Extra research: Nick Hornby's writing on Autism

Ms Casson recommended that I looked at the author Nick Hornby's writing about his child with autism. I found an article on the Guardian website. The part I found the most interesting was the introduction he had written to a book of short stories which he had editing called 'Speaking with the Angel' where he describes a day in the life of a family with an autistic child;

''He sleeps five or six hours every night, in fact, which means that if he can be kept awake until, say, nine, then he will wake up at two or three. He is upset and frustrated, so he screams, and his parents, who have maybe slept three or four hours, feel a mixture of exhaustion and depression and panic - they live in a small flat, and the walls are thin, and they know that they are not the only ones who are disturbed on a nightly basis . . . It is six hours until one of them starts work (the other would like to work, but in the absence of any suitable school place for the child, it is not possible), by which time the child will have attempted to hurt himself by hitting himself hard and repeatedly on the head, and maybe thrown some food around, and refused to use the toilet and ended up soiling a carpet, and demanded in the only language he has at his disposal (one word, repeated with increasing force and volume) to go out to the park, even though it's pitch black outside . . ."

This gave me some inspiration into what to write for my narration and made me think about what parts of Matthew's daily routine my audience would find the most interesting.