Exiting Nirvana

American author Clara Claiborne Park’s memoir Exiting Nirvana: A Daughter's Life with Autism (2001) chronicles Park's efforts to encourage her autistic daughter, Jessy, to pursue a career as an artist and to become more comfortable in social situations. A sequel to  The Siege: The First Eight Years of an Autistic Child (1967), Exiting Nirvana chronicles Jessica's progress from the age of eight up to the present. Fred R. Volkmar, head of the Child Study Center at Yale University, called Park "one of the first parents who had the courage to share their story at a time when autism was poorly understood."

Early on, Park seeks to differentiate her memoir from traditional narratives about overcoming disability. Individuals like her daughter, Jessy, she argues, exist not in a world of pain and exclusion but one of solipsistic bliss. This is because, for Jessy at least, she wants for nothing, hence the book title's reference to the Buddhist concept of nirvana, a transcendent state where all desire—and thus all suffering—is eliminated. For that reason, the author is conflicted about her attempts to pull Jessy out into the larger world, which is so full of disappointment and heartache, made even more confusing to a young woman like Jessy. To convince Jessy to engage with society would be, in effect, to rip her away from nirvana.

Park asserts that Jessy's condition is not “typical” because there are too many degrees of autism to make generalizations about the half a million Americans who are diagnosed with the disorder. For example, there are extremely high-functioning individuals with autism like Temple Grandin, a successful college professor who broke new ground in the field of animal science and wrote eloquently about her experiences with her condition. For people like Grandin, the condition only manifests in a reduced ability to comprehend social and emotional interactions. On the other end of the spectrum, there are individuals who rarely or never speak, possessing borderline awareness of other human beings. Jessy veers closer to the high end of the spectrum



At the age of 15, much of what Jessy says to her mother is spontaneous and beguiling, reading more like a work of abstract poetry than the utterances of a teenage girl. Park maintains that Jessy and individuals like her crave stillness and control more than anything else. Because these qualities are more often found in inanimate objects rather than other human beings, individuals with autism can become intensely anti-social. Jessy assiduously sorts colored paper scraps and runs her fingers through chain links, deriving immense pleasure from these activities. Nevertheless, when an object is out of place—a missing washcloth, for example—she can become temporarily anguished, though her anguish is usually remedied rather easily. Park emphasizes that joy outweighs angst in the life of her daughter.

As her daughter grows through adolescence, Park believes Jessy has a prodigious talent for math, a quality often associated with autism in popular representations of the condition. However, a practical application of her mathematical ability holds little interest for Jessy. As Jessy grows into a young adult, she gets a job in a mailroom, the duties of which she performs without complaint from her superiors. Around this time, she also begins to paint. Despite having no formal training, Jessy's paintings attract the attention of local and national galleries who praise her ability to recreate photorealistic images on canvas set against strange and unexpected color patterns that give the work a sense of surrealism.

Jessy still struggles immensely with social interactions, however. Something of a breakthrough occurs when she obtains a golf counter which she uses to award herself points for behavior like making eye contact or saying hello, while subtracting points for undue emotional outbursts. This recalibration of social behavior through the act of counting allows her to more comfortably exist in a world dominated by social conventions that strike her as wholly mysterious. Park illustrates her daughter's progress in this respect by sharing an anecdote from her early adulthood in which Jessy asks if the death of a friend is a valid reason to shed tears. Years later, Jessy delivers a moving improvised speech at the funeral of an individual who became close to her. Despite these successes, Park reiterates at the end of the book that Jessy's struggle is constant, and there will be no clean endpoint to her journey.



According to The New York Times, Exiting Nirvana "remains a monument to the patience and care that brought Jessy out of her sterile paradise, as well as a fascinating excursion into an otherworldly mind."