Harmony

A Conversation with Carolyn Parkhurst

1. Why did you decide to write about a child on the autism spectrum? Is there anyone in your life like Tilly?
 
My fifteen-year-old son has Asperger’s, and raising him has been so different than I’d imagined it would be when I first became a parent. He’s an incredible kid; he’s smart and creative and funny, and he has the most interesting mind of anyone I’ve ever met. But it’s also been really challenging. Raising a child with special needs can be isolating and overwhelming; there’s a whole new world of doctors and therapies, schools and medications and “services” to navigate, in addition to dealing with behavioral issues and added levels of daily stress and household chaos.
 
At first, I wasn’t sure I wanted to write about a kid with autism; it was already so much a part of my life that I wasn’t certain I wanted to make it a central part of my work, too. But I think there’s some truth to the idea that our ideas choose us, rather than vice versa, and it turned out that this was the story I was best qualified to tell. My hope was that, in addition to telling a good story, the book might resonate with other parents who have had similar experiences. Knowing that you’re not alone goes a long way toward alleviating isolation and hopelessness.
 
2. Has the idea of living in a group situation like Camp Harmony ever been appealing to you? Have you ever known anyone who’s lived that way?
 
I’ve never seriously considered joining any kind of community like Camp Harmony, but I can see the appeal of living with a group of like-minded people, working together to share daily tasks and responsibilities. The question of whether Camp Harmony is a cult is an open one; I wanted to leave it as a sort of gray area, and there are certainly ways in which the camp serves as a positive force in the families’ lives. But when I started writing the book, I was thinking a lot about the question of cults, and what might make an otherwise intelligent, thoughtful person give up everything in his life to follow a charismatic leader. And the answer I arrived at is that if you’re feeling lonely and isolated and desperate, if you can’t see any way out of your problems, then you might be willing to put your faith in anybody who treated you kindly and offered you a solution for a better life.
 
3. Why did you write Alexandra’s voice in the second person?
 
Alexandra’s experiences are very close to mine—she’s the most autobiographical character I’ve ever written—and her day-to-day life is really at the heart of what I wanted to get across in this book. I wanted her narrative to reflect the specific details of raising a child on the autism spectrum, the very particular joys and challenges that arise in every situation. When I started writing, I didn’t give much thought to writing in the second person; that was just the way Alexandra’s voice came to me. But one of the things I like about it is that it feels very intimate; the reader is placed right inside her perspective, living her story right along with her. I also like the way that it mirrors the interior voice we all have inside our heads, the one that’s our harshest critic, the one that holds onto all of our most unflattering secrets and our most unlikely hopes.
 
4. Tilly’s voice as narrator is very different from how she comes across in everyday life. Why did you choose to write it that way?
 
Tilly has an incredibly vast imagination; it’s one of her biggest strengths, and it’s something that never lets her down. It’s the one thing in her life that’s always in her control, and it’s the one place where it works to her advantage to have a brain that’s “differently wired” from everybody else’s. She also has a strong sense of fairness, and she believes that her own life, her own family’s story, is as worthy of memorializing as the life of any president or king. So she fantasizes about a world where people line up to see a museum exhibit of “Hammond Family Artifacts” or take part in historical recreation festivals that replay the stories of her life. No matter what challenges Tilly faces in the other parts of her life, when she’s inside her head, she is her own hero, and anything is possible.
 
5. Janelle says, “A hopeful mom can talk herself into anything.” (p. 99) As a mother yourself, do you find this to be true? If so, why?
 
Absolutely. We all have so many hopes for our kids, and we can all see what kind of amazing potential they have, even if it’s not always apparent to everyone else. (The piano-lesson and ballet-lesson industries earn most of their revenue from boundless maternal hope.) And when our kids have any kind of problem, we want to believe that we can solve it. There are many evenings when I’ve gotten sidetracked reading anecdotal stories from parents who swear that a certain dietary supplement has helped their autistic child, or a particular kind of therapy, or a holistic practice. Ultimately, we tend to rely on a good dose of common sense to keep us from going too far afield. But a willingness to consider anything that might help our children is a key component of motherhood.
 
6. Technology (or the lack thereof) plays a very important role in this book. Do you think that our society’s current relationship to technology helps or hinders parents?
 
Both, probably—I think most of us agree that the unprecedented access we have to technology is both a blessing and a curse. Online forums can be a real lifeline for parents of special-needs kids, and the support of long-distance friends and family through email and social media is a wonderful gift of modern life. But I don’t know any parent who doesn’t worry about the effect that screen time has on their children, and I also don’t know any parent who hasn’t been caught once or twice looking at her phone when she should have been paying attention to her kids. There’s no going back; laptops and smartphones and the Internet are a part of our lives. But their existence raises a whole new set of problems and concerns for parents to navigate.
 
7. What are you working on now?
 
Something much lighter! I spent five years writing Harmony, and it was not an easy five years. I worried about whether it was okay to be writing (and eventually publishing) something so personal, about whether I was portraying the experience of parenting a child with special needs fairly and honestly, and about what my kids would think when they read it eventually. Now, I’m taking a little bit of a break and writing something that’s funny and topical and not at all personal.