The Emperor, C'est Moi

Description

Hugo Horiot was an angry autistic child with Asperger syndrome who refused to speak for the first years of his life and only escaped institutionalisation because his mother decided, controversially, to educate and care for him herself. Today, the storm of autism has passed and Hugo has become a peaceful and highly functioning adult. In this book, he now returns to his childhood, to his experiences, his tantrums, obsessions, furies, and to give a voice to a child who had cut himself off from the world. This is a true story, a literary and startling testimony.

HUGO HORIOT is a young French actor, director, and writer. In 2005, he was admitted in the Theatre du Jour, a French theater academy, where he studied the art of acting with Pierre Debauche. The Emperor, C'est Moi, the narrative of his autism and coming out of it, is his first book. It won him the Prix "Paroles de patients," a French award that recognizes writers writing about disease and healing from it. In 1991, his mother, Fran oise Lef vre, published a book titled Le petit prince cannibale, about his autistic childhood and the way she helped him to grow up. It won her the Prix "Goncourt des lyceens". "I am not cured of Autism," said Horiot, "I have learned to live with it. He lives in Paris. This text was adapted for the stage, with Horiot playing his own character. Translator LINDA COVERDALE has a Ph.D. in French Studies from the Johns Hopkins University and has translated more than seventy books. A Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, she has won the 2004 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the 2006 Scott Moncrieff Prize, and the 1997 and 2008 French-American Foundation Translation Prize. She lives in Brooklyn.

"An astonishing and riveting tale from the 'inside' of autism-brave, brutal, funny, triumphant and terribly moving. As a doctor, I had no idea, and now I do. Required reading for anyone-parent, teacher, school-mate, health-care worker-who knows a person with this syndrome." -Samuel Shem, M.D, author of The House of God and The Spirit of the Place. "Haunting, original, dazzling in its mixture of fancy and specificity, a welcome addition to memory and understanding..." -Tim Page, author of Parallel Play "Hugo Horiot refuses to allow his Autistic behaviors to control his life. Instead, he uses them to put himself in a position of power, triumphantly emerging from his violent, isolated world with only his mother's help. An important read for the growing number of individuals with Autism who wish to live independent and purposeful lives." -Suzanne Reek, President, The Autism Society of America, Nassau/Suffolk Chapter "It's a beautiful book, moving, fascinating, that grants us entry to a strange and sometimes frightening world..." -Brigitte Axelrad, Science et pseudo-sciences "Truth glares from the pages, which we read with heart overflowing, sharing the experience of the boy trapped inside himself." -La Libre Belgique "Equal parts love and pain, Hugo Horiot's evocative account of his struggle with Autism Spectrum Disorder shares with us the penetrating insights of a tortured mind at odds with a society that does not accept him. In allowing the reader to enter the private world he retreated into as a child, Horiot forces us to reevaluate how we view those with psychological differences." -Christopher Teare, Cognitive Training For Autism, Harvard University