This "novel" deserves to be read. The author, barely twenty, drew it from diaries she kept since childhood. She has a younger sister with autism, nicknamed Pulce (Flea).
In her own voice, she traces the difficult but also beautiful and love-filled relationship between Pulce and herself, and between Pulce and their whole family—neurotic in its way, yet vibrant with life and affection. She also writes about her own life as a thirteen-year-old navigating school and the thorny world of her peers, a world that can offer refuge but can also enslave. Then into the family comes something astonishing: Facilitated Communication. A facilitator places a hand on the autistic young person's elbow as they sit before a computer with an adapted keyboard, and suddenly the person begins to communicate—to show a language, ideas linked by their own logic, the capacity to write them down in an original, even fascinating way, though not according to our usual patterns of speech. It is wonderful to discover that you can widen communication with an autistic person, where before it had been so limited. Yet the facilitator must be scrupulously careful not to impose their own thoughts onto the autistic person, who is known to have acute sensitivity.
Then catastrophe. A school facilitator "discovers" through Pulce's communication that both the child and her sister, the author, have been victims of sexual abuse by a monstrous father. The family explodes.
This "novel" is worth reading because much of it is not fiction, and because it opens a window into the mystery of the autistic person. It is worth reading because it moves you—and also makes you smile. It is essential reading for professionals—psychologists, social workers, judges—as a warning against the arrogance and false certainty of infallibility that can poison their work and heap fresh suffering on those already wounded. (Not that we should swing to the opposite extreme and dismiss the professionals who labor in family suffering and social crisis as superficial or arrogant. That excess appears in Gaia Rayneri's account, though understandable given what her family endured.)
Sergio Sciascia, 2010