Next Stop: A Memoir

For one summer, when her son David was twenty-one, Glen Finland rode the Washington, D.C., Metro with him day after day. David has autism, and the plan was for him to learn the train routes so he could find work and perhaps live on his own. Those hopes were also tied to a marriage that badly needed renewing. This memoir follows a young man on the edge of adulthood as he begins to travel the city alone, and the family relationships that shape his path. It is a portrait of a mother learning, slowly and with many setbacks, to let her child go and to take back her own life. The story looks honestly at how hard that letting go can be.