Before I had children I didn’t think I would care very much about their looks, certainly not in any remarkable way. Doing so would reveal a gross degree of superficiality, a collusion with a society that already places too much emphasis on attractiveness.

In his 1950 novel, “Requiem for a Nun,” William Faulkner famously wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Rita Zoey Chin, in the prologue to “Let the Tornado Come,” her often devastating debut memoir, describes this idea in another way: “[A]s resounding and complete as any present moment is, one side of it is always touching, even in the gentlest of ways, the past, where there is always a story inside the story waiting to be told.”

Americans fear the startling rise in autism diagnoses—one in 88 kids is diagnosed as having an autism spectrum disorder (ASD)—but few understand the experience of those caring for an autistic child. 

When I bumped into Jeff at a friend's birthday party, I noticed how he went out of his way to introduce himself, and how, later, his large blue eyes lingered on me as he walked out into the cold New York night. I'd just turned 29 and had spent most of the past decade breaking up and reuniting with Jason, a Bradley Cooper look-alike whose laconic moodiness I confused with depth. Newly single, I asked Jeff out..

Within the past year, my husband and I stopped showing up in the many drawings and cards our five-year-old daughter, Annabel, brought home from school. Instead nearly every creation was made for him: her “baby”; her “cutie boy”; her brother, Finn.