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A memoir
Viking
January 2011
On Sale: December 30, 2010
240 pages
ISBN: 0670022373
EAN: 9780670022373
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
A heartbreaking yet deeply hopeful memoir about life as a
twin in the face of autism. When Allen Shawn and his twin sister, Mary, were two, Mary
began exhibiting signs of what would be diagnosed many years
later as autism. Understanding Mary and making her life a
happy one appeared to be impossible for the Shawns. At the
age of eight, with almost no warning, her parents sent Mary
to a residential treatment center. She never lived at home
again. Fifty years later, as he probed the sources of his anxieties
in Wish I Could Be There, Shawn realized that his fate was
inextricably linked to his sister's, and that their natures
were far from being different. Twin highlights the difficulties American families coping
with autism faced in the 1950s. Shawn also examines the
secrets and family dramas as his father, William, became
editor of The New Yorker. Twin reconstructs a parallel
narrative for the two siblings, who experienced such
divergent fates yet shared talents and proclivities.
Wrenching, honest, understated, and poetic, Twin is at heart
about the mystery of being inextricably bonded to someone
who can never be truly understood.
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