But an inadequate, albeit sensical reading of “nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so” could also take it as some shrugging indication of life’s fundamental amorality—if it’s all subjective, if it’s all just in your mind, who cares? It threatens a nullifying relativism. Barrodale does not let either her reader or her main character off the hook with anything as voiding as that. Instead, Trip confronts a problem Buddhism makes explicit: how to attain non-attachment, that serene, even magnificent state of “both-and,” while remaining morally and emotionally attached to the objects of our love. A mother might partially accept her own demise, but she, like us, will have a harder time accepting the possible death of her teenage boy. Sandra does not escape samsara (toward the end of the novel she glimpses her future parents), but she does experience an enlightenment of sorts. It comes in the most moving line of the novel. It’s as simple as this: “I understood that nothing had ever been wrong with Trip.” There is indeed nothing wrong with a boy who has autism. To know as much is a beautiful form of acceptance. But surely there is something fundamentally wrong, as in spiritually unacceptable, about the death of a very young person. Like his mother, we care whether Trip lives or dies. For the unenlightened among us, it’s easier to magnificently affirm Jung’s “magnificently affirmative both-and” in the realm of fiction, rather than in life itself. This, truly, is where thinking makes it so. Something unacceptable—say, an indecisive prince who ends up slaughtering everyone around him—becomes terrible as well as beautiful, deplorable as well as understandable. {read}