“A vivid, compelling, painfully honest sibling story. My heart went out to Karl. I couldn’t put this book down.” – Rachel Simon, author of Riding The Bus With My Sister
“Deep, dark, and devastating, Boy Alone is remarkable in its ruthless honesty, exceptional writing, and eye-opening subject matter. A fascinating and powerful read.” – Janice Erlbaum, author of Have You Found Her
“This is a truly beautiful and powerful book. Karl Greenfeld has written his own angle on the story of his autistic brother Noah, made famous in the works of their father Josh Greenfeld. Karl turns his sibling saga into a lyrical exploration of love, mystery, family, and what makes us human. He also dances around hope and reality, fact and fiction, in a way that will startle you. The result is a masterpiece of literature and memory that will leave you breathless.” – Walter Isaacson, author of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
“Gripping.” – Suki Casanave, Washington Post
“Recent autism memoirs range from accounts of strenuous ‘healing’ to reflection on accepting the condition. Such a reaction isn’t found in Greenfeld’s book. . . . Karl resolves the conflict he sets up . . . with a surprise twist that may remind some readers of ‘The Sixth Sense.’” – Polly Morrice, New York Times Book Review
“Boy Alone unlocks the heart and lets the emotions pour out: grief, despair, anger, love, devotion and wonder. Whether you are a parent or a sibling of someone with autism or just looking in from the outside through this rarely opened window into the complex life of a family coping with autism, you will never forget this book.” – Portia Iversen, Co-Founder of Cure Autism Now and author of Strange Son
“A candid, brave, painful and very well-written memoir about a truly tragic family situation.” – Peter Matthiessen, author of The Shadow Country
“In his extraordinary memoir, Karl Greenfeld details what it is like to grow up next to a ‘beautiful’ boy with whom he can never play and never connect and who never returns his love, but who, nonetheless, is the most important fact of his life. Greenfeld’s story goes beyond autism, however; it is also a brilliant depiction of male adolescence and a meditation on what family means and what we owe one another in this life.” – Michael Thompson, Ph.D., co-author of Raising Cain
“Karl Taro Greenfeld grows from child to boy to man, variously resisting and succumbing to the force of his brother’s autism. The reader has no choice but to take the same emotional, heartwarming, tragic, comic, frustrating, loving, painful, uplifting journey.” – Paul A. Offit, author of Autism’s False Prophets
“Sibling rivalry—and love—of a ravaging kind is the subject of this unsparing memoir of the author’s life with his severely autistic brother. [An] affecting chronicle of a family simultaneously shattered and bound tight by autism.” – Publishers Weekly
Karl Taro Greenfeld knew from an early age that his little brother, Noah, was not like other children. He couldn’t crawl, and he had trouble making eye contact or interacting with his family. As Noah grew older, his differences became even more pronounced—he was unable to communicate verbally, use the toilet, or tie his shoes, and despite his angelic demeanor, he often had violent outbursts.
No doctor, social worker, or specialist could pinpoint what was wrong with Noah beyond a general diagnosis: autism. The boys’ parents, Josh and Foumi, dedicated their lives to caring for their younger son with myriad approaches—a challenging, often painful experience that the devoted father detailed in a bestselling trilogy of books.
Now, for the first time, acclaimed journalist Karl Taro Greenfeld speaks out about growing up in the shadow of his autistic brother, revealing the complex mix of rage, confusion, and love that defined his childhood. Boy Alone is his brutally honest memoir of the hopes, dreams, and realities of life with a mentally disabled sibling.
Seamlessly weaving together the social history of autism and autism research—as the Greenfelds lived through it in seeking treatment for Noah—with the deeply affecting story of two very different boys growing up side by side, this book raises crucial philosophical questions: Can relationships exist without language? How should aging parents care for a nonverbal, violent child, and then a grown man who is not self-sufficient? Is there anything that can be done to help an extremely autistic child or adult become a member of mainstream society?
Haunting, tragic, and unforgettable, this chronicle of autism is a beautiful, wholly original exploration of what it means to be a family, a brother, and a person.
About the Author
Karl Taro Greenfeld is the author of seven previous books, including the novel Triburbia and the acclaimed memoir Boy Alone. His award-winning writing has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, Best American Short Stories 2009 and 2013, and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012. Born in Kobe, Japan, he has lived in Paris, Hong Kong, and Tokyo, and currently lives in Pacific Palisades, California, with his wife, Silka, and their daughters, Esmee and Lola.
From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post’s Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Review Suki Casanave Noah Greenfeld sits huddled on the floor, rocking and humming. He twiddles his fingers incessantly, or flaps his hands near his ears. He does not speak; he rarely responds when spoken to. He can smile like an angel and devours his favorite foods. But mostly he is a heartbreaking mystery, a being trapped in his own world, unable to care for himself and largely unaware, it seems, of his surroundings. He is a “Boy Alone.” It turns out, though, that the title of Karl Taro Greenfeld’s memoir about life with Noah, his severely autistic younger brother, applies just as accurately to the author himself. Even early on, when the boys were young, Karl could feel the “arrhythmic baseline underneath our otherwise happy family melody.” This was the 1960s, and the problem of autism had barely surfaced in the national consciousness. Parent support groups, celebrity fundraisers and extensive research were still decades away. As Noah’s atypical development became clearer, his parents, writer Josh Greenfeld and artist Foumi Kometani, searched frantically for a diagnosis and for help. Karl’s childhood world, meanwhile, was shifting irrevocably. “I can feel the room tilting toward you whenever you walk in,” he writes of Noah, “all the attention and parental love drains into you, never to come back out. You possess gravity out of all proportion to your size.” The conclusion Karl drew from this realization shapes his life: “I am learning that I can never compete with you; despite being older, bigger, smarter, faster, I will lose every race for our parents’ time and attention.” These days, when autism success stories seem to emerge with increasing frequency, Karl Greenfeld’s memoir — which combines personal experience with an exploration of autism research — offers a frank, sometimes brutal account of life with a severely disabled child who will never be considered one of those success stories. Living with Noah was a relentless task, an unremitting round of violent behaviors: scratching, biting, spitting, hair pulling. There were tantrums in public places and years of interrupted sleep and unsuccessful toilet training. The book is gripping in an exhausting way, the prose driven by an anger that can become repetitive, even while the family’s plight elicits sympathy. Young Karl was angry about a lot of things — that he would never have a typical sibling relationship, that his brother tyrannized their family life, that he himself never fit in at school. The situation wasn’t helped by the success of his father’s trilogy of books about Noah, which put the family in the national spotlight. As a teenager, Karl became mired in alcohol and drug addiction that followed him into adulthood. Like Noah — perhaps largely because of him — the author grew up, in his own way, a boy alone. When Noah becomes too big and too difficult to handle, his parents, Karl writes, “vibrate with the guilt of putting Noah away.” Karl grappled with his own demons: “The mystery to me is why I care,” he recalls of his teenage musings. “Why do I want Noah at home?” Karl believed that his brother had ruined his life in countless ways, yet he couldn’t bear the thought of sending him to an institution. Ultimately, the author wrestles with the question of whether he really loves his brother and, more broadly, whether love for someone like Noah can ever mean more than an unshakable sense of obligation. Watching his parents, Karl got his answer: “Breaking down her love of Noah,” he says of his mother, “was as impossible as trying to divide a prime number.” But love is there, unmistakable, “in the way she would sew his pants, prepare his onigiri rice ball lunches.” This is not a redemptive memoir, though. Karl Greenfeld may have managed to orchestrate his own recovery, but his brother was ultimately confined to an institution. And despite developments in autism research, Karl remains pessimistic about the fate of others like Noah. “I wish, I really do, that they will all miraculously recover,” he writes — and the book even includes a lengthy dream sequence in which the author imagines the life Noah might have had as a “recovered,” functioning autistic adult. “But I know, I really do, that not all of them will.” In the end, the reader is left simply to marvel at this family’s endurance, at the sheer feat of survival — and the memory of those rice balls, lovingly made.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
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