Myomancy ADHD, Dyslexia and Autism

The Ride Together: A Brother and Sister’s Memoir of Autism in the Family

Paul Karasik

$5.26 via Amazon

Meet the Karasiks, a typical middle-class 1960s family: one mother, one father, one daughter, and three sons, one of whom, David, has autism.

The Ride Together is an extraordinary family memoir told in alternating chapters of comics and text. With a narrative that stretches over nearly fifty years, Paul and Judy Karasik — he writes with pictures, she with words — unite to relate the story of their family, their brother David, and the history of their relationship with him. In doing so, each comes to understand the responsibility David represents and the meaning his life gives theirs.

In the pages of The Ride Together, David grows from child to man, remaining dependent on others, even as he witnesses his siblings leaving home — and him — for careers and lives of their own. He speaks in a code of his own; he performs his own versions of The Adventures of Superman and Face the Nation; he writes page after page of television synopses.

What he understands of life and death no one can truly tell, yet David walks through his days with dignity and, as it turns out, endurance.

At first glance the adventure of this book is its brilliant experiment of form — the story of a brother with autism told in a style that is as unusual as the subject matter. But The Ride Together goes deeper than that: It takes a family that may appear strange to some — like many families with disabilities — and reveals a group of people whose acceptance of what life has dealt them helps them persevere through good times and bad.

Praised by writers for its craft and by families for its authenticity, The Ride Together provides a remarkable portrait of a family with a difference.

People who have brought this book wrote:

What a unique and astounding experience this book is. The authors tell the story of their autistic brother in a way that made me shake my head in wonder. Alternating chapters of prose and graphic/illustrated text paint a portrait of such power and poignant insight that neither method alone could ever achieve. For me, it was like when, after instumental music has taken us as far as it can, the vocal chorus kicks in in Beethoven's Ninth. As I read (and re-read) this book, I found that the chapters were almost conducting a dialog with each other, with "prose" chapters challenging the "words-and-pictures" ones, and vice versa, each chapter upping the narrative ante. Because the format alternates as it does, our brains are constantly challenged and engaged, and we get to know David and all the members of the Karasik family in wasy that make it unlikely that we will soon forget them.

A stunning achievement.

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