Life, Animated (40 page)

This book is a family affair. As the designated writer, I’m mostly a facilitator of expression—the voices and feelings and insights of my wife and sons. There is pressure in any work of nonfiction to be true to the sometimes-elusive hearts and minds of subjects and sources. In this instance, that desire was deeply intensified, as were the complexities of turning private experiences into a public manuscript. I’ve lived much of my life in public. The central characters of this book—the most important people in the world to me—have not.

But we plunged into the bright lights together, with my wife—thankfully, a skilled writer and editor—in the lead. She helped structure our life so this book would be possible and then steeled us for the rigors of emotional inquiry and research. Soon enough, we found ourselves floating across the past twenty years like a pair of ghosts, looking down at our little family, a quartet of confused actors, with a mix of intimacy and distance. It was wrenching—having to basically live difficult moments of our lives over again—but, at day’s end, deeply affecting.

We needed a map, and the pile of source materials—neuropsychological tests and school reports, home movies, cards and letters, audiotapes and notebooks, provided one. We have often used our journalistic skills to document the unfolding events so that, at the very least, we could be well informed in our consultations with teachers, therapists, artists, coaches, and, of course, medical professionals.

We traversed two decades with this close community, and several were key consultants for this book. For that, and so much more, we’re thankful to the following: Dr. Alan Rosenblatt, Dr. C. T. Gordon, and Dr. Lance Clawson; our testing guru Bill Stixrud and therapists Christine Sproat, Sharon Lockwood, Jennifer Bilyew, and Debbie Regan; an array of artists, musicians, coaches, and counselors, including Ruthlee Adler, Tony Rheil, Maureen O’Brien, Tyler Ostholohoff, Karen Soltes, DJ Butler, Jeremy Jenkins, Ronde Baquie, Frank Scardino, Fallon Nickelsen, and Megan Holland. And, finally, the dedicated educators: Lucy Cohen, Stephanie deSibour, Jan Wintrol at Ivymount School; Susan Whitaker, Colleen Bain, and Cathy Parker at NCRC; Pamela Knudson, Jennifer Owen, and Lydia Kepich at Lab School; and at KTS, Rhona Schwartz, Jonathan Davis, Audrey Achmed, Lisy Holloway, and Dustin Hartwigsen. A special note of thanks as well to Nate Olin, Owen’s brilliant art teacher, and all the folks at Riverview School, led by the inimitable Maureen Brenner. And to our coconspirators, Gabrielle and George Jathas, thanks for all your trust and good humor.

There are two people who have worked closely with Owen for years and to whom we owe the greatest debt of gratitude for all that they have taught us and the doors that they helped open to our son: Suzie Blattner and Dan Griffin. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts.

A turning point, early on, was our encounter with a villain who acted like a hero. That would be a gentle, large-hearted actor, Jonathan Freeman—the voice of Jafar—who came into our orbit and has since become our dear friend and the brightest star in Owen’s constellation. Our gratitude extends to all the animators Owen has met over the years who were so generous with their time—along with the voice-work actor, Jim Cummings. These folks have helped our son appreciate his talents and believe that anything was possible.

There are too many friends to thank—our Dedham buddies, the “farm friends,” the Boston college gang, our beloved Washingtonians. During the period of this book and its writing, the constancy of these friendships have sustained us.

A new friend and assistant at the Kennedy School, Greg Larson, stepped in with strong early research. Our beloved Greg Jackson, a former assistant of mine, who has since become an established fiction writer, brilliantly edited the first third of the book, and helped in structuring the rest. And then there is a writer that the world already knows—the novelist Howard Norman—who has long been my indispensible shtetl chum and counsel on both living and writing. He was my guide from the first days of this project and helped shepherd it to its finale, reading it chapter by chapter and standing ready for calls, day or night. I really cannot thank him enough.

Every book is a journey, and this one took us to the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy, where we worked for a month, outlining the book and writing, with Cornelia delivering long memos each day about our life for me to shape into narrative. At this moment of inception, we were graced with a very talented community of fellows, friends all, who are kindred in this project, as are the foundation’s Rob Garris and the Bellagio Center’s elegant director, Pilar Palacia.

There were supporters in Cambridge, from my friend Alex Jones at Harvard’s Kennedy School Shorenstein Center, where the project formally began in 2012, to Larry Lessig, director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, where I’ve spent two years as the senior fellow.

We traveled quite a bit to test our ideas and experiences against expert perspectives. To try to understand what we’d observed and place it in the context of the latest research, we met with David Amaral and his colleagues at the MIND Institute at the University of California, Davis; Hazel Sive at MIT; Simon Baron-Cohen at Cambridge University Autism Research Centre in the UK; Ricardo Dolmetsch at Stanford University; Tom Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH); Gerald Fischbach at the Simons Foundation in New York; and Margaret Bauman at Harvard. All were tremendously helpful and generous with their time.

Wendy Lefkon, Kingswell’s editorial director, saw the potential in this book from the very start, championed it, and enriched it with her skillful editing. She has been my trusted partner and friend from day one. Thanks also go to Ellice Lee for her creative art direction, Seale Ballenger for his strategic efforts, Arlene Goldberg for her endless patience with our last-minute fixes, Marybeth Tregarthen for her production wizardry, and all the rest of the talented Kingswell team.

Thanks to Lori Slavin, for her inspiration on the title, and to my intrepid agent Andrew Wylie, always a sober judge of projects and a master at seeing them to completion.

And it all circles back to family…

The Suskind/Kennedy clan of cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents has always been there for Owen and for us, every step of the way, with support and faith and love. “Without you, there’d be no us.”

Walt, our eldest son, just starting out in his adult life, didn’t exactly have a book figured into his busy schedule. But, like everything else he’s ever done, he stepped forward with his generous spirit, great memory, and wonderful sense of humor to add so much to these pages, as he does to our life. Thanks, Walt.

And, finally, there’s the person who inspired and guided this project. He is now very much a young man. We wouldn’t have proceeded with this book if Owen had not arrived at the maturity and self-awareness to say, forcefully—as he did—“Yes! I want people to know me for who I am, and to know people like me for who they are.”

He trusts the world, even while knowing it so often falls short. His story is far from over; in some ways, it is just beginning. But his faith in the power of story, and our capacity to believe in one another and show kindness, lights every page of this book. Right to the end.

RON SUSKIND
is the author of four
New York Times
best sellers and the critically acclaimed,
A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League
. His other books include
Confidence Men
,
The Way of the World
,
The One Percent Doctrine
, and
The Price of Loyalty
. He was the senior national affairs writer for the
Wall Street Journal
, where he won the Pulitzer Prize and is currently the senior fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife, Cornelia Kennedy. Their older son, Walt, lives in Washington, DC, and Owen (pictured here with his dad at age twelve) lives independently on Cape Cod.