Delightful and engaging are not words typically associated with anything having to do with autism. And yet they perfectly describe this unsentimental, deeply moving account of an autistic person's journey through life from a toddler to a 40-year-old woman.

When Jessy was born in the late 1950s, autism was not well understood, and the current thinking was that autistic children were withdrawn in response to fear of not getting their needs met. To blame, according to this theory, were "refrigerator mothers." More recent thinking has relieved mothers of the blame for their children's condition.

Park suggests that autistic children are not so much withdrawing from this world as content to stay in the Nirvana in their minds. Life is better there, easier to understand, more predictable. Exiting Nirvana is the story of how Jessy's family, friends, housemates, doctors and teachers have all coaxed her out of Nirvana to spend more and more of her time in this messy, less than satisfactory world.

Jessy works a real job, saves her money, cleans the house—a lot of "ordinary" stuff that is far from ordinary for someone with such severe autism. She also paints, and has had a number of shows. They are bizarre paintings of very ordinary things, buildings mostly. They are not unlike her life—a strange combination of ordinary and bizarre. It is tempting to see in them a reflection of something deeper about her life—but Park makes clear that it is almost always a mistake to attribute to Jessy feelings about things that non-autistic people would have.

Jessy has learned from experience, some of it painful, that other people feel a certain way, but she is applying rules not intuition. Park recounts a recent incident when they were walking on the beach and Jessy got cold. She returned to the house and put on a sweatshirt, but much to her parents' surprise and delight, she returned with a sweater for her father as well. Had she finally, at the age of 40, developed empathy? Not in the way non-autistic people would. But she was "thinking of others," one of the focuses of her family's work with her.

Similarly, her family has learned from experience, some of it painful, how Jessy thinks and responds. They know not to ask certain kinds of questions. "What" questions, as in "What are you doing?" are not well received. In fact, they cause her to "snap" (as her mother calls it), wailing inconsolably. They have also learned how to buy Christmas gifts for someone who relates to things in a different way. One sibling scored recently by giving Jessy a set of samples from a cosmetic company. The "beauty system" was right up her alley. She went to the department store the following day and quizzed the saleswoman on various aspects of the system ("Can you use the day cream at night?"). When she understood the system, she bought herself what she deemed appropriate. Park writes: "Jessy has spent a happy hour and seventy-six dollars; later, in another store, she'll spend fifty dollars more to fill out the set. And no, she still doesn't look in the mirror. Why should she?" For Jessy, the appeal of the beauty system is not the beauty; it's the system.

Park has been carefully cataloguing Jessy's slow steps toward a social life, so she has no lack of anecdotes to share with the reader. She has grouped them into sections on talking, thinking, painting and living. Each chapter is headed with a Jessy quote and each is more interesting than the last, as Jessy herself becomes more three-dimensional. She moves from saying, "That is not sound" to "The hangman hangs by the clothespin because of new politeness" to "I guess Darth Vader learned from consequences! Like me!" Park's account is unflinchingly honest—and funny, too. In a rather lengthy explanation about some numerical obsessions of Jessy's, she notes, "Not very interesting, perhaps, but very autistic." Park notes her daughter's honesty—autistic people are honest to a fault—and her matter-of-factness. Though obviously anything but autistic herself, Park shares a modicum of these qualities with her daughter—and it makes for a wonderful, full portrait of a unique individual for whom, by the end of the book, the reader develops a real fondness.

The image of an autistic child sitting alone and rocking endlessly is one that is all too familiar in popular culture. But rarely asked and even more rarely answered is the question of what happens to those rocking children? Do they rock until they're 80 or do they magically "get better?" "Exiting Nirvana" provides a rare look at an adult with autism. We see that she is no longer the three-year-old who snakes a chain up and down for hours; nor is she the average 40-year-old who goes to work, watches TV, has hobbies, or is she? She's come remarkably close. Her paintings may catch the eye of many and draw the most attention, but it is the ordinariness of her life that is truly extraordinary.

Not so long ago children with Downs' Syndrome were regarded as hopeless cases—and adults with Downs' were not even mentioned. Now, they are so integrated into mainstream life that one hardly notices. Park's account of her daughter's life is a wonderful first step to changing the image of autism in a similar way. The story of Jessy Park makes a clear case for the value of special education and what a family with resources and a lot of will can do.

Abigail Reifsnyder is a freelance writer, social worker and mother of two. She lives in Washington, Massachusetts, in rural Berkshire County. This review was originally published in The Berkshire Eagle.