Sara the Famous

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About a year and a half ago, my friend´s autistic daughter Sara asked me if I could write a book about her life. At around the same time, Sara´s mother told me that Sara had been repeatedly saying that she wanted to be famous--that she was definitely going to be famous--but nobody was really sure what she meant by that or if she thought of "famous" the way most other people did.

It was around this time that she began discouraging people from buying her birthday and Christmas presents; she spent the days after Halloween giving out her own candy to sick children at children´s hospitals. I was inspired to write this story after seeing Sara´s Christian faith in action, and after listening to Sara´s mother tell of Sara´s experiences in the mainstream school setting as a Christian autistic girl. These experiences were often filled with loneliness, frustration, rejection and discrimination, but they resonated with her faith and helped to strengthen it so that she could aspire to give to others what she herself so often had not received.

Sara the Famous is based on a true story, as told in the voice of the author´s young friend Sara, a Christian autistic girl with a deep faith in Jesus. It chronicles Sara´s experience with isolation and discrimination, and it shows the flip side of what such experiences can mean when one´s highest aspiration is to be a different kind of famous: A Jesus kind of famous.