Eli Gottlieb Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Interview

Eli Gottleib discusses how a series of personal tragedies led him to search for a deeper understanding of his autistic sibling and thus inspired his novel Best Boy

Why did you write the book?

Over the course of writing my last novel, both my parents died, my marriage broke up and I became my brother's guardian. That kind of loss tends to focus the faculties pretty drastically, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson, and in this case it led me to concentrate hard on the one family member I had left. I've always been interested in liminal states, and things beyond the edge of obvious speech. Trying to "locate" an autistic perspective in language was one of those.

What's it like growing up the sibling of a child with autism? We tend to focus on parents and on the afflicted children themselves. But what about siblings?

To grow up the sibling of an autistic means to grow up partly invisible. The same is true of being the sibling of any child who's developmentally disabled. The mother and disabled child tend to bond deeply, and everyone else gets relegated to the suburbs of the family, emotionally. Resources and attention flow to the sick child and the pressure causes a high percentage of marriages to explode. As a sibling, it takes work to navigate your own resentment at those years spent living in the shadows.

In your first book you write about every parent's nightmare&#...