Description
"In Beautiful Mystery, Danilyn Rutherford reflects on her relationship with her disabled daughter Millie in a genre somewhere between ethnography, autobiography, and memoir. Rutherford's daughter was born with what at first seemed like severe autism but turned out to be an even more challenging inability to communicate in recognizable ways. Her husband dies suddenly while Millie is still young and Rutherford explores her daughter's journey from disabled child to disabled young woman, demonstrating the challenges of caring for a loved one and finding ways to communicate. Meditating on the cognitive mystery of Millie's disability and interior life, Rutherford writes from the perspective of a mother, widow, and anthropologist to trace a process of becoming and vulnerabilities in a mother-daughter relationship. She draws on the power of anthropological theory to assess her personal journey, convey the intimacy of interacting with disability, and imagine Millie's magnetic yet unknowable social worlds"--
