Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Cammie McGovern was awarded a creative writing fellowship at Stanford University, and has received numerous prizes for her short fiction. Her stories have appeared in many magazines including Glamour, Ladies Home Journal, Redbook and Seventeen, and she is the author of the much-acclaimed YA novel Say What You Will, published in 2014. A Step Toward Falling (2015), another YA novel featuring characters with disabilities. Just My Luck, for middle-grade readers (February, 2016).
She has also written three adult novels, The Art of Seeing, Eye Contact, and Neighborhood.
She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts with her husband and three children, the eldest of whom is autistic. She is one of the founders of Whole Children, a resource center that runs after-school classes and programs for children with special needs.
Cammie McGovern's website
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Like Cara, you are also the mother of an autistic child. To what extent did
your own experiences inform your writing? What, if any, misgivings and
difficulties did you encounter in approaching such a personal subject through
fiction?
About four years ago, I started writing a nonfiction account of our
experience in the early years just before and after our son's diagnosis of
autism. It's a time when you feel frantic to be doing as much as possible
because everyone tells you the early years are the most important, but no one
can say with any certainty what that help should look like or which therapies
will work best for you child. I used to devour every account I could find of
parents in a similar situation, looking for clues, for children who resembled my
son and for what strategies worked best. Eventually, as we emerged from that
time, I thought it might be a service to other parents to write about our own
story and the discoveries we'd made, often by trial and error and muddling
through a lot of mistakes. The more I wrote, though, the more I realized how
hard it is to write a memoir well and sustain a narrative that doesn't have a
clear ending in place. I'd already published one novel and many ...
Cris Beam is the author of Transparent and has written for public radio's This American Life, as well as for several national magazines. She has an MFA in writing from Columbia and teaches creative writing at Columbia, NYU, ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
A Step Toward Falling
Try:
I Am J
by Cris Beam
Barbara D'Amato is a playwright, novelist, and crime researcher. She began writing full-time in 1973, first co-writing plays with her husband, Anthony D'Amato.
After trying different genres, her first published novel in 1980 ...
(more)
If you enjoyed:
Eye Contact
Try:
Death of a Thousand Cuts
by Barbara D'Amato
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