A generation of children forced to live without words.
It begins as a statistical oddity: a spike in children born with acute speech delays. Physically normal in every way, these children never speak and do not respond to speech; they don't learn to read, don't learn to write. As the number of cases grows to an epidemic level, theories spread. Maybe it's related to a popular antidepressant; maybe it's environmental. Or maybe these children have special skills all their own.
The Silent History unfolds in a series of brief testimonials from parents, teachers, friends, doctors, cult leaders, profiteers, and impostors (everyone except, of course, the children themselves), documenting the growth of the so-called silent community into an elusive, enigmatic force in itself—alluring to some, threatening to others.
A generation of children forced to live without words.
It begins as a statistical oddity: a spike in children born with acute speech delays. Physically normal in every way, these children never speak and do not respond to speech; they don't learn to read, don't learn to write. As the number of cases grows to an epidemic level, theories spread. Maybe it's related to a popular antidepressant; maybe it's environmental. Or maybe these children have special skills all their own.
The Silent History unfolds in a series of brief testimonials from parents, teachers, friends, doctors, cult leaders, profiteers, and impostors (everyone except, of course, the children themselves), documenting the growth of the so-called silent community into an elusive, enigmatic force in itself—alluring to some, threatening to others.
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Overview
A generation of children forced to live without words.
It begins as a statistical oddity: a spike in children born with acute speech delays. Physically normal in every way, these children never speak and do not respond to speech; they don't learn to read, don't learn to write. As the number of cases grows to an epidemic level, theories spread. Maybe it's related to a popular antidepressant; maybe it's environmental. Or maybe these children have special skills all their own.
The Silent History unfolds in a series of brief testimonials from parents, teachers, friends, doctors, cult leaders, profiteers, and impostors (everyone except, of course, the children themselves), documenting the growth of the so-called silent community into an elusive, enigmatic force in itself—alluring to some, threatening to others.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780374534479 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 06/10/2014 |
| Pages: | 528 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 7.50(h) x 1.50(d) |
About the Author
Matthew Derby is the author of the short-story collection Super Flat Times. His writing has appeared in The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, McSweeney's, Conjunctions, The Believer, and Guernica. He lives in Rhode Island.
Kevin Moffett is the author of Permanent Visitors and Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events. He lives in Claremont, California.
Read an Excerpt
The Silent History
By Eli Horowitz, Matthew Derby, Kevin Moffett
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2014 Ying Horowitz & QuinnAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-374-53447-9
CHAPTER 1
THEODORE GREENE
EL CERRITO, CA 2011
She already looked half-dead on the drive to the hospital, but I wouldn't admit this until much later. I was pretty determined, I guess, to remain upbeat. In all the classes we'd taken to prepare for the birth, that was the one thing the instructor kept repeating to the men in the room, the future fathers. "There's no magic involved," she said. She told us that what our wives needed most was our support. Our patience. The idea was—and I totally believed this—that a calm mother would produce a healthy child. It had a logic to it, and we had no reason to doubt the instructor. We were all first-timers except for this one guy who showed up to class with a wife half his age. He already had three or four kids, I think, from previous marriages, and the instructor pointed to him and said, "Mitch has been through this before. He knows all about the idea of support, right, Mitch?" Everyone laughed but Mitch, who just kind of stared back at the instructor with a look of bemusement. It was almost more of a—even though his wife was pretty attractive—more of a look of defeat.
There were other aspects of that day that made me feel like something bad was coming. Things that made it hard to focus on the goal, that one task of keeping the birth free of panic and dread. First there was the humidity. Everything was drenched in it. By the time I got home from work my clothes were damp. I went inside the house and Mel was on the couch with her head back, sweating with the fan off. "Why are you here?" I said, and she said, "I stayed home today." I said, "What?" and "Why didn't you call me?" You know? "I would have come home." But she didn't say anything. Just stared at the ceiling with her eyes half- closed like she was drugged. I went to the kitchen and took off my shirt. I put half a box of noodles in a pot, and when I went back to the couch to check on her she was crying. "Are there contractions?" I said, and she nodded. "Are they close together?" I said, and she nodded again, and I was like, This is it. I put my shirt back on even though it was soaked, and I helped her out to my car. She had her full weight against me. I felt like if I let go of her she would just collapse into a pile. I tried hard not to get worked up. But then when I opened the passenger-side door the half-eaten taco from my lunch break slid off the seat and onto the driveway. I looked at the taco on the blacktop and I felt this, like, pulsing kind of terror.
Of fatherhood, yeah, I guess. I remember thinking, This is the car we'll use to bring Flora home. This will be her first car ride, in my ten-year-old hatchback with mismatched seat covers that smell like burning human hair. Mel's car was newer, but I'd blocked her in and there was no time. No time left to back out into a more respectable set of circumstances. I was working at a company I hated and wolfing down tacos in the parking lot of a strip mall down the road. It was not where I wanted to be, and anyway what difference would it have made? Mel and I were the people we were, and there wasn't anyone to blame but ourselves for how we lived.
I got Mel in the car and started driving, like I said, toward the hospital. The clouds were wild and dark like right before a heat storm. They looked almost like smoke from a fire, sort of billowing in reverse behind the cell towers at the interchange. I glanced over at Mel, who was doubled over in the passenger seat. Her eyes were rolling around under her closed lids and her skin was a sort of light gray color. I looked hard at the road and told myself that we were all going to make it through the day, but only two-thirds of that statement was actually true.
NANCY JERNIK
TEANECK, NJ 2011
I started taking Ambitor about a year before I found out I was pregnant with Spencer. This was right around the time it first went on the market, and almost half the women at Yan Talan started taking it. I remember seeing this ad for it, a three-panel foldout in the front of Fortune. It had a picture of a woman sitting behind a huge wooden desk in a corner office with floor-to-ceiling windows. She had her legs propped up on the desk and she was sitting back—like, reclining in a big upholstered leather chair, smoking a cigar. She was in the middle of blowing a smoke ring, and the caption said something like Call the Shots. That was it, except for the Ambitor logo and the tiny text that described all the side effects, which seemed like a small list to me, as someone who had taken a bunch of different antidepressants and weight-control pills and stuff. I looked at this woman in the ad and thought, That's me. That's where I want to be. I want everything in that picture. Not in a shallow way. Not like, I want to have a big desk, or smoke cigars, or I guess anything in the actual picture, which actually was really not very well done. But more of a feeling like, I want to be in control.
So I started taking it, and suddenly I had this capacity to do things. I had access to a whole new reservoir of energy. It was pretty incredible, actually. I mean, I still think about what it was like to be on Ambitor, and I would probably be taking it right now if I could. If it was still on the market.
I found out I was pregnant in December, and Ron, who I thought would be scared or upset, given that we were just a few months into our marriage, was actually really excited. I can remember that first trimester being the last really happy time. Because I was made VP in February and put in charge of the whole Schick Quattro for Women account. And I won't bore you with the whatever hours I spent at the office or at Schick headquarters in Milford, but it had the effect on my marriage that you'd expect. I saw it all happening. Like, I could remember watching as my relationship with Ron sort of split apart like a dissolving glacier, but—and maybe this was the Ambitor doing what it did best—I saw things drifting, but I didn't really care so much. Or, I cared, but only in the way you care for the people in a movie, watching them as their lives go down the tubes.
I hardly remember anything about Spencer's birth except that it took forever. Forty hours from start to finish. In the end they had to do a C-section, because he just wasn't coming. Or I wasn't trying hard enough. So I was completely out of it for the actual birth, and I didn't know that Spencer came out without making any noise. Ron was really worried about that, but the doctor told him it was a myth that all babies come out crying. Of course, nobody knew at that time about Spencer—about what was wrong with him. So Ron just sort of took the doctor at his word. If I'd been awake I would've said something. I wouldn't have let that go.
We took Spencer home a few days later. Ron had a week of paternity leave from his job and we were almost able to get back to that place where we were happy. But Spencer wasn't nursing. Nothing at all. They said that you should wait a few days before panicking, that sometimes the kid just doesn't want to nurse in the beginning. But by the fifth day of nothing we started to get really stressed out. Ron was going to have to go back to work the following Monday, and it suddenly seemed so small, the window of time we had to be all together. I didn't know what I was going to do alone in the house with this kid who wouldn't eat. We called the doctor and she asked if we'd tried formula. I was like, "You said we should never give the kid formula." And she said that normally breast milk is the best, but if the kid is not nursing, you try the formula, so Ron went out in the middle of the night to a drugstore and got this stuff. He put the nipple of the bottle to Spencer's lips and he immediately started nursing. I remember lying on my side in the bed watching Ron hold the bottle while Spencer was just nursing like crazy, like he'd been starving—which he was, I guess. And Ron started laughing with this mixture of relief and joy, because finally here was something, here was Spencer showing that he needed something. And I focused on Spencer—I tried to block Ron out of my vision, because I could see him glancing over at me, trying to get me to laugh about it or even smile, but I just felt sick, absolutely sick to my stomach. I couldn't see it as anything other than a line on the battlefield, and Spencer, this baby that had wanted so much to stay inside me that they had to cut him out, had just crossed over to Ron's side. I eventually got him to take my milk, but I couldn't rid myself of that feeling.
The three months of maternity leave were like being underwater. Everything was so still and silent with me and Spencer alone in the house. He'd cry when he was hungry or tired, but that was about it. He never made any of those little trickling sounds that babies make. He'd stare at me, but it was like I was some kind of complex math problem on a chalkboard. I don't know how to explain it, but it just seemed like he didn't need me that much. And if I'm being honest, I guess it irritated me. I somehow expected that when I had a baby, we would be connected by a golden thread. There would be this bond between us that I could feel, even if we were in separate rooms or cities. But I didn't feel any connection to him at all. He was like an alien in my house.
I went back to work, and it was like finally crawling ashore. My team had held down the Schick account in my absence, and within a few weeks we launched a huge online campaign for the new Quattro with Flex-Edge technology. I was then up to 750 mg of Ambitor a day, which was only slightly over the recommended daily dose. This was around the time that the article appeared in Harper's, the one that was like, Ambitor is dangerous, Ambitor has these unknown side effects. Ron encouraged me to stop taking it—at first he was sort of sweet about it, but he eventually turned belligerent. He started blaming the Ambitor for Spencer's behavior, which I thought was a little ... I mean, no one was saying anything about birth defects. This was just classic Ron, making a problem out of everything. I was still hoping that eventually Spencer would just sort of emerge from the depths, so to speak. Like, one day I'd wake up to the sound of his babbling in the next room, and I'd go in and he'd look at me and smile and say "Mama" for the first time. But it never happened.
AUGUST BURNHAM
NEWTON, MA 2012
My name is Dr. August Burnham, and I direct the Center for Neurodevelopmental Services at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. I administered the M-CHAT screening for Calvin Andersen shortly after returning to Boston from the tour for my first book, The Wide Empty Sea: Living with Childhood Disintegrative Disorder. My publicist reminded me on more than one occasion that the tour was a success, but I couldn't help feeling like it had been a lot of wasted time. A lot of sitting around in hotel rooms just to talk for a half hour in a chain bookstore in front of a dozen people who seemed to have wandered in accidentally. Radio interviews with hosts who hadn't read the book. The awkward exchanges with parents of CDD kids.
When I got back to Boston I was completely drained. I hadn't expected it to be so difficult to get back to work. I'd lost interest in almost everything. This of course had an impact on my domestic life. My partner, Bruce, and I had recently adopted a boy from Honduras, a special-needs kid with a cleft palate and some mild developmental delays—a beautiful boy named Hector, which was the perfect name for him. Little warrior prince. Hector had just undergone his first cleft palate surgery and he needed a lot of attention, and I was already—well, I'd missed the surgery because of the book tour, and I think Bruce expected me to come back and be twice as attentive and supportive. But I just couldn't bring myself to the task.
All of this is to say that when I screened Calvin I was not in the greatest shape. Calvin wasn't speaking at thirty months, and his parents had driven him to McLean from Hadley in Western Mass. Their pediatrician had diagnosed Calvin with an oral-motor delay that she thought could be corrected with speech- language therapy. They worked with a speech pathologist who told them that she'd never seen a case as pervasive as Calvin's, where there was just no trace of speech development. They were determined to get a more satisfactory diagnosis. Apparently he'd developed normally as an infant, but at eighteen months, when typically the rudiments of language are apparent, Calvin had no words or signs. The thing that was most disturbing to his parents was that not only was he not talking, but Calvin didn't seem to want to communicate with them or anyone else. He seemed to have no desire to express himself in any way.
They came to me thinking I'd be able to detect this thing. As if I were some sort of medicine man who could commune with the spirit that possessed their son. Any validation from the medical community would be an anchor for them. It would allow them to move forward in whatever direction the diagnosis pointed. But they were—it was like they were not going to leave there without a diagnosis. I was already burned-out, as I said, and their determination only put me in a worse mood. But I went ahead and led Calvin through some exercises for the M-CHAT. I asked him to go over to the padded mat in the center of the room. He didn't respond to the command, but he looked at me when I asked him, which meant that he heard me and was acknowledging me. I pointed at the mat and asked him again, and he just fixated on my face. I pointed again and asked a third time, but his gaze didn't waver. I found this very curious. Not at all like a kid with, say, autism. I went over and knelt on the mat and he followed me there. He seemed interested in what I was doing, right? Again, this is not the type of behavior you'd typically see with autism or similar conditions. I made a face at him, a sort of clownish smile, and I asked him to make the face too. But he did nothing. I made a raspberry and asked him to make one, and he gave no response. No sound, acknowledgment that he understood what I was asking, but still displaying a level of attentiveness that would be odd for any child. Something cold and analytical about it, almost as if he was examining me.
In the end he came up short on a few of the critical questions in the diagnostic. There was something going on, but I had to tell Calvin's parents that I wasn't entirely sure what it was. It clearly wasn't childhood disintegrative disorder—which, frankly, I was sick of talking about anyway. But Calvin also didn't show any of the classic ASD symptoms, aside from the language issues, which were profound. I was at a loss, to be honest, but I was intrigued by Calvin, and I asked to see him again and run some more tests. I felt a charge inside, like something I'd lost was returning to me. It was exactly the kind of focus I needed. Exactly the sort of uncharted space I'd always wanted to explore.
MONICA MELENDEZ
HOUSTON, TX 2014
The parents drove their kids in from as far away as Odessa to take part in the study. Others registered online, sending video clips and testimonials. One man flew in from Oakland once a month with his daughter, a beautiful girl named Flora, who clung to him during the tests, burying her head in the crook of his arm. I got to know all of the parents quite well. They were so consumed—to the point of obsession, really, which was understandable. By the end of the first year we had twenty-seven families in our study.
It all happened very quickly. I remember hearing Dr. Reyes describing the symptoms to a colleague at a dinner party at the provost's house, and then a few months later we'd publicly identified the condition and had thirteen diagnosed cases at the center. It was almost as if the announcement of the thing caused all of these cases to emerge. But really, who knows how long it's been around. We might never find out how many kids were just misdiagnosed over the years, living with this condition that no one understood. I heard there's a team working out of Douglas Hospital in Montreal that's searching through medical records to try to find the earliest cases—apparently there's an account from the 1980s of a factory worker with permanent aphasia who led a relatively normal life in a small town near Ottawa. I'm willing to bet there are others, but the year we conducted the study definitely had the flavor of an epidemic. Maybe epidemic is too strong a word, but you get the picture. Cases started showing up across the country. It hadn't really broken to the press in a big way at that point, but the mental health community was, I remember, starting to become obsessed.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Silent History by Eli Horowitz, Matthew Derby, Kevin Moffett. Copyright © 2014 Ying Horowitz & Quinn. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Prologue,
Hugh Purcell, Executive Director, Washington, DC, 2044,
Volume One,
Theodore Greene, El Cerrito, CA, 2011,
Nancy Jernik, Teaneck, NJ, 2011,
August Burnham, Newton, MA, 2012,
Monica Melendez, Houston, TX, 2014,
Francine Chang, Oakland, CA, 2016,
Emily Roark, York, PA, 2016,
David Dietrich, Decatur, GA, 2017,
Theodore Greene, Richmond, CA, 2017,
August Burnham, Newton, MA, 2017,
Steven Grenier, New York, NY, 2018,
Patti Kern, Pacifica, CA, 2018,
Prashant Nuregesan, Atlanta, GA, 2018,
Nancy Jernik, Teaneck, NJ, 2019,
David Dietrich, Decatur, GA, 2019,
Theodore Greene, Richmond, CA, 2020,
Francine Chang, Oakland, CA, 2020,
Volume Two,
Kourosh Aalia, Oakland, CA, 2021,
Patti Kern, Pacifica, CA, 2021,
August Burnham, Newton, MA, 2021,
Francine Chang, Oakland, CA, 2022,
Theodore Greene, Richmond, CA, 2022,
Kenule Mitee, Brooklyn, NY, 2022,
Steven Grenier, New York, NY, 2023,
David Dietrich, Decatur, GA, 2023,
Arturo Cordero Garcia, Baltimore, MD, 2024,
Prashant Nuregesan, Charlotte, NC, 2025,
Nancy Jernik, Brooklyn, NY, 2026,
John Parker Conway, Monte Rio, CA, 2026,
Francine Chang, Oakland, CA, 2027,
Patti Kern, Monte Rio, CA, 2027,
Kenule Mitee, Brooklyn, NY, 2027,
Emily Roark, Queens, NY, 2027,
Theodore Greene, Richmond, CA, 2027,
David Dietrich, Brooklyn, NY, 2027,
Palmer Carlyle, Hoboken, NJ, 2027,
Volume Three,
Theodore Greene, Richmond, CA, 2028,
Patti Kern, Monte Rio, CA, 2028,
John Parker Conway, Monte Rio, CA, 2028,
Terry "Bug" Delarosa, Villa Grande, CA, 2028,
Francine Chang, Monte Rio, CA, 2029,
Nancy Jernik, Brooklyn, NY, 2029,
Yariv Bassani, Floral Park, NY, 2029,
August Burnham, Rahway, NJ, 2030,
Drake Pope, Brooklyn, NY, 2030,
Prashant Nuregesan, Atlanta, GA, 2030,
Steven Grenier, Philadelphia, PA, 2031,
August Burnham, Rahway, NJ, 2032,
Nancy Jernik, Monte Rio, CA, 2032,
Francine Chang, Monte Rio, CA, 2032,
Theodore Greene, Richmond, CA, 2032,
Patti Kern, Monte Rio, CA, 2033,
Dr. Madeline Sorm, Sebastopol, CA, 2033,
Volume Four,
Theodore Greene, Richmond, CA, 2034,
August Burnham, Rahway, NJ, 2034,
Steven Grenier, New York, NY, 2035,
Patti Kern, Hayward, CA, 2036,
Calvin Andersen, Newark, NJ, 2036,
Prashant Nuregesan, Redwood City, CA, 2037,
Kenule Mitee, Brooklyn, NY, 2037,
Persephone Goldia, Philadelphia, PA, 2037,
Senator Ransford Sweeney, Des Moines, IA, 2038,
Zane Noerper, Waldron Island, WA, 2038,
Francine Chang, Monte Rio, CA, 2038,
John Parker Conway, Monte Rio, CA, 2038,
Nancy Jernik, Monte Rio, CA, 2039,
Theodore Greene, Richmond, CA, 2039,
August Burnham, Rahway, NJ, 2039,
David Dietrich, Richfield Springs, NY, 2039,
Patti Kern, Hayward, CA, 2039,
Nancy Jernik, Rock Island, IL, 2040,
Volume Five,
August Burnham, Acadia National Park, ME, 2040,
Calvin Andersen, Acadia National Park, ME, 2040,
Persephone Goldia, Philadelphia, PA, 2040,
Francine Chang, Rock Island, IL, 2040,
Theodore Greene, Richmond, CA, 2040,
David Dietrich, Rock Island, IL, 2040,
Brian Ng, Rock Island, IL, 2040,
Patti Kern, Rock Island, IL, 2040,
Nancy Jernik, New Liberty, IA, 2040,
Theodore Greene, Rock Island, IL, 2040,
Francine Chang, New Liberty, IA, 2040,
Patti Kern, New Liberty, IA, 2040,
David Dietrich, American Highway, 2040,
Calvin Andersen, Acadia National Park, ME, 2040,
Steven Grenier, Charlottesville, VA, 2040,
August Burnham, Portland, ME, 2040,
Gorton Vaher, Philadelphia, PA, 2040,
Kenule Mitee, Brooklyn, NY, 2040,
Volume Six,
Calvin Andersen, Rock Island, IL, 2040,
Theodore Greene, Rock Island, IL, 2040,
Francine Chang, New Liberty, IA, 2040,
Patti Kern, New Liberty, IA, 2040,
Nancy Jernik, New Liberty, IA, 2040,
Francine Chang, New Liberty, IA, 2040,
John Parker Conway, Monte Rio, CA, 2040,
August Burnham, Portland, ME, 2040,
Steven Grenier, New Liberty, IA, 2040,
Nancy Jernik, Chicago, IL, 2040,
John Parker Conway, Monte Rio, CA, 2040,
August Burnham, Chicago, IL, 2040,
Kenule Mitee, Lagos, Nigeria, 2041,
Francine Chang, Oakland, CA, 2041,
Gorton Vaher, Philadelphia, PA, 2041,
Patti Kern, Spindletop, KY, 2041,
Theodore Greene, Oakland, CA, 2041,
Epilogue,
Calvin Andersen, Terlingua, TX, 2043,
Acknowledgments,
A Note About the Authors,
Copyright,