WHEN HORSE BECAME SAW
BY TONY MACRIS
When Horse Became Saw is Anthony Macris’ engrossing personal account of his
young son Alex’s regression into a severe autistic state. It tracks the
incredulity, grief and determination he and his wife Kathy experienced as their
expectations of normal family life were profoundly challenged and changed.
Great openness defines
Macris’ approach. He writes as a father fearful of never being able to
understand or connect with his son; as a husband co-navigating not only the
emotional territory of Alex’s condition but the pure weight of care; as a
citizen of a society which makes distinctions about the worth of each
individual’s life and fails to support its most vulnerable; as an academic and
writer crafting sense and story from the new life taking shape around him.
The title, a reference to the
scrambling which preceded Alex’s loss of
language, evokes the nature of this book. It refuses the linearity a
journey narrative may suggest by deeply engaging the contradictions of life
with Alex and exchanging any inevitable ‘arrival’ with the notion of ongoing
approach – to a new way of being, a new idea of normal, beyond the barometer
set by personal and public expectations. Reading Horse is concurrently
painful and vivifying, a deeply affecting experience.
Mathilde, de Hauteclocque
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
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