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Cammie McGovern Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Author Biography  | Interview  | Books by this Author  | Read-Alikes

Cammie McGovern
© Ellen Augarten

Cammie McGovern

Cammie McGovern Biography

Cammie McGovern was awarded a creative writing fellowship at Stanford University, and has received numerous prizes for her short fiction. Her stories have appeared in many magazines including Glamour, Ladies Home Journal, Redbook and Seventeen, and she is the author of the much-acclaimed YA novel Say What You Will, published in 2014. A Step Toward Falling (2015), another YA novel featuring characters with disabilities. Just My Luck, for middle-grade readers (February, 2016). 

She has also written three adult novels, The Art of SeeingEye Contact, and Neighborhood

She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts with her husband and three children, the eldest of whom is autistic. She is one of the founders of Whole Children, a resource center that runs after-school classes and programs for children with special needs. 

Cammie McGovern's website

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Interview

A Conversation with Cammie McGovern about her book Eye Contact and her experience as the mother of an autistic son.

Like Cara, you are also the mother of an autistic child. To what extent did your own experiences inform your writing? What, if any, misgivings and difficulties did you encounter in approaching such a personal subject through fiction?

About four years ago, I started writing a nonfiction account of our experience in the early years just before and after our son's diagnosis of autism. It's a time when you feel frantic to be doing as much as possible because everyone tells you the early years are the most important, but no one can say with any certainty what that help should look like or which therapies will work best for you child. I used to devour every account I could find of parents in a similar situation, looking for clues, for children who resembled my son and for what strategies worked best. Eventually, as we emerged from that time, I thought it might be a service to other parents to write about our own story and the discoveries we'd made, often by trial and error and muddling through a lot of mistakes. The more I wrote, though, the more I realized how hard it is to write a memoir well and sustain a narrative that doesn't have a clear ending in place. I'd already published one novel and many ...

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Books by this Author

Books by Cammie McGovern at BookBrowse
A Step Toward Falling jacket Say What You Will jacket Neighborhood Watch jacket Eye Contact jacket
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Read-Alikes

All the books below are recommended as read-alikes for Cammie McGovern but some maybe more relevant to you than others depending on which books by the author you have read and enjoyed. So look for the suggested read-alikes by title linked on the right.
How we choose read-alikes

  • Cris Beam

    Cris Beam

    Cris Beam is the author of Transparent and has written for public radio's This American Life, as well as for several national magazines. She has an MFA in writing from Columbia and teaches creative writing at Columbia, NYU, ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    A Step Toward Falling

    Try:
    I Am J
    by Cris Beam

  • Barbara D'Amato

    Barbara D'Amato

    Barbara D'Amato is a playwright, novelist, and crime researcher. She began writing full-time in 1973, first co-writing plays with her husband, Anthony D'Amato.

    After trying different genres, her first published novel in 1980 ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    Eye Contact

    Try:
    Death of a Thousand Cuts
    by Barbara D'Amato

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