Author Heath, aged 6, helps autism sufferers
HEATH GRACE will be celebrating the international publication of his first book with friends today.
Nothing unusual about that, you may think, but Heath is only sixyears-old and the friends he will be celebrating with are his fellow pupils at Stithians Primary School in Cornwall.
If that is not surprising enough, Heath actually wrote and illustrated the book when he was just five and he has a celebrity fan in TV presenter Chris Packham, who wrote the book’s foreword.
Heath, from Carnkie, near Redruth, wrote My Mummy Is Autistic – which is published by Routledge on October 22 – because his mummy is indeed autistic.
Jo Grace, who works as a sensory engagement and inclusion specialist as founder of The Sensory Projects, was only diagnosed four years ago.
She said: “I’m very typical of a generation of women who are referred to in research as a lost generation. The diagnostic criteria for autism is written around what autism looks like in boys. Girls like me weren’t found, so currently there’s a whole spate of us getting diagnosed at the same time.
“The insight it has given me as to how I’m different to other people has been transformative. I process language at a different speed to other people, which leads to misunderstandings. Before, I would have been stuck to understand what those misunderstandings were about, but now I know bits of my brain are working differently.”
It was due to this that Heath wrote his colourful book following a day’s shopping with his mum.
Jo ran over Heath’s foot with the trolley because she didn’t hear him say ‘stop’ due to her problems processing language. He told her it had happened “because your brain is different” and that her words were lining up, ready to come out.
Jo said: “He got a pen and drew me a picture of the words lining up to prove he understood. The image was really clear and it was the first or second day of the summer holidays. I’m trained as a primary school teacher, so I was thinking: ‘Ah ha, this could be a way of getting him to practise writing through the holidays’.
“I told him the picture was really good and he could probably explain my brain to other people who do not understand as well as he does.
“We did a few more pictures over the coming days and then he got fed up, so I packed it all away. I had only been imagining stapling them together to make a book for home.
“After a while, I spoke to him about the books I have written – I’m a published author too – and said often writing them was boring, but having written them felt good. The next day I offered him the choice of writing another page and he sat down and worked on it diligently. He did a page a day from then on.
“At the end of it I looked, and it is tricky being his mother because obviously I think everything he does is brilliant, but they really were so clear, so I sent them to one of my editors at Routledge and they loved it too. If a five-year-old can understand and explain autism, it asks a question of the wider world.”
Nature presenter Packham, who also has autism, was impressed. He agreed to write the book’s foreword, and the family are over the moon at the result.
Jo said: “Someone we know showed him some of Heath’s drawings and he liked them so much he said he would write a foreword, but normally people have to pay. Because Heath was five when he wrote the book, he would swap it for making a bird box.
“So Heath made a bird box and we hoped Chris would write something like ‘I like this book’, but he has written the most beautiful essay as it meant a lot to him. When he saw our friend again, the first thing he asked him was how was the book going.”
Chris wrote: “There is a remarkable tenderness here, between mother and child, an acceptance which is both beautiful and charming and heart-warming. The drawings offer a clarity, the voice of the child a purity, uncomplicated and direct. But of course what seals its success is the equally honest and pragmatic replies from the adult.”
Heath read a passage out to our reporter: “Mummy’s brain hear words slower than my brain. My brain hears words quickly.”
He is going to be taking cakes into school today to celebrate the book’s ‘birthday’.
Jo added: “The publishers were especially pleased that the book looks at autism from the point of view of the child regarding the adult, as autism is often portrayed as a child’s ‘problem’, something to be grown out of. We just hope Heath’s book will help other people.”