“The Warner Boys” is the perfect antidote to neurodiversity nonsense — and offers an unexpected bonus for science
The Warner family.
By Jill Escher
I remember two years ago hearing about a former pro football player coming “out of the autism closet” and sharing with the world his family’s plight of having two severely affected sons. At the time I didn’t pay much attention, but I suppose it’s never too late to catch up with what turns out to be one of the best autism memoirs I’ve read.
Curt Warner earned his fame back in the 1980s as a star running back for the Seattle Seahawks. Before that he was a two-time All-American at Penn State, known for his crafty, determined rushes. He was gentlemanly but tough. As his wife Ana remarked later, after getting pounded play after play in the NFL he would suffer injuries he didn’t even know about until after the game.
Curt and Ana wrote The Warner Boys together, with the assistance of sports journalist Dave Boling. I loved the book as soon as I saw the opening lines: “Our son Austin devoured books. Not reading them, eating them.” It’s this sort of candor about the highly dysfunctional autism suffered by both Austin and his twin brother Christian that makes the book worthy of an Autism Pulitzer, if there were such a thing.
Forget the “autism is neurodiversity” or “autism is like traveling to Holland instead of Paris” blather. In these pages it’s more like traveling through a mini-hell, dreading what heart-stabbing nightmare lurks around the corner — a dark tale they manage to convey with the biggest of hearts and an overwhelming love for their boys.
It all starts innocently enough. In a chance encounter, Curt meets Ana, a transplant from Brazil who was working multiple jobs trying to build an independent life for herself in the United States. She knew nothing about Curt or his fame, but from the moment she saw him went weak in the knees knowing “this was it.”
When Curt tore up his knee in his second season in the NFL, thanks to the terrible turf in the Kingdome, he underwent a complicated surgery involving removal of a ligament from his hamstring to rebuild his ACL, a pioneering surgery at the time. He underwent five more surgeries after that, on his knees and ankles. More about this topic at the end of this review.
Not long after, he had to retire from football and he started a new life as a businessman. The couple also wanted to pursue their dream of having children. Tragedy struck from the start. First came a beautiful boy named Ryan, stillborn. Then multiple miscarriages. Finally they had Jonathan, who went on to be a typically developing boy with an athletic streak. Nine months later they were pregnant again, with twins.
From the earliest years Austin and Christian failed to reach basic milestones. After the autism diagnosis, and as the boys grew older, their behaviors intensified. They relentlessly kicked holes in walls all over the house. Vicious head-banging landed Christian in the trauma ward. Austin’s lack of fear and elopement led to near-death experiences. The boys screamed and shrieked, and bit their hands and arms so often and severely it seemed they wouldn’t heal.
Every waking moment seemed fraught with mix of dread, exhaustion, puzzlement, heartache and financial drain. To endure the chaos and strain, Curt drew on lessons learned from his football days: “Sometimes you’re just getting beaten and there’s othing you can do about it…. You’ve got to line up and try it again. The next play, boom, you get clobbered again…. That’s pretty much what every day felt like for us for a long time.”
And Ana was beyond exhausted. After the boys were born she suffered post partum depression, then later, PTSD, then panic attacks (“My heart would pound so hard, and I’d have this overwhelming sense that I was going to lose it, just come undone”), then a deep, dark depression permeated with suicidal thoughts. On long drives near their home in Camas, Washington taken to calm the twins, she thought of ending it all, taking the boys with her, crying “so hard I could barely see.”
I appreciated Ana openly sharing the depths of her pain — such inner torments, though usually transient, are almost universal among severe autism parents, but far too seldom talked about.
But it was not the chaos that hurt the most, it was the boys’ inexplicable suffering. When Curt tried to hug and comfort the boys, you could feel his heartbreak leap off the page: “I would look into their eyes, and it’s like they were asking me, Why? Why is this happening to me?”
So many other themes will resonate with autism families. For example, the divide-and-conquer strategy that prevented Ana from seeing many of big brother Jonathan’s sports events, the futility of the costly and complicated therapies, living in a lockdown house with extra locks, alarms, and fences, trying new diets, oddball micro-talents combined with functional incapacity: Austin could provide any detail of every Disney movie from the last decade or more, but he couldn’t tell you how many quarters make a dollar. Indeed Austin’s naive craftiness led to a mega disaster that I will let you discover on your own (though the title of this post offers a hint).
The narrative is also peppered with some non-preachy advice for couples finding themselves overwhelmed and stressed in the “strange new world of ASD.” Despite being a fierce competitor on the field, Curt never complained or “kept score” as couples often do. Following advice of a preacher the couple valued open communication. For Ana, faith and her love for God saved her in her darkest moments. The strongest glue, though, was an enduring mutual respect, a context that made the conflicts endurable.
As the book comes to a close, the Warners have adopted a lively little girl named Isabella, and the boys have become “full-grown adults, but unable to explain to anyone who they are, where they live, or that they suffer from a disorder.” My best guess is that the Warners’ deep concern about the future is what drove them to publicly divulge their intensely personal story. They remark that the autism tsunami means unprecedented waves of seriously disabled youth aging into adulthood in need of lifepan care, financial support, and structured supervision. As America ignores and sugar-coats the rising tide of disabling autism, The Warner Boys blares a wake-up call, seeming to cry, “Enough of the distractions, look at the disaster happening everywhere to our families.” That alone makes the book an important contribution to the literature — one that you should read and recommend to everyone you know who dares to try to normalize autism.
Now, a coda.
Why did this happen? Why would two perfectly healthy and intelligent people have not just one but two sons with severe autism and intellectual disability? The Warners write they never received any explanation from any clinician for their son’s disorders.
But I would like to suggest potential clues are right there in Chapter 2. As I said above, after serious injuries Curt underwent six surgeries in the latter part of his football career. Then not long after the succession of operations he and Ana started their family.
I have authored papers in scientific journals suggesting that in some cases general anesthesia (GA), particularly the sort used in surgery with modern inhalation anesthetics, can act as a potent germ cell toxicant, raising the risk for autism in offspring.
What does that mean? Basically that GA can damage sperm or egg DNA or alter gene expression, with brain development genes being particularly susceptible to GA. It means that the offspring of the damaged germ cells could be at heightened risk for abnormal neurodevelopment, a phenomenon we see in the animal studies. I discuss this hypothesis in detail in a recent paper here, which was also profiled in Psychology Today here.
The fact that this rather obvious question of genetic toxicology is not even being entertained in mainstream autism research is in my view one of the greatest medical and research oversights of our time. I can only hope that stories like the Warners’ can provide a cautionary tale, not just about the dire reality of severe autism, but about a potent genotoxic exposure that may quietly be fueling a public health disaster.
Jill Escher is the president of the National Council on Severe Autism. She is also an autism research philanthropist (Escher Fund for Autism), a member of the governing council of the Environmental Mutagenesis and Genomics Society, and the chair of BeyondGenes.
Disclaimer: Blogposts on the NCSA blog represent the opinions of the individual authors and not necessarily the views or positions of the NCSA or its board of directors.