Jonathan Rintels

Lifemobile is my first novel, but I've been a writer for -- yikes -- over three decades. Mostly film and television, but also a lot of public policy papers and advocacy on issues I care about. I live with my two children in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Two years ago, I bought a 1965 Chevrolet Corvair on eBay. As both my children will attest, I often do silly things. When I brought the Corvair home, my son wanted nothing to do with it. “It’s just an old car, Dad,” he repeated over and over. My son has Asperger’s Syndrome, or what some call “high-functioning autism.” He can be pretty rigid at times, and when he makes his mind up about something, that’s usually it.

But not this time. Somehow, I ended up telling him about the history of the Corvair, Ralph Nader's charge that it was "unsafe at any speed," the harm that did to the car's reputation and sales, and how my childhood friends mocked my father's Corvair by calling it our "Deathmobile." Then I told my son what most people don’t know; that many years later, a U.S. government investigation found the charges were not true.

“So Corvairs weren’t really unsafe,” he said. “They got stereotyped because they were different. Like me.” Suddenly, he was fascinated by all things Corvair and only wanted to ride in our Corvair. To my astonishment, he even volunteered to help me work on it. We’ve spent a lot of very high quality time together in our Corvair. It turned out that buying it wasn’t so silly after all. In fact, it changed our lives.

That was how I came to write Lifemobile, a novel about a special boy and a special car that changes the boy’s world forever.