THE UNLOCKING

A mother discusses her son’s dysfunctions and the grueling battle to overcome them in this engrossing memoir.

Lam recounts her experiences with her autistic son, Harry, a smart, creative kid with normal-range verbal capabilities who was plagued by severe anxiety, obsessiveness, and a syndrome called Pathological Demand Avoidance, which made him militantly defy every request. Harry violently rejected all dinner-time food except for two specific brands of chicken tenders; refused to wear shoes, then threw fits when his socks got dirty; monopolized Lam’s and her husband Paul’s attention, physically attacking them to end phone calls and Zoom meetings; and required endless hours of ritual cajoling to eat or use the toilet. The demands of caring for Harry, exacerbated by harsh Covid-19 lockdowns in Melbourne, Australia, where they lived, tested Lam’s family to the breaking point; she writes that she “lost the will to live.” But help arrived in the form of “applied behavioral analysis” therapy, a controversial practice that uses painstaking observation of autistic kids’ actions to understand and change behavior—in Harry’s case, by rewarding him with favorite toys and framing lessons as fantasy adventures. Gradually, Harry added new foods, began tolerating separation from his parents, and—miraculously—started school and made friends. Lam’s prose is evocative and unflinching in conveying the strain of Harry’s condition: “Harry’s desire to control everyone in our household was a source of elemental torment…I despised it, hated it, felt degraded each time I indulged it.” She also provides a fascinating, meticulously detailed psychological analysis of the workings of Harry’s mind: “He was forever observing and taking mental notes, but would not give anything a crack until he was satisfied he could do it with absolute perfection the first time. Then, if he liked it, he did nothing else but that.” The result is a profound and moving family saga that illuminates and richly humanizes the challenges of autism.

An extraordinary portrait of an autistic boy and the fight to help him.