Jen Mercier

Best. Rock. Memoir. Ever. A must-read!

I'm all for a writer putting out his/her first novel, but this was like a child's first attempt at storytelling, i.e. amateurish narrative and unconvincing characters. It made me want to reevaluate my long-term relationship with crime fiction. Perhaps worst of all is that it suffered from a lack of editing, and I even wondered if the writer became tired of his own story about 2/3rds of the way through. Unlike the writer, I will keep it short: No.

This book, despite its title, is about former actress Krista Vance: her Hollywood life, her modeling career, her failed marriage to a producer, her remarriage and her new life in Las Vegas with her twin sons. Seemingly an attempt by Vance to get back into the public eye, the story raises concern when she alleges that one of her sons was cured of autism with chelation therapy. First and foremost: there is no cure for autism. Secondly, this method is a potentially deadly process known to have caused irreversible kidney and liver damage, and was debunked and condemned as a treatment for autism in 2010 by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration. Yet her narrative reeks of a savior complex shown in her dismissal of leading physicians and therapists as negative thinkers, her stop at nothing to find a "cure," and her inference overall that autism is a life-or-death disease short of a hospital bed, an ICU drip, and life support apparatus. In the end, you have to wonder why Vance wrote the book at all. It has no value to anyone aside from attention-seekers who cannot risk the simplest flaw in themselves or in others and/or those who believe that an autistic life is not worth living. Given that we have reliable information at our fingertips, engaging stories and real-life perspectives by writers on the autism spectrum -- not to mention public figures like Hannah Gadsby and Greta Thunberg -- we just don't need to hear tall tales out of left field from those who perhaps didn't get the lives, or the children, they hoped for.