FRAGILE INNOCENCE

Pulitzer Prize–winner Reston (Dogs of God, 2005, etc.) tells a harrowing, personal story about parenting a sick daughter.

Life was just about perfect: a successful writing career, a beautiful wife, three lovely children. Then tragedy struck. Reston’s youngest child, Hillary, fell ill. What started out as a seemingly run-of-the-mill fever turned into an illness that ravaged Hillary’s brain. (The Restons have never been certain what the illness actually is.) Though Hillary lived, she sustained severe brain damage, losing her ability to speak. Here, Reston chronicles two decades of family life. Gradually, he and his wife, Denise, move from tortured self-pity to an absolute adoration of Hillary and an understanding that she is wonderful just as she is. Hillary’s older siblings emerge as heroes, though near the end of the book (and none too soon) Reston reflects on the ways each of his older children has been shaped, and perhaps a bit scarred, by growing up in such stressful circumstances. There is real polemic threaded through this memoir—an insistence that disabled, retarded or handicapped children’s lives matter just as much as everyone else’s. (If you imagine that no one would say otherwise in this politically correct age, think again; sometimes even Hillary’s physicians suggest that, well, if her kidney failure kills her, maybe everyone will be better off.) The book is marred by Reston’s distracting insistence that mothers are more attentive to their kids than fathers and that they of course feel the sorrows of children’s illnesses more deeply. When describing his and Denise’s dreams about Hillary, “As usual, the mother’s dreams were more vivid.”

Moving.