This soul-stirring, courageous memoir explores the fierce beauty of isolation and the depths of a mother’s love for her son who stops sleeping through the night.Unfolding over the witching hours between midnight and 6:00 am, this meditative book takes place during the two-year period in which the author’s son, Gabriel, who is autistic and also has Down Syndrome, did not sleep through the night. Told as interwoven memories, the book describes Gabriel’s childhood and Maria’s own entrance into the world of multiple disability parenting. There are gifts from Gabriel’s complex mind that balance out the hardships—in this two-year period his mother notices the releasing power of jazz music on her son and takes him to jazz clubs at all hours of the night, where he quickly becomes a favorite patron.

As a counterpoint to understanding the figurative isolation that keeps Gabriel apart, Maria offers the story of Admiral Richard Byrd, the polar explorer who journeyed alone into the utter wilderness of the South Pole. His story creates a shared and powerful language for the experience of feeling alone. In the three main characters—mother, son, adventuring explorer—Maria reveals overlapping and layered themes of solitude that enlighten and uplift one another.

Much more than a book about coping with a mentally ill child, Know the Night is about the distances that can form between people who should be the closest of all—husband and wife, parent and child, lifelong friends and partners. The reader becomes a companion in Maria’s isolation rather than simply an observer as the book transcends its subject matter by shining a light onto a universal human experience.