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 another novel, The Art of Seeing . 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.
(Photo: Stuart Conway)

About Writing EYE CONTACT
As the mother of three young children, the eldest of whom is a nine-year-old with autism, I find my reading habits have changed a lot in recent years.   These days I crawl into bed minutes after my children have shut their eyes and reach past all the classics in search of any book that will do the near-impossible: keep me awake, and take me away—something with suspense and a page-turning story, preferably with a mystery, preferably with a murder.  

Perhaps this makes sense when life with an autistic child is so full of daily mystery and unanswered questions—what is he thinking? How much does he understand of the world around him and his parents with their mysterious priorities, pushing him to talk, to play, to connect with other children and make friends?   I got the idea for Eye Contact when my son was four and had begun talking a little, repeating phrases—snippets from his favorite videos and the perfectly accented directions from a Spanish bus driver—and I began to wonder:   What if a child like my son held a secret and a whole community was hanging on these words he utters out of nowhere, seemingly without any context or meaning, using them to piece together information only he had?   

From there, the story expanded into what I hope it is now: a suspenseful tale interwoven with a portrait of a mother and son and the extraordinary relationship that I have so often witnessed between special needs children and their parents, a bond forged in the painful isolation of an infancy and early childhood when every door to the future and the real world of typically-developing children feels closed and all your hours are given over in the battle to help your child achieve ordinary milestones. I wrote this book only as I was emerging myself from that cocoon, and seeing, for the first time, the way having such a son had redefined me:   taught me to celebrate the most modest victories, to see and count the smallest blessings.

(for more about writing Eye Contact, see “Ghost in the Machine” in Articles and Essays).