Baltic to stop Japanese colonial expansion into China and Korea gathered there before being defeated by the Japanese in 1905.

Following the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt closely followed Japanese movements down the Chinese coastline and imposed an embargo on Tokyo as Japanese imperial troops started occupying Vietnam in 1940.

His fears of a wider Japanese thrust into the Indian Ocean via Vietnam were well founded. In early 1942, having attacked Pearl Harbor and occupied all of Vietnam, the Japanese then concentrated their ships in Cam Ranh Bay before attacking Southeast Asia and striking as far as the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

Created in 1942, the American 7th Fleet helped roll back the Japanese empire during World War II and remained to protect America’s postwar control of the Pacific and Indian Oceans to this day.

Following the Chinese communist victory in 1949, American presidents of all political colors (Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson) were convinced that if Vietnam fell to the communists, it would allow the Soviets and the Chinese to march across the region much as the Japanese had done before them.

Despite their disdain for French colonial rule, from 1950 (as the Korean War got underway just to the north), the Americans increased support of the French in Vietnam in a bid to contain the spread of communism. The 7th Fleet first called on Vietnam in 1950 to reassure the French of American backing.

When the French withdrew from their war with Ho Chi Minh and agreed to divide Vietnam, like Korea, into a communist north led by Ho and a non-communist South, the Americans accepted but switched their support to an anticommunist Vietnamese leader for the South named Ngo Dinh Diem.

As long as this man did not undermine America’s wider strategic goal of containing Eurasian communism, things could continue as they had with the French.

But they didn’t and when Diem’s draconian policies in the countryside (land reform, strategic hamlets, repression) seemed to play into the communist hands the Americans supported his overthrow in 1963.

However, when stability still remained elusive, Johnson decided to intervene directly in 1965 by sending ground troops while the US navy stationed the bulk of its forces in Cam Ranh Bay.

Ironically, the American withdrawal from the country in April 1975 in no way diminished its geopolitical importance to a new set of ‘great powers’ competing with each for influence in the communist world – the Soviets and the Chinese.

Having broken ideologically and violently with the Soviets by the late 1960s, the Chinese worried that their communist brethren in Hanoi would join the Soviets to help encircle them from the south (the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan in 1979).

The Chinese threw their weight behind the genocidal Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, whose leaders were virulently opposed to the Vietnamese, communist or not.

The Vietnamese turned to the Soviets, signed a security alliance in 1978, including the lease of Cam Ranh Bay to the Soviets, before overthrowing the Khmer Rouge later that year.

China’s leader, Deng Xiaoping, travelled to the United States to win over American support of a project to teach Vietnam a lesson. In early 1979, the Chinese sent troops into Vietnam in what was the first war among communists in world history.

Thanks to their access to Cam Ranh Bay, the Soviets projected their naval power deep into South East Asia for the first time ever.

The crumbling of the Soviet empire and its European satellites by 1991 profoundly changed the geopolitical calculus but not the strategic importance of Vietnam.

With the Soviets gone, the Chinese have for the first time since recalling their armadas in 1433 begun reasserting their influence into the Indian Ocean, taking, claiming, and even building islands as they dispatch their vessels across the seas.

Given that the war among Asian communists in the late 1970s put to rest any form of international communist bloc, Vietnamese communists have now entered negotiations with the Americans, Japanese, Europeans and anyone else who can help them deal with the resurgence of Chinese power.

The Americans agree. And this is why President Obama, like Presidents Clinton and Bush before him, travelled to Vietnam earlier this year. The Americans still ‘need’ Vietnam and the Vietnamese need them.

Vietnam is right in the middle of that zone where American control of the Indian Ocean dating from WWII bumps up against the Eurasian continent and a Chinese empire increasingly willing to challenge the American monopoly of the Asian waters.

Little wonder talks have already begun allowing American and Russian vessels to use the naval facilities of Cam Ranh Bay …

Q: In the book, you write that "there has never been one Vietnam but several remarkably varied ones." What were some of the different permutations over the centuries?

A: Like the United States, the Vietnam that we see on the map today did not begin that way. Like the United States, Vietnam is a product of its own colonial expansion.

If Euro-American colonizers went westwards from the 13 colonies and conquered lands extending to California, the Vietnamese went south, leaving the Red River to conquer the Cham in central Vietnam, the Khmers in the south, and a host of non-Vietnamese peoples in the surrounding highlands. Vietnam is as much a colonial creation as so many other nations in world history.

Like the United States, this colonial expansion also triggered civil wars and the creation of contesting Vietnamese states. Two Vietnams emerged following the Chinese withdrawal in the 15th century, one in the north ruled by the Trinh military family, the other expanding southwards under the leadership of the Nguyen lords.

By the 18th century, this southern family ruled a separate state. Civil war intensified from the 1770s when the Tay Son brothers marched out of the highlands and rode a wave of famine-driven hunger to power in the 1790s. It only lasted a few years before the Nguyen marched from the Mekong delta in the south to the defeat them in 1802.

This is why the S-like Vietnam that we see on the map today only dates from 1802, a product of Vietnamese colonial expansion and civil wars. Indeed, in the 1830s, the Vietnamese expanded their empire to include all of Cambodia and parts of Laos.

They returned to the S-like Vietnam in the 1840s, but the French would build their own Indochinese colonial state on the remnants of the pre-existing Vietnamese one.

This is why I write that there has never been one Vietnam but several remarkably varied ones. The Vietnamese, like the Americans, are colonizers too. Unity is certainly a part of Vietnamese history. But civil war is as much a part of Vietnamese history as it is of so many other countries in world history. 

Q: How would you describe the relationship between Vietnam and China?

A: I would refer back to my point 1. But I would add that Vietnam, like Korea and even Japan to some extent, is in a unique position in that it has been a part of and has always had to deal with this massive world empire the Chinese built since Han times in the third century BCE.

Like the Franks and Germans dealing with the Roman Empire at the same time on the other side of Eurasia, the Vietnamese borrowed all sorts of things from the Chinese – Confucian statecraft, Mahayana Buddhism, a character-based writing system, architecture, chopsticks and the like.

The difference, however, is that the Roman Empire crumbled in the 5th century CE whereas its Chinese counterpart is still with us. The Chinese empire was always able to reconstitute and even grow itself.

The Vietnamese (again like the Koreans) thus found themselves borrowing from the Chinese to build their own countries and cultures on the periphery of the Chinese empire while always having to make sure that the Chinese didn’t return to return them to that same imperial order.

This meant that the Vietnamese have always had to convince themselves that they were not Chinese despite their reliance on Chinese models and attempts to present themselves as the messengers of a superior Chinese-based civilization. It was a unique and difficult balancing act.

The French and the Germans, for example, never had to worry about the Romans coming back to crush them or to heap ridicule on their borrowings of Roman statecraft, myths, language, or claims to be the new Caesars in post-Roman Europe (Tsars, Czar, Kaiser).

Ironically, Vietnamese communists find themselves in a similar situation today. They have heavily borrowed Chinese communist models and methods including ones for tailoring capitalist economics to preserving communist rule.

But they do this despite the fact that the Chinese communists are now intent on pushing their empire far beyond its continental limits. This historical relationship with China is such that the Vietnamese continue to find themselves relying on Chinese models while opposing the Chinese empire at the same time.

Q: What do you see looking ahead for Vietnam?

A: At the international level, the Vietnamese government will do all it can to contain Chinese naval expansion into the Indian Ocean all the while being careful not to lean too far to any ‘great power’ side.

At the internal level, Vietnamese communists will follow the Chinese lead by trying to curb calls for greater political pluralism that could spin out of control and challenge the communist party’s right to run the country as a single-party state.

Again, as in the past, it’s a fine line to walk.  

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I’m trying to write a social history of Saigon during the French and American wars between 1945 and 1975.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I thank you sincerely for your interest in the book and Vietnamese history. 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. This Q&A also appears on www.hauntinglegacy.com.

Oct. 6

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Oct. 6, 1914: Thor Heyerdahl born.

Q&A with Mark Rubinstein

Mark Rubinstein is the author of the new book Bedlam's Door: True Tales of Madness and Hope. He is a physician who has been an attending psychiatrist at New York Presbyterian Hospital and a clinical assistant professor at Cornell University Medical College. His other books include the novels Mad Dog House and The Foot Soldier. He lives in Connecticut.

Q: You write of your new book, “Though quite diverse, these stories have an overarching unity…” What do you think unites them?

A: Number one, these are people in pain and distress.

Number two, the major unifying theme is these people, as strange as their presentation may seem at first, each can be seen, if time is taken to listen to them, which is so frequently absent in medicine today—physicians, even psychiatrists, today are doing medication therapy, and spend 10-15 minutes with a patient, leaving the psychiatry to social workers and psychologists—it has changed the entire model.

These are people in pain. If time is taken, if energy is taken, they are understood if the effort is made. They are all interesting. Each patient is compelling. We all have a back story, even people who don’t go to a psychiatrist.

I wanted by virtue of telling these 14 stories—the next [book] has 20—to demystify what to so many people not in the mental health field, what appears so strange or frightening.

It seems very relevant to me today with the terrible scenarios of mass shootings and bombings. These are disturbed people. Some young people are seizing upon Islam when they have deeper more personal disturbances.

Look at James Holmes—he was schizophrenic. Adam Lanza—his own father [indicated] that he was undiagnosed as schizophrenic…he was a very disturbed, isolated, bizarre young man. These are very troubled people, and it’s more and more evident in the news today because of the shootings. I wanted to demystify some of it.

Q: What do you think are some of the most common perceptions and misperceptions about mental illness?

A: One of the most common is those who are severely ill—[such as] schizophrenics—are dangerous. A select few are dangerous, very paranoid, so they will take preventive action—that’s a very small minority. The vast majority don’t go out and harm anyone. They may harm themselves, but most are not dangerous to other people or to society.

It’s estimated that 45 percent of those in prison or jails are disturbed…it creates an enormous drain at the county level…It’s a financial drain on our mental health facilities.

Another fantasy is that homeless people are alcoholics. They tend to be extremely disturbed—veterans with PTSD, schizophrenics who can’t function in society. They often use alcohol to self-medicate, but are not primarily alcoholics.

For the most part, they are not dangerous. It is a small minority that poses danger to others. They too pose a drain on local…governments.

It’s also important to realize that virtually every human being has problems. I like to put it in terms of while most of us are not severely mentally disturbed, many people, perhaps the majority, have suffered through common human unhappiness and we deal with that. There are a lot of fantasies about mental illness and mental health too.

Q: You write, “The stigmatization of mental illness and psychiatric hospitalization continues to this day.” What do you see looking ahead? Do you think this will eventually change?

A: I hope it will, but I don’t know that it will. People are frightened when they see people who are severely mentally ill. It’s sort of like prejudice—to prejudge someone. They want to see the person as “the other.” They tend to externalize and vilify.

Working in a psychiatric emergency room, the police would bring in someone and say, This guy belongs in the loony bin, he’s a psycho. These terms were bandied about, and still are. The term “lunatic” is from an ancient belief that a full moon is responsible for lunacy—it all derives from “lunar.”

The stigmatization has always been there—in the Middle Ages, people were locked away. As recently as the 1950s, they were treated by lobotomies.

There are still people today who believe psychiatry attempts to control people’s minds. Every medication alters your physiology…we accept these things when it comes to physical illness but don’t so readily with psychiatric illness.

There are certain political and religious movements, [for example] Scientology, that are in a war against psychiatry. Not to single out Scientology.

People say, I don’t believe in psychiatry, like it’s a religion. The fact is, psychiatry has entered the realm of neuroscience. It’s become very scientific, sometimes to its detriment. The combination of medication and counseling seems to be the most effective, the most potent combination, to mix the two when necessary.

I used to testify in court—the classic cross-examination question was, Isn’t it true that psychiatry, of the medical specialists, is the least scientific? I would say, it’s not true. Tremendous advances have been made, especially with more recent medications.

With gene therapy, we will be able to predict who might become schizophrenic, and with slight alterations we might be able to short-circuit [that]—the future is limitless, if we as a species can survive that long.

Q: How was the book’s title selected, and what does it signify for you?

A: The book’s title, Bedlam’s Door, [relates to] the emergency room where I worked as a resident, and then as chief attending psychiatrist of a huge emergency room. There were 80.000 total visits a year in the ER.

Many people viewed the ER as bedlam. There were huge double doors and sometimes people barged through, or were escorted by police officers, by family, or were intoxicated, stumbling and falling. It was chaos sometimes, and sometimes there was an eerie sense of quiet, and then it suddenly would burst forth with pandemonium.

Bedlam’s Door is an appropriate title for the entrance to the hospital, the “loony bin” to use a pejorative phrase. I thought it was a catchy title—it embodied psychosis, pandemonium, and psychiatrists’ attempts to restore normalcy.

My next book, Beyond Bedlam’s Door, deals more with the private patients in my office and in court cases. One psychiatrist was guilty of malpractice—he inveighed upon his patient and convinced the patient to commit murder.

The notion of things being Bedlam-like but understandable if you take the time—there’s the line from Death of a Salesman, when the wife of Willy Loman says your father is very upset and disturbed, but attention must be paid.

Q: So is this next book already written?

A: I’m just going over the last story. It will be my next book out, and then I have another novel written.

Bedlam’s Door is number two on mental health books on Amazon. It’s gratifying to see people reading it. It’s not for everybody—it’s for people interest in psychiatry, in human beings, in storytelling. Everybody has a story.

We often jump to conclusions about people. They can be valid. But if you really spend time, and get to know a little about the person, it may not make you like the person, but at least you understand.

Some of these stories, if I wrote them as fiction, people would say, Come on, get real! I’ve had readers contact me and say, I find it hard to believe this really happened. The only things I changed were to protect people’s identities.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Michael A. Boylan

Michael A. Boylan is the author of the new book Reach for Me: The Story of My Son Connor, which focuses on his experience caring for his son, who has special needs. Boylan is the founder of the Reach for Me Network, which helps caregivers for children with special needs. His other books include The Power to Get In and Accelerants. He lives in Minnesota and Colorado.

Q: Why did you decide to write this book about your son?

A: First, on our website, reachformenetwork.com, you will see…an author interview that explains how I wrote the book. It’s a good description of why I wrote the book, and the audience.

I had a career for 20 years writing best-selling books in the business arena. I was traveling around the world, doing keynote talks, training large corporations.

When my son was born, I had to stop traveling. My income took a hit, there was stress in the family because of Connor[‘s situation], there was depression and anxiety within our marriage and family that caused a divorce, there was strife with my extended family, and it rippled into my business career…

My life imploded. I lost my house, my company, my self-confidence as a guy, and I got depressed. My life was stood on its head. At [one] point I was speaking to Bill Gates, and to 8,000 Microsoft salespeople. I was getting a standing ovation, and I started to cry.

Bill Gates said, What’s wrong with you? I said my son was just diagnosed [with Williams Syndrome] and he looked at me and said, I’ll handle the crowd, you do what you need to do.

I was a take-charge kind of guy, that’s how I was raised. Having a child with a cognitive disability, I knew I had to turn my style around. I was so high-strung. That didn’t work for Connor. I bumped up against a huge life change, and it took me down emotionally and financially.

I wrote the book over 2 ½ years. I was angry, distraught, searching for answers. I felt an obligation to tell the truth about the underside of caregiving. Caregivers don’t want to come off as a sourpuss, but I felt there was an obligation to show all the stresses and strains a regular person goes through, regardless of whether you’re rich, poor, faith-based.

When you have children with special needs, it rocks the parents’ world. It confronts all the stuff the parents can’t get away from. Looking at the raw picture of what happened, my goal was to be honest so [readers] can say, What happened to us, we’re not alone.

The first half of the book is the story of what happened to our family. The learning, the shock, what happened to the marriage and family.

Because I have 20 years of success, I had known to build a step by step process that helps people. The second half of the book is to lay out a roadmap that caregivers can use as they see fit.

I lay out a process for them to say, I don’t know if this might be helpful to you or not. I ask questions to help the caregivers. The divorce rate among caregivers is 80 percent plus. A couple can sit down and talk about tough stuff by using this as a guidepost and hopefully create some healing and some guidelines.

The one-percenters who are very wealthy with special needs children—it’s not the same for them. They have a staff. They don’t go through [this] at all. The book is written for the 99-percenters. When they find out they have an additional $10,000 bill for autism services it can send them over the edge.

Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

A: It was a story that caused me to have a meltdown—that’s how the title came and how the song came. Connor was about 6 or 7 and [my wife and I] had divorced already. It was just he and I.

I had showered him and he had gone through two pull-ups. I had new suits made. I was still in depression mode, and I put on a brand-new suit. I was like, I can do this, get back in business mode! I said, Please sit here on the bed.

[Then] I picked him up and put him in the car seat. I was rushing to an appointment and was going to drop off Connor at my mom’s, and I looked down and his pull-up had leaked and my suit was totally ruined.

I kind of lost it. I thought I was not going to make the appointment, and went back in the house with Connor. I had 28-foot ceilings and wood floors. I sat on the floor and started sobbing.

Connor crawled over and started patting my forehead, and was saying, Daddy sad, Daddy cry. I felt like he was saying, It’s OK. I felt like it was not OK, that I didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to care for my own son, I was strung out, I was coming unglued, and I knew it.

My father called and said you’ve got to come out and ski. I said, I can’t do this any more. He said, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I said I’ve got to figure this out.

Connor kept patting my forehead. I felt like he was saying, Reach for me. I was pissed off with the world. That’s where the title comes from—him trying to tell me, Reach for me. The peace is for me. That’s where the song comes from.

The author and his son

I believe all caregivers come to a point where they hit a wall: What am I doing…How do I stay together as a person? If you get angry at your special needs child, it doesn’t do any good. Many special needs children have peace and calm about them. The title [says] believe it or not, your special needs child might have more peace than you do.

Q: You write about some difficult times in your life—how hard was it to revisit those experiences?

A: For things with sex, it’s a taboo. My friends would joke with me and call me “Mr. Once a Year.” I’d say that’s not funny. They said, You can’t live like that.

I said, I have enough on my plate with Connor and trying to save a marriage. We made conscious choices not to discuss certain things. They got worse and worse.

This is typical with caregivers—the romance goes out the window. The relationship is relegated to the background. I thought by being honest—I did [what I did] and my marriage collapsed—it was a warning sign to caregivers to help guard against things.

It’s difficult to go through these things, but I am a direct person. I thought telling the truth would be helpful.

With what I suffered in my business, my clients were demanding Fortune 500 companies—I felt so alone. I would get clients saying good for you, I don’t know how you handle it—and we need the document in four hours and don’t you be late. There isn’t really a compassion.

Another reason I wrote the book is to communicate to people who do not have children with special needs what it’s like.

The audience [for the book] is mainly the 35 million Americans who have special needs children, but there is a secondary audience, the non-caregivers, who can be brutally cold to caregivers—with a look in the grocery store, if a child acts up in a movie theater or church. I thought about how [to create] a little more compassion, how to educate people….

Q: What reaction have you had so far from readers?

A: On the website, you can watch six video testimonials from three couples—what did you get from this book? The book is being compared to Stephen Covey’s book The Seven Habits because this book has a step by step process.

The second book is The Purpose Driven Life. After each principle, it shares a personal reflection section.

The comments I’m getting—we gave about 300 books away to people who had never heard of me, and the comments were, Thank you for being so honest and so revealing about your struggle.

The men were commenting—men like to fix things—I appreciate how honest you were about your struggles at work and that you gave me solutions and a process.

Women liked the reflections section. They used it with their husbands to ask tough questions. The women would say things like, You’re a guy and talking about your son, and it’s a very interesting perspective you’re laying out here. Most men aren’t caregivers.

The reactions [included] I couldn’t put this down; I’ve highlighted several areas. It’s been exceedingly well received and it just came out.

Q: How is Connor doing now?

A: He just turned 18 and I just went through the legal guardianship process with the state of Minnesota. I’m his full legal guardian for everything. He is in 12^th grade and from an academic standpoint is functioning just under a third grade level.

He is high-functioning, conversant, charming, yet his IQ is about 43. He has blind spots. He doesn’t comprehend the concept of strangers so he’s very vulnerable. He doesn’t understand if there’s a hot burner in the kitchen and he can burn his hand…

He’s in a mainstream high school but in a special needs program within the high school. He is with an attendant who shadows him and two other students.

When he’s home I know he’s safe. He’s a musical savant, a drummer. That’s where he goes to calm down, his music. He’ll never marry or drive a car. He’ll always be with me. I’m prepared for that as best I can be.

Another reason I wrote the book—most children eventually leave the nest. Most caregivers for special needs children don’t [have that possibility], or thoughts of retirement.

That’s the life of a parent of a child with special needs. Friends in their 70s have a child in [his] 40s and can’t stop working. It’s a different world.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: We want to promote the book as aggressively as we can. It takes a long time for a book to break out. The book is part of an overall effort—the Reach for Me Network. The book will hopefully be purchased for corporations. We designed a wellness program on the Connor Principles, and have started selling it to companies.

We are currently engaged with about eight Fortune 500 companies that are starting to have an interest. Ten percent of their employee base are caring for children with special needs, and we are trying to get the book into the corporations, to help companies help their employees.

Corporations are worried about workers having meltdowns. Corporations are paying attention because it’s a money issue for them. They are concerned if caregivers have a hard time focusing or [high rates of] absenteeism…

With the Reach for Me Network, the idea is to have five million people in the next five years joining the network for free. Like AARP negotiates better insurance, we want to do the same for caregivers.

Join the network and share your caregiver story and spread the word about the book and the music video, and we can start loading the first 500,000 people on the network. Then we can start negotiating with life insurance companies and others…

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: My vision for the book is that it goes all over the world. Most books written about topics like this are mostly focused on the diagnosis of the child—here’s what to do if your child has autism, Down Syndrome.

This book is totally different—it’s about the rawness of being a caregiver, the emotions, the psychological swings, and the process to help them reduce anxiety and find some joy.

I hope it finds a strong resonance…The book represents a picture of what 35 million people deal with. It’s designed to empower them, and be honest with them—and here’s why we should aggregate into one network. 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Oct. 5

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Oct. 5, 1928: Louise Fitzhugh born.