Reviewed by Amanda Apgar
Content Warning: references to ableism, quoting of and references to negative language and beliefs about Autism, references to problematic public discourse regarding neurodivergence and disablement
April is Autism Acceptance Month. Alongside the usual fundraising campaigns and hostile debates over the puzzle piece symbol, April 2025 brought a fresh wave of controversy: the CDC released new prevalence data (1 in 31), followed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s statement that autistic children will never grow up to pay taxes, or play baseball, or get married, and that “autism destroys families.” Responses were swift and varied. Some parents of children with high-needs autism thanked RFK and renewed calls for a cure. A handful of autistic adults clapped back by TikToking about paying taxes and writing poetry, before other advocates chided them for reinforcing the ableist logic that equates human worth with productivity. Most surprisingly, RFK’s statement galvanized the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network and their longtime nemesis, Autism Speaks, to issue a joint statement condemning his anti-vaccine stance.
Despite public fractures, most parties — parents, self-advocates, and providers — privately agree on one fundamental point: every autistic person has support needs, and the real crisis is the near-total absence of meaningful, consistent, quality support. That absence is captured vividly in Amy Macklin’s new memoir, Henry’s Classroom: A Special Education in American Motherhood.
While I personally wouldn’t choose to release an autism memoir in the wake of hell month, Macklin’s story may resonate across divides. Henry was diagnosed under DSM-IV with PDD-NOS, though Macklin explains that if Henry didn’t have a speech delay, he would have been diagnosed with Asperger syndrome (more aligned with today’s “level one”). Henry’s needs are not as intense as those of many autistic people; he doesn’t engage in pica or elopement, eventually speaks fluently, and does not have an intellectual disability. Yet Macklin’s memoir powerfully demonstrates how even families of “lower-need” children are ground down by the cumulative strain of social abandonment — a strain that isolates caregivers—usually mothers—and reconfigures their lives around the endless labor of making up for broken systems.
People sometimes think I write about parents parenting, when really, I study the stories parents tell; the narrative turns they take, how gender and race enable narrative motion and resolution, and how to frame these narratives within prevailing contexts. In earlier work, I argued that the parental memoir subgenre of disability life writing is often structured around a white, hetero-abled narrative of overcoming. From that perspective, Macklin’s memoir initially seems familiar.
While her story begins not in tragedy but in hardship, it still arcs toward a happy new chapter — though crucially, not quite toward “overcoming.” Gender dynamics shape key moments in Henry’s story: he is bullied by a boy on the bus; Macklin fears the judgment of other boys; a male teacher enables one of Henry’s breakthroughs; her husband is largely absent. Yet unlike many memoirs that rely heavily on gender normativity to reclaim the promise of an ordinary childhood, Macklin resists both the pull of ordinariness and the lure of heterosexual futurity.
Instead, Henry’s Classroom is about accepting Henry’s neurodivergence and trying to provide him more than the bare minimum, only to be met with a series of indirect “noes”: short-lived programs, overburdened and understaffed services, endless waits, and hour-long drives.
Indeed, readers of Macklin’s memoir will spend an ungodly amount of time with her in her minivans (RIP “the spaceship”) as she waits in school pickup lines, drives Henry to therapies, evaluations, and enrichment programs, to then wait again because the distances make it inefficient to leave. Over time, a “Mom in the Minivan” emerges in Macklin’s memoir as a figure shaped not by choice, but by systemic failure.
What Macklin wants for Henry and her other children — and what they deserve — she hacks together almost entirely on her own. Her efforts consume her life. “The cumulative effects of this nonexistent support nearly broke me,” she writes, as rage, dread, and anxiety engender a special-needs version of the deflated soccer mom, white-knuckling the steering wheel of her Toyota Sienna.
Macklin’s memoir belongs to a rare subset of parental narratives that weave personal experience with a broader investigation of systemic failure. The most notable example is Michael Bérubé’s Life As We Know It, a memoir of raising his son Jamie alongside a comprehensive introduction to disability politics. Macklin, too, moves beyond her family’s story to reexamine the brokenness of diagnostic processes, the relentlessness of IEP teams, and the dreary parade of budget shortfalls.
Yet the most devastating “systemic” failure she illuminates is not bureaucratic: it is the social desolation she and Henry experience, an isolation that defines life for many autistic people and their families, no matter where they fall on the spectrum of need and whether or not they align with a social model of disability. Parenting a disabled child and growing up disabled is walking a lonely road. Other kids can be cruel. Other parents struggle to relate. Mothers carry most of this weight. Of all the challenges facing autistic people and families, social isolation might be the simplest to address and the easiest to solve if the autistic community could come together instead of competing for a place at the bottom. Alas.
Intracommunity debates treat autistic needs like a zero-sum game, as if one group’s recognition must come at the expense of another’s survival. Then again, the stakes are brutally high: resources like specialized autistic medical care, respite services, supportive classrooms, research funding, and even basic social integration are limited to the point of vanishing. Looming cuts to Medicaid make the future even bleaker. These are desperate times.
Macklin’s memoir quietly echoes this desperation. She ultimately pulls Henry from general education, homeschools him, teaches to his interests, connects him with like-minded peers, and he thrives. It’s a victory for Henry, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. But it’s also a highly individualized solution, one not easily replicable for families without Macklin’s resources, stability, or good fortune (none of which were guaranteed or easily gained). Henry’s success, however hard-won, underscores the brutal gap between what some families can patch together, what others survive without, and what for others still is not even in the realm of possibility.
The fact that Macklin can solve many of her family’s challenges (though not without profound stress, grief, and loneliness) risks reinforcing two damaging and intertwined myths:
(a) that the challenges of autism are surmountable, if
(b) parents, especially mothers, work harder for their children.
But the capacity of parents to address their children’s needs varies dramatically between families caring for “level 1” children like Henry and those raising “level 3” children who may be totally dependent, self-injurious, and without meaningful communication. Henry’s loneliness, and Macklin’s exhaustion, are real and deserve compassion — especially from the high-needs community, who might be tempted to dismiss her story as “struggle-lite.” At the same time, the low-needs contingent must reckon with the validity of caregiver concerns among the higher-needs population. Memoirs like Macklin’s may dominate numerically among the genre (and her son’s profile among the autistic population), but the severity of crisis among the minority demands the entire community’s attention and allyship.
The autistic community’s refusal to rally around its most vulnerable members is tearing it apart. At minimum, the community could coalesce around one shared demand: that mothers, and all caregivers, not be left to shoulder this alone. Here, too, Macklin’s memoir offers an uncomfortable but resonant lesson. Her subtitle — A Special Education in American Motherhood — captures a grim familiarity: there is everything ordinary, and nothing remotely “special,” about the abandonment she experiences. Autism parents still face the same Bettelheimesque burden of blame, now compounded by institutional indifference and intracommunity infighting.
May the autism community have mercy on Amy Macklin.
Links:
- New prevalence data: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/74/ss/ss7402a1.htm
- “autism destroys families”: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/18/well/autism-kennedy-reaction.html
- Some parents thanked RFK: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/25/opinion/autism-rfk-parent-child.html
- TikToking about paying taxes: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIjoEAIviZL/?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ%3D%3D
- Chided for ableist logics: https://www.facebook.com/100069984194813/posts/pfbid0Be9mbgM5USeWxKJHobssftSJGP38dfHpiLspn5UkCHfWdQJbB2HTuxcEDtJyC2m5l/?mibextid=wwXIfr
- Joint statement from ASAN and Autism Speaks: https://autisticadvocacy.org/2025/04/leading-autism-organizations-release-joint-statement-on-upholding-scientific-integrity-and-supporting-the-autism-community/
- People sometimes think I write about parenting: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/chso.12844
- In earlier work: https://press.umich.edu/Books/T/The-Disabled-Child2
- Michael Bérubé Life As We Know It: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/13124/life-as-we-know-it-by-michael-berube/
- The minority: https://losangelesbookreview.com/review/girl-storm-a-memoir-of-chaos-humor-and-resilience-in-the-path-of-profound-autism/
Title: Henry’s Classroom: A Special Education in American Motherhood
Author: Amy Macklin
Publisher: Apprentice House
Date: 2025
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About the Reviewer
Amanda Apgar is an associate professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Loyola Marymount University and the author of The Disabled Child, Memoirs of a Normal Future (University of Michigan Press, 2023).