Autism Misinformation and Stereotyping in Angie Kim's "Happiness Falls"
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Angie Kim’s new novel, Happiness Falls, opens on a minor miracle. Mia, the novel’s sardonic undergraduate protagonist, finds herself literally bowled over by her younger brother, Eugene, who sprints across their lawn with strength and coordination he’s never before demonstrated. Eugene is autistic and has another developmental disorder called mosaic Angelman syndrome, which causes difficulty with speech, balance, and intellectual development. (The “mosaic” means that Eugene “has two distinct sets of genes in his body: some cells with an imprinting defect and some that function normally,” which means he’s less affected than many people with the disorder.) In other words, he can walk, but he can’t run—until, suddenly, he can. “I’d never seen Eugene look so graceful, so typical,” Mia reflects.
As the novel progresses, Eugene’s limitations will come to seem more theoretical than real. (Spoilers for Happiness Falls follow.) In their quest to discover the whereabouts of their missing patriarch, John, whose disappearance seems to have set Eugene running, Mia and her family are also shocked to learn that he and Eugene have secretly been attending a form of communication therapy known as “poke-point-type” (PPT), and that as a result, Eugene can spell out words, sentences, and even jokes with the help of a trained facilitator who holds up a letterboard while he moves a stylus from letter to letter. (In a recording of a session, they watch as the facilitator, Angeli, asks Eugene to name an alternative energy source, and he spells out “wind” and “nucular.”) Understandably, this brings his family immense joy while also forcing them to reconsider how they’ve treated him over the years. John may be permanently missing, presumed dead, but the family has essentially gained a new member, one who, at the novel’s conclusion, is learning how to use a computerized text-to-speech device.
Regrettably, the narrative Kim paints—of a non-verbal autistic adolescent who has never learned to spell or read learning to communicate through a facilitator—is, generously, fantastical. Less generously, Eugene’s journey in Happiness Falls can be described as propaganda for a real-life therapeutic method known as “facilitated communication” (FC), in which patients point at letterboards, typically with the help of a facilitator holding their hand. (The stylus Eugene uses is an invention of Kim’s.) Despite copious evidence that FC does not work, however, and can in fact be dangerous to autistic people and their families, it remains alluring to parents of nonverbal autistic children, and Kim presents it as liberating for Eugene in Happiness Falls.
Both Happiness Falls and her popular debut, Miracle Creek, have been praised by critics and readers, but they advance pernicious and outdated ideas about autism. Below, I explain more about the dangers of FC and of Kim’s work, and consider the significance of her books in a publishing and critical ecosystem in which narratives about disabled people are chronically undervalued. In recent years, publishers have received pressure to think more critically about the way their books represent women, BIPOC characters, and queer characters, and many critics have become sensitive to works that fail on these fronts. While there is still a long way to go to make publishing a more equitable space for all marginalized communities, I believe that publishers and review publications are especially ill-equipped to understand and serve the needs of disabled people. The best way to rectify this is to hire more disabled workers and critics, and to publish more disabled writers.
A still from an Apple ad featuring FC.
What is facilitated communication (FC)?
Over the years, facilitated communication (FC), the method on which Kim bases Eugene’s speech therapy in Happiness Falls, has been publicized and rebranded by promoters including Douglas Blinken, who founded the Facilitated Communication Institute at Syracuse University; Soma Mukhopadhyay, who founded the “rapid prompting method” to communicate with her autistic son; and Elizabeth Vossellar, who founded “Spelling to Communicate” and served as “an important beta reader” for Happiness Falls. No matter who is teaching the method, and no matter what it is called, it serves primarily as a way to comfort the parents of autistic children, rather than an authentic way for those children (and adults) to communicate. As a 2015 journal article on the practice concluded, “The overwhelming majority of well-conducted peer-reviewed studies reach the same conclusion: FC is a powerful illusion in which facilitators unknowingly author messages using the hand of a person with a disability.” (The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association and the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities have both formally denounced FC.) The process is typically corrupted in the following fashion: “The facilitators often have to direct clients, ignore incoherent spelling, and ‘reset’ them if they are not giving a meaningful response.” Advocates of FC, including Kim, are eager to explain away why patients cannot be tested and cannot communicate with family members (anxiety), but peer-reviewed studies show that the practice simply does not work.
Advocates of FC believe that autism is a physical, rather than a cognitive, condition, despite extensive research into the nature of autism and personal accounts from autistic people, many of whom are perfectly capable of explaining their own experiences, which often include difficulties in social situations, discomfort produced by noise and other stimuli, and many other factors. In the documentary Spellers, however, Elizabeth Vossellar claimed that “Speech is 100% motor, language is 100 cognitive. And you can tell they’re in two different areas of the brain. Speech up here, language is down there.” This is, obviously, absurd. To most people, the connection between speech, language, and thought should be intuitive: how often do we solve problems by talking them through? The entire discipline of psychotherapy, for instance, depends on this process.
The belief that autism is a motor problem and nothing more is, however, appealing to (some) parents of nonverbal children who wish, badly, to believe that their children are not really disabled, just physically impeded. This mindset is consistent with a view that autism can be cured (Kim suggests as much in Miracle Creek, as described below), and many proponents of FC have connections to figures and organizations who are notorious in the autism community. Mukhopadhyay, the “inventor” of RPM, was previously affiliated with the Cure Autism Now Foundation, which merged with the reviled advocacy group Autism Speaks in 2007. (Both organizations have been criticized for researching a prenatal test for autism.) Spellers, meanwhile, was partly funded by anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Another prominent anti-vaxxer, J.B. Handley, wrote a memoir about how his son was freed by Vossellar’s method. (Kennedy Tweeted that it was a “MUST READ.”)
Though Kim has not explicitly come out against vaccines, her novels encourage beliefs similar to those outlined above. She includes an unusually lengthy author’s note at the end of Happiness Falls in which she explicitly advocates for FC: although the novel is wholly fictionalized, she writes, “Eugene’s story is based on the lives of real people—nonspeakers who overcame the erroneous, lifelong presumption that they were severely intellectually disabled and learned to communicate through spelling and typing.” Later in the note, she wonders, “What if these people can’t speak because of motor challenges rather than cognitive deficits? What if we focus on improving their motor skills and sensory regulation so they can point to letters to communicate?”
This view of autism privileges the concerned parent rather than the autistic child. Instead of trying to meet the child where they are, and attempting to understand their experience of the world, the child is reshaped into a being more familiar and understandable to the parent—i.e., one who can communicate using fluent language. Some autistic people can communicate using keyboards that they operate independently, but there are also many autistic people who simply do not talk. Although Kim denounces people who judge nonverbal individuals, she displays a very limited view of human experience in this novel by failing to envision an experience of the world in which language is not a person’s primary mode of communication. This is especially galling because she also compares the experience of disabled people to her own as an immigrant who struggled to communicate in English. The experience of an abled immigrant living in a foreign country, while no doubt difficult, is simply not comparable to that of a disabled person who does not have linguistic capabilities.
Eugene’s narrative is especially absurd given that the majority of people with Angelman syndrome also do not speak. According to the Mayo Clinic, individuals with this syndrome experience “delayed development, problems with speech and balance, intellectual disability, and, sometimes, seizures.” They also, as Kim extensively describes in her book, smile and laugh often. The disability is clearly wearing for parents: depressingly, 95% of parents of children with Angelman syndrome would “cure” their children if they could, and “‘expressive speech’ [is] one of the top categories of desired improvement.” But people with this disability can communicate, even if they are not, generally, capable of “expressive speech”: as one study put it, they “have a wide repertoire of non-verbal communicative behaviours, mainly characterized by gestures, although advanced forms such as symbolic communication are used by some individuals.” Instead of focusing on how individuals with this disorder do communicate with the world, Kim has created a fantasy scenario in which people with Angelman syndrome think more like herself.
FC not only takes away the agency of nonverbal individuals—as one journal article puts it, the practice renders the disabled individual a “disempowered and a passive participant in their own life”—but can also cause serious and lasting harm to those individuals and their family members. Many criminal and abuse cases have begun with FC. Most famously, the facilitator Anna Stubblefield was convicted of sexual assault after she embarked upon a “relationship” with the man for whom she was operating as a facilitator, who did not have the legal right to consent to sex. Gigi Jordan, meanwhile, murdered her eight-year-old son after claiming that he had communicated to her that he had been abused and was asking to be killed through FC. Other people have been separated from their parents after “accusing” them of abuse through FC. Janyce Boynton, a former facilitator who now advocates against the practice, has described her unwitting role in one such case, which she later regretfully described as “confirmation bias.” Needless to say, these grim episodes do not get a mention in Happiness Falls.
How do Miracle Creek and Happiness Falls play into autistic stereotypes?
It feels almost beside the point to drill into the specifics of Happiness Falls when the most important takeaway from the novel should be the dangers of FC. This may not be very good or interesting literary criticism, but when a book promotes such a dangerous message, it’s hard to focus on anything else. But both of Kim’s books are readable and acclaimed (and Happiness Falls looks likely to become similarly popular to Miracle Creek), which makes the troubling messaging about autism she includes within them even more pernicious. If her books weren’t entertaining, nobody would read them, and they wouldn’t be so dangerous.
Both Miracle Creek and Happiness Falls are engaging mystery novels, particularly Happiness Falls, which I found a fast read until FC began to overtake the narrative. Kim writes persuasively about the experience of first- and second-generation Korean-Americans in both books, and her teenage narrator Mia in Happiness Falls is entertainingly kooky. Though neither book features superlative prose, and each has some flaws—the structure of Miracle Creek, which revolves around a trial, can drag, while Happiness Falls features intrusive footnotes and a lot of theories about the mathematics of happiness that I didn’t find very interesting—they are readable, which I’m sure accounts for their positive reception and (at least in Miracle Creek’s case) popularity.
If anything, Miracle Creek’s depiction of autistic people is even more offensive than Happiness Falls. The novel revolves around the explosion of a hyperbaric oxygen therapy chamber (HBOT) that results in the death of an autistic child, Henry. Henry’s mother, Elizabeth, is charged with his murder, and the book revolves around her trial. As the novel progresses, though, Kim paints Elizabeth in an increasingly sympathetic light—including her decision to administer Henry IV chelation treatment, even though chelation treatment is grounded in the incorrect belief that vaccines cause autism, and can be fatal. Kim also writes that Henry has been cured of autism as a result of Elizabeth’s aggressive plan of therapies. This, needless to say, is not possible: autism is not a disease.
But Elizabeth is not presented as a perfect mother, either. Shortly before Henry’s death, she feels that she has been overworking him, and vows to cancel his future therapies. Readers can thus feel sympathy for Henry, and distance themselves from Elizabeth’s intensity. She only cancels these therapies, however, after Henry has been “cured” of autism. Happiness Falls accomplishes a similar sleight of hand by making the reader feel complicit in judging Eugene by his outside appearance, as Kim suggests in her author’s note. A reader who is not familiar with autism or disability narratives can easily be persuaded to go along with Kim’s unrealistic narrative by feeling that sympathizing with Eugene’s impossible progress is actually a sign of humility and deference to a disabled character. Mia herself feels this: she reads a blog post that explains that Eugene and others who have been “trapped” in their nonverbal conditions have PTSD from the experience, and feels extreme guilt at her part in his trauma. The reader, who identifies with Mia, is encouraged to feel the same thing.
In fact, Eugene’s rapid intellectual progress fulfills a classic stereotype of autistic people in fiction, that of the brilliant autistic savant. Though depictions of autistic characters have been moving away from this stereotype, which has been prevalent at least since the 1988 film Rain Man, savant figures (like the main characters of The Big Bang Theory and The Good Doctor) remain overrepresented in media. These characters are typically white males in their 20s and 30s. Eugene, at least, is a biracial male teenager, but his story is familiar enough it confirms incorrect biases about autistic people—i.e., that they are all secretly brilliant.
Why does it all matter?
While knowledge of autism, and advocacy by autistic people, has increased in recent years, misinformation and stigma still plague public attitudes toward the condition. For example, a 2018 academic study found that people who self-reported positive attitudes about autism were still likely to have “dehumanizing attitudes” about autistic people, and parents can struggle with the expectations they have of their autistic children. Overcoming “dehumanizing attitudes” about autism will, and has been, a long process, but one crucial component of that process is that works of fiction represent autistic people realistically and with dignity, given how people absorb information about autism from popular media.
When authors like Kim disseminate dangerous misinformation about autism, then, their work can have serious repercussions among people who are poorly informed about the condition. Kim has received little oversight from her publishers or cultural critics on this front. Miracle Creek was hugely popular, received glowing reviews, and won the prestigious Edgar Award for Best First (Mystery) Novel. It was also blurbed by acclaimed authors including Alexander Chee, Laura Lippman, and Jennifer Weiner. Happiness Falls boasts an even more dazzling series of endorsements, including from Imbolo Mbue, Ann Napolitano, Gary Schteyngart, Gabrielle Zevin, and others. It has already received starred reviews from Kirkus and Booklist and received gushing reviews from the Washington Post—“We rarely see a novel this assured that centers on disability”—and the Boston Globe—“Initially diagnosed with autism, Eugene has had a complicated journey, and Kim shows, with equal amounts of research, empathy, and respect, what it’s like to live with a child with special needs and how that can affect a family and make them grow in many ways.” A tepid review in the New York Times focuses more on the novel’s literary shortcomings than its depiction of disability.
It is imperative that readers, critics, and publishers approach stories about characters with disabilities more rigorously and with more skepticism. This is not the first book to valorize FC: The Reason I Jump, a memoir “written” by an autistic teenager named Naoki Higashada, made waves in 2013 when it was published in an English translation by the author David Mitchell. (Kim names a character in Happiness Falls after Higashada.) That memoir was received with some skepticism—“We have to be careful about turning what we find into what we want,” the New York Times review cautioned—but not enough to stop it from becoming a bestseller and being turned into a documentary. Now, ten years later, Kim’s advocacy on behalf of FC has been received with no skepticism, and will likely drive more parents to look into the practice. Instead, she has received credit for writing about disabled characters, a practice so rare that it seems worthy of praise to many. But the mere act of including disabled characters in novels does not make them successful. Instead, as I’ve already suggested, it can have the opposite effect.
As I argued above, the depiction of disabled people in popular media receives uniquely little scrutiny from critics, likely because there are so few disabled critics working. While I am not interested in proposing a hierarchy of hardship amongst marginalized groups, I do believe that America’s creative industries and established venues for cultural criticism desperately need to improve how they approach stories of disability. Miracle Creek, for example, was strongly praised for its depiction of a struggling immigrant family from South Korea, while the novel’s ugly ideas about “curing” autism were ignored. If publishers, editors, and writers were more attuned to ableist tropes—and simply better informed about the lives of disabled people—books like Miracle Creek and Happiness Falls would not enjoy such universal praise and propagate such dangerous ideas about autism and disability.
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