I Have Been Buried Under Years of Dust: A Memoir of Autism and Hope

Written by Valerie Gilpeer and Emily Grodin

Narrated by Sara Morsey

A remarkable memoir by a mother and her autistic daughter who’d long been unable to communicate—until a miraculous breakthrough revealed a young woman with a rich and creative interior life, a poet, who’d been trapped inside for more than two decades.

“I have been buried under years of dust and now I have so much to say.”

These were the first words twenty-five-year-old Emily Grodin ever wrote. Born with nonverbal autism, Emily’s only means of communicating for a quarter of a century had been only one-word responses or physical gestures. 

That Emily was intelligent had never been in question—from an early age she’d shown clear signs that she understood what was going on though she could not express herself. Her parents, Valerie and Tom, sought every therapy possible in the hope that Emily would one day be able to reveal herself. When this miraculous breakthrough occurred, Emily was finally able to give insight into the life, frustrations, and joys of a person with autism. She could tell her parents what her younger years had been like and reveal all the emotions and intelligence residing within her; she became their guide into the autistic experience.

Told by Valerie, with insights and stories and poetry from Emily, I Have Been Buried Under Years of Dust highlights key moments of Emily’s childhood that led to her communication awakening—and how her ability rapidly accelerated after she wrote that first sentence. As Valerie tells her family’s story, she shares the knowledge she’s gained from working as a legal advocate for families affected by autism and other neurological disorders. 

A story of unconditional love, faith in the face of difficulty, and the grace of perseverance and acceptance, I Have Been Buried Under Years of Dust is an evocative and affecting mother-daughter memoir of learning to see each other for who they are.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperAudio
• Release date: Apr 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9780063071155

Valerie Gilpeer

Valerie Gilpeer is an attorney who has been practicing law for forty years. She shifted her civil law practice twenty years ago in favor of representing families of disabled children trying to obtain educational services from local school districts. She has continued to focus on disability rights law through her volunteer work with several nonprofit organizations in the Los Angeles area. Valerie and Emily live with Tom Grodin, her husband and Emily’s dad, in Encino, California.

Reviews for I Have Been Buried Under Years of Dust

[junipersun · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Most of this memoir is that of Valerie, the mother. A few of Emily's writings are interspersed, becoming more prominent in the 2nd half of this book. If you are a parent who needs validation for your feelings upon learning of your child's diagnosis, you may appreciate Valerie's words. If you are another Type A personality, you will be supported by Valerie's actions on behalf of her daughter. If, however, you are struggling to make ends meet on a modest income, you may find yourself ashamed at not being able to provide so many choices to your own child with autism. Please let go of that feeling. We are each doing the best we can, and our children are not Emily.The insight I gained from this is that meltdowns/aggressive behavior/self-injury can be caused by 1)emotions that overflow their capacity to contain them 2)frustration about not being understood, 3)anxiety. One approach I have always maintained, which goes along with Valerie's approach, is to expose my son to as much good books (and music) as possible. In Emily's case, we see how this exposure, along with an education which taught spelling and grammar, allowed her to express herself with great variety once she had a breakthrough in typing.Emily's contributions are enormously reassuring that there is an intelligent person hidden under autism, and that breakthrough can happen even as adult. She is, however, a very strong-willed person, and it is possible that not all people with autism will be able to muster the strength to work around their autism. Emily still (at the time of this writing) was unable to avoid all meltdowns or to control her almost continual vocalizations and finger-stims.There was a lot of name-dropping by Valerie which I felt was egregious, along with her focus on what clothes her daughter was wearing. It would have been just as effective, for example, to talk about an encounter in a cafe without naming the cafe and explaining that it was a high-end popular spot. One wonders, also, how often concessions made for Emily's behavior (e.g. by airline stewards) were influenced by the amount of money her parents were able to spend. It would also be interesting to have read the full list of therapies her parents tried, and Valerie writes that they "used every behavioral, speech, social, psychiatric, occupational, and language...even the woo-woo suggestions", before finally coming to facilitated communication. I'm surprised they didn't try nutritional & DNA analysis, which are other popular & expensive offerings.