Saving the Fourth Generation

MARI SARKISIAN WYATT is a pseudonym for an Armenian-American who received her B.A. from Princeton and her M.A. from Stanford, both in English. After being deemed unemployable by multiple job agencies in her Midwestern hometown, she moved to New York City, where she worked in publishing for over a decade. Deciding that it would be too difficult to raise a family in Manhattan, she and her husband, Wesley, moved back to the Midwest, and she became a freelance copy editor to work from home, not imagining that her first child would be diagnosed with autism, which at the time, the early 1990s, was rare and considered untreatable. She and Wesley spent the first six years of their son's life inventing therapies for him, then despite being in her forties, Mari decided that he needed a brother to teach him how to be a guy. What began as a nice idea--to have a child using assisted reproductive technology--quickly turned into an all-consuming obsession, and she spent six more years trying to fulfill that goal. Writing under a different name, Mari is the author of four romances and the co-author (with her now adult son) of two self-help guides for the parents of special-needs children.