Romance and irony, personal and academic: How mothers of children with autism defend goodness and express hope

This article tells about stories with stories alongside a theoretically based analysis. The author’s personal story is combined with the story of this research project to tell and analyze the stories of two mothers whose children have autism. The mothers’ narratives are interpreted in this study as a defense of the narrators’ goodness as mothers and a defense of their children’s goodness. The narratives do this is in part through their structure, which holds many qualities in common with two traditional Western literary structures: romance and irony.