I’ve not been here a while, I know. There are reasons – but it’s partly  because of Judith Newman. I’ve finally read her controversial book, “To Siri With Love”, and I’ve tried to get down several times what I want to say about about it, and I just haven’t been able to do it.

Content Note: Ableism, autism stereotypes, censorship, cure versus acceptance, forced sterilization, Judith Newman, parent memoir,  “To Siri With Love”

Image Description: “Autism” in uppercase letters, various colors, against a black background.

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I’m feeling very torn – about Judith Newman, about the book, and about what that sensation of feeling torn says about me as a disability activist. Because other activists that I respect, that have taught me and mentored me and opened my eyes to realities that, until I met them, I’d not understood even though I was disabled myself, came away from reading Judith Newman’s memoir of raising twin boys (Gus, who is autistic and Henry, who is neurotypical) with a very clear, very negative perception of “To Siri With Love.”

They started the #BoycottSiri hashtag, and they’ve stuck by it.  I’ve read reviews and comments on those reviews stating that there’s no way that Judith Newman could love Gus, her autistic son, and write the book she did. I saw a petition started by someone (taken down almost immediately when other disability advocates said publicly, “No, not appropriate” ) that he be removed from the home.  I have heard again and again that the book shouldn’t have been published because it’s damaging to the autistic community.

And I get why people are angry. I’m late to the party with this blog post (the controversy over “To Siri with Love” erupted in late 2017) because at that time I read a couple of passages from the book that I found online, including the sample that Amazon provides for Kindle readers, and decided that, as much as I wanted to read the book and write about it, I wasn’t going to pay money to do so. I did not want to support a parent author who went out of her way to explain why she didn’t think it was important that her 14-year-old sons be included in the writing process of a book that put private details of their lives on display, and that talked about her intentions to get power of attorney of Gus at 18 so that she could get doctors to give him a vasectomy.  I’m not interested in supporting that ableist bullshit.

So I waited for my local library to buy the book, and I’ve read it twice since I checked it out. Because I’m much more conflicted about it than I thought it I’d be.

Not Good, But Not as Awful as I was Expecting

First off, I’m glad I didn’t pay money for the book, because Judith Newman does say explicitly in “To Siri With Love” that she’s uncomfortable with the idea of Gus having children and wants  medical power of attorney for him when she turns 18 so that she can have him sterilized – not because he’s autistic, she said in interview she gave after disabled Twitter exploded into #BoycottSiri, but because she’s scared that he’ll impregnate someone without an understanding of what it is to be a good father.

Which never happens in the non-disabled world, right?  Every non-disabled person goes into parenthood knowing exactly what they need to know and how to handle every situation, fully aware of the awesome responsibility they’ve undertaken and ready to commit fully to raising children, right? And when there’s a suspicion, even when it’s backed by reasonable evidence to support it, that a non-disabled person won’t make a good parent, the first thing that happens is that they’re sterilized, right?

Wow. Where to start with this.

This assumption that the only way to endure that her son has safe sex is ableist, insulting, and demonstrates a strange ignorance from someone who’s written for top newspapers and demonstrates that she knows how to do research. She knows the dark period in disability history shaped by forced sterilization and eugenics – she talks about it. She knows that education is the far better way to go – she talks about it.

But in interviews, she’s doubled down on the idea that a vasectomy would be best for her son.

Something else is going on here.

Conflicting Emotions

And it’s not, I believe that Judith Newman doesn’t  love her sons – either of them.  In fact, if you can manage to get past the fact that Gus’ stories are being put out there for the masses largely without his permission or input, there are a number of moments in “To Siri With Love” that (I’m guessing, as a non-parent) will resonate with any parent raising a child (autistic or neurotypical) in today’s world – the concern over whether they will be well-enough prepared for life’s challenges, the pride and angst that comes with letting go as they grow up, the conflicting feelings that emerge when children first begin to date and explore romantic relationships, and the fears for the future, when they are no longer around to watch over their children. I had moments where I smiled, and even moments where I laughed a bit. But under all that was unease – as much as I sensed that Judith Newman loves Gus, reading “To Siri With Love” was like spending time in my family home and being able to hear CBC radio constantly in the background – no matter how endearing I found Newman’s description of her son, how much love I could read in her descriptions of him, there was a constant low hum just in the background, a song whose lyrics were usually just low enough enough to be indistinct but that at times was so loud that its noise obliterated everything:

“I wish he’d change/get better/that things were easier.”

This isn’t that Difficult, Judith Newman

If I picked up on this messaging,there’s no doubt that  the autistic community did. Which is why I don’t tend to like these disability parent memoirs (for the most part…every now and then I come across one that I like): even if the kids never read them, the people around the kids get to hear about their parents’ low expectations for them:

• The way Judith Newman is sure that her kid is “nicer than yours” but won’t do anything worth much, the way yours will.
• The way her kid’s “obsession” (as opposed to “interest”) with trains makes her pretty sure that he’ll never find a girlfriend, but that maybe it’s okay, because maybe he shouldn’t be in a romantic  relationship given that she can’t imagine him in a romantic scenario in which Benny Hill isn’t playing in the background.
• The way she wonders if he even thinks.

Judith Newman claimed, after the backlash to her book, that she didn’t write it for “an autistic audience,” which is a genuinely puzzling statement. Either she doesn’t believe that autistic people can read (highly unlikely, since texts from Gus are included in the book), or she doesn’t believe that they’d be interested in her book. Both ideas are pretty insulting to autistic people, and they’re not the only reason that autistic people should be insulted by what she wrote.  I suspect that she’s trying to be funny at times, with her constant reliance on stereotypes and functioning labels to talk about autistic people, but there’s not humour in these things.

There’s humour (for me) in Gus’ assertion that he likes his first girlfriend because “she told me I do,” but only because I could imagine either of my neurotypical nieces saying that a boyfriend someday.  There’s humour (besides the invasion of privacy) in Newman’s discussion of Henry’s obsession in puberty with asking her, “Is this normal? Is this normal? Is this normal?”, but only because I recall torturing my own mother this way when I went through puberty. Her straight-up parenting anecdotes are humourous, yes.

And the two chapters devoted to discussing the process Newman went through in order to figure out how she’d deal with the fact that Gus was becoming a young man with a young man’s sex drive are actually quite well-written. I just wish she’d kept the process to a therapist’s office, for the sake of her son’s privacy.

I have a lot of wishes when it comes to “To Siri with Love.” Sad face.

Judith Newman, “To Siri With Love, and Feeling Torn

And a deep sigh. I think that you can love your kid and want the best for them and be tragically misguided about what that should look like. I think that you can be convinced that your conceptions of disability and its implications for your child’s life are accurate and unimpeachable, not knowing that you’re actually working from outdated models and ideas.

And I think (and this is where I predict that I unfortunately will draw the ire of the disability community – not because I want to, but because I’ve given this a lot of thought and it’s just where I’ve landed on this) is that regardless of how disabled people feel about this book, we have to accept that Judith Newman had a right to write it.

Do we have to like it, or stay quiet about why we dislike it?

Hell. No.

I knew as soon as read the Kindle free excerpt of “To Siri With Love” that I wouldn’t like it, that I didn’t want to pay for it, and that I wanted to tell people exactly why. But even though I retweeted some of the tweets I liked about why other people didn’t like the book, I was uncomfortable when they included the #BoycottSiri hashtag.

I don’t like the idea of calling for boycotts of books just because I don’t agree with what the author has written.  It’s too much like censorship. I don’t feel like the book does much for the disability community in general and autistic people in particular – hell, I don’t know that it really does much for anyone but Judith Newman, when you get right down to it – but I know that there are a lot of people out there (disabled people among them) that argue that this blog doesn’t do a hell of a lot for anyone, either, and yet I get to keep writing it.

We can only control our own journey, ultimately. Here is how I will travel with this book as I continue to reflect on it, trying to check my privilege as a neurotypical person as I do so:

• There’s something about the way Judith Newman presents herself that .puzzles me.  I feel like she’s holding something back, like she’s not being truly authentic about her experiences and feelings – it has nothing to do with her children, it’s about her, and it makes me wary of her. I’m totally willing to acknowledge that I’m being unfair, because I’ve only got how she presents herself in the book to go by.
• That being said, I see no evidence, as other have observed, that she doesn’t love her children.  I think she’s misguided about autism and disability in particular and healthy parent-child boundaries in general – the dialogue between her and Henry about Gus at times sounds like like parent-parent. I think that the entire family could probably do with some counseling, but I’ve worked with a lot of families like that, and their issues were rarely due to a lack of love.
• I don’t think that parent memoirs are inherently bad – like I said, I’ve read several that I’ve liked. They focused more on the system and how it fails disabled people and their caregivers, the feelings these hurts produce, rather than “This is why my disabled child makes it so difficult for me to parent them” and ascribing motivations to behaviours – the stuff that leads to piling-on and inevitably to negative stereotyping and the belief that parents of disabled children must be “saints.”
• Parents do needs spaces to talk about the frustrations that can come along with raising disabled children, and shouldn’t fear being attacked for having that need – but there needs to be some dialogue between the disability community and parents (and potentially lawmakers, because maybe parent support needs to be baked into disability supports for children) about what that needs to look like.
• While there were bits of “To Siri With Love” that I liked, more as a commentary on parenting in general than on parenting a disabled child, it’s  not a parent memoir that I will read again or recommend to parents of disabled children. I am glad that I didn’t pay money for it, even if it meant waiting a bit to read it.

I thought I was done with this, and then I read Max Sparrow’s review while looking for a link that that I’d used when writing my post, and he reminded me that Judith Newman’s position on sterilization is that she’ll have it reversed when Gus is ready to have children. I didn’t pick this up from reading her book, or if I did it didn’t make enough of a difference in how I felt about this whole business that it really registered. I like his theory that Judith Newmann loves her kids the way she’d love her dog:

“She cares about their safety and welfare. She cares about feeding them nutritious food and ensuring they get sufficient sleep. She wants them to be happy and feel loved. She understands them only as well as one can understand a distinctly separate species. And she feels she has ownership of their bodies and minds”.

I think that’s as close as I’m going to get to what I want to say about Judith Newman and “To Siri With Love.”

Let me have it, folks. But please be respectful.

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