ABSTRACT
Catherine Maurice was in many ways a typical mother with two small children. A bright, well educated woman whose husband worked on Wall Street, she doted on her two children and had big plans for their futures. Then she noticed something very unusual on her daughter's first birthday. Maurice's precious little girl, Anne-Marie, seemed distant and unattached. Instead of tearing into her presents, she would handle them briefly and then seem to lose interest. Maurice continued observing Anne-Marie, hoping she was just having some bad days. Unfortunately, there were other signs that something was wrong. Maurice remembered that when Anne-Marie was 10 months old, the babysitter had commented that Anne-Marie was such a good little baby and that she “sat and played in one spot for two hours!” 7 In her highly acclaimed book, Let Me Hear Your Voice: A Family's Triumph Over Autism (Maurice, 1993), Maurice chronicles the gradual unfolding of her daughter's autistic behavior over several months and her own difficult journey to find effective treatment for Anne-Marie. Maurice's story was especially unusual because her younger child, son Michael, was also diagnosed with autism a few years after Anne-Marie.
