Today I had lunch with a debut author, stand-up comedian, blogger, and parent of a young son afflicted with cerebral palsy and autism.
John Williams, who lives in Lewisham, has just published ‘My Son’s Not Rainman’. Not four weeks from publication date, this unsentimental, easy to read, funny and sad memoir about John and, as he calls him, The Boy, is in its 2nd reprinting and translation rights have been sold to Russia and France. If you read The Guardian, you may have seen the cover story of their Saturday Family Supplement on September 10th- ‘Have you heard the one about the comedian and his autistic son’? – that featured John telling some of his adventures in, one might say, the disability business.
“Why’ The Boy’” I asked John over a glass of wine at Dulwich’s Café Rouge. ‘I feared my son might want to read the book and maybe he is still too young to understand the trials and tribulations of his parents, now divorced but working together to do the best for our kid, but The Boy knows the book is out there, he’s seen it and approved the cover. No, that’s not him, looking blond and beautiful, but it might be the sort of child whose unnerving tantrums in a bus queue or a department store would incite a passer-by to ask the question..“why?”.
Williams has been asking that question for 15 years. And makes a good fist of answering it when in one of his blogs (every one worth reading) reproduced in the book, he writes with disarming honesty… ‘I can’t quite explain it but in some ways it feels we’re living our lives on a different time trajectory to everyone else… the Boy will get there eventually – he’s just following a different path’. And elsewhere ‘the Boy will forever dance to a different beat’. That path from birth to the 13th birthday is charted in a way that’s quite unique and different, and necessary, from so many accounts of growing up with a, let’s face it, a handicapped child in the family.
Only here this single parent with his belief in the intrinsic value of life, tells of its joys and heartbreaks. As he said to me ‘I’m just Dad. And there is no better job in the world’. And that must be one reason why his other day (or rather evening job), is as a stand-up comedian. It was difficult, he is the first to admit, to write a script for a comedy, but he did, and for a successful hour at the 2013 Edinburgh Fringe. I, too, am a parent of a middle aged son with autism, and never thought parenting might be a bit of a laugh and a giggle. But John gives all of that and more. He recounts, not only his own breakdown and two years with various label diagnoses in psychiatric hospitals, but also of his transformative time as a care worker with disabled children, but most of all The Boy’s progress through their challenging but happy times together. One of the outings is to Legoland….‘great for Playing Spot The Person On The Autistic Spectrum. The place is filled with them.’
Eventually, there are the schools, the struggles with the education system, and finally, like the best of fairy-tales, the special school where ‘Mr.Teacher ‘telephones..’. .things are going all right. He’s having a brilliant day. No hitting, no biting, he’s stayed in class all day. I’m really proud of him.’
John is now proud to be off all the pills, the legacy of the hospital years. He is a successful comedian; he has developed a thick skin; he can joke about autism; he is very aware of the condition’s infinite amazing complexity; a caring, loving, confident parent; and now a writer. As the cover announces -one man, one autistic boy, a million adventures. I am unsurprised at his news of a second printing. Life may be at times in his words ‘a shitty game without winners….. a frightening, horrible, angry, impenetrable fog’ but ‘My Son’s Not Rainman’ is in its inimitable way a triumph of a memoir.
You can buy the book from Village Books (Dulwich Village) at £7.99 - 25% of the net profits will go to a not-for-profit group aiming to provide a café/hub for young people with autism and their families and carers, people like John and The Boy, in south-west London.
