In 1967, Clara Claiborne Park published The Siege: The First Eight Years of an Autistic Child, her memoir tracing the experiences of symptoms, diagnosis, treatments, uncertainty, and advocacy that became the dominant narrative of parenting a child with autism. The Siege initiated the genre of parent memoirs of autistic children, building upon an existing literature of parent memoirs of children with disabilities, most notably Down syndrome. For autism and Down syndrome, parent memoirs served as a site for the construction of imagined communities of the afflicted, using the imagery and narratives that parents created in these works to shape the meaning of these disorders along with the identity of parents as caretakers, advocates, and experts on behalf of their children.
Using parent memoirs along with medical literature, archival research, and oral history, this paper will argue that the imagined community surrounding autism used parent memoirs to construct the disorder in opposition to Down syndrome, shaping autism’s ability to replace Down syndrome as the paradigmatic childhood disability of note. The tropes of the autism spectrum as established and reified by parent memoirs capitalized on the opportunities for autism’s ascendance offered by changing diagnostic criteria, medical research, and cultural controversies surrounding the disorder. Despite the increasing prevalence and improved life expectancy of individuals with Down syndrome since the 1970s, the genre of memoirs of Down syndrome has not produced a similarly useful meaning of the syndrome to maintain its cultural prominence.
