Fragile Innocence is the story of a child devastated
by pure chance. This moving narrative of a father’s journey
to understand and accept the profound changes in his
daughter’s life is at once memoir, biography, mystery, and
drama, all centered around one remarkable young woman who
cannot talk or read or understand language, but who has
touched almost everyone she has ever met.
At eighteen
months Hillary Reston, a happy, healthy toddler, was struck
by a remarkably high fever. On the advice of her doctor, her
parents, James Reston, Jr., and Denise Leary, administered
Tylenol and anxiously waited for the fever to subside. Five
days later it did, but the damage was done. Over the course
of the next five months their bubbly, highly verbal child
was radically and irrevocably changed. Worse yet, no doctor
could explain what evil and still unidentified force had
stolen Hillary’s ability to speak or understand language,
hurtled her into a seemingly endless cycle of seizures,
destroyed her kidneys, and taken her to the very brink of
death.
For her parents, discovering what had happened
to their child and how to assure the quality of her life
became an obsession. This quest for answers would take them
from the nation’s hospitals to the office of a pioneering
geneticist in Texas and the vaulted halls of the National
Institutes of Health.
This very intimate story also
personalizes some of the most daunting ethical issues of
medicine that society faces today, including stem cell
research, animal organ transplantation, diagnosis with the
Human Genome Map, and reproductive and therapeutic cloning.
Hillary gives these immensely complicated issues a human
face, and they are pondered by Reston as a reporter, a
thinker, and a father.
In Fragile Innocence
author James Reston, Jr., invites us inside his family,
candidly sharing the joys and sorrows of raising Hillary.
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