Tisha Campbell & Son Xen Open Up About Autism, Love and New Book ‘The A Word’

Tisha Campbell and Xen Turn ‘The A Word’ Into a Family Conversation

TV icon Tisha Campbell, along with her son Xen, are in the middle of an endearing and courageous promo tour for her new memoir, The A Word: A Mother’s Journey Through Autism and Love.

But on this week’s Way Up With Angela Yee, the conversation lands somewhere much more personal than a normal book stop. Tisha talks about what it took to finally put the behind-the-scenes version of her life on paper, while Xen sits beside her not as a footnote to the story, but as part of the conversation itself.

The 352-page memoir, published September 15 by Amistad/HarperCollins, traces Tisha’s experience raising Xen after his autism diagnosis, from therapies and schools to advocacy, misunderstandings and the little moments of humor and love that kept the family moving. The publisher frames the book as both memoir and practical encouragement for parents, caregivers and advocates navigating similar terrain.

Tisha tells Angela the hardest part was unmasking. Publicly, audiences are used to the smile, the comedy and the performer who can keep a room moving. In the book, she says, she finally gets into the things that were happening behind all of that — the parts she did not usually talk about and the moments she had spent years keeping private.

“This is stuff that was happening behind the scenes,” she explains in the interview, describing the book as an opportunity to show people more of who she really is instead of only the public-facing version.

And there’s another detail that makes The A Word feel even more personal: Tisha wrote it herself. No ghostwriter. She tells Angela that when she first shopped the book, some publishers wanted something more salacious — a celebrity tell-all. That was never the point for her. She wanted to write about family, autism, what she learned and what other people might be able to take from it.

The reason she finally pushed through the emotional weight of writing it came from the people who kept finding her. As Tisha traveled doing stand-up, parents and caregivers would stop her in airports and other public places to ask about autism, resources and the choices she made for Xen. Those conversations made the need for something bigger than a quick answer impossible to ignore.

Tisha is especially direct about wanting the book to reach families of color who may not have equal access to information, specialists or support. That advocacy is not new for her. She has spent years working around autism awareness and family resources, and the memoir pulls that public work back into the home, where the story began.

Xen’s voice is what keeps the conversation from becoming a story told only about him. During the interview, he explains the sensory side of autism in plain language — how something as simple as a peach can feel completely different depending on texture, color and sensation. At one point, he sums up the difficulty of explaining autism to someone who does not experience the world that way: “Explaining my autism to people is like explaining the color blue to a blind person.”

That one line does a lot of work. Tisha has spent years learning Xen’s world from the outside; Xen is now old enough to tell her, and everyone else, what some of those experiences felt like from the inside. That back-and-forth is where the interview becomes much more than a standard celebrity-parent memoir plug.

Tisha also reveals that her own recent testing gave her new language for parts of herself she had spent years hiding or managing. She says the diagnosis came after the book was written, which means the memoir captures one stage of her understanding while the Angela Yee conversation catches the story still evolving in real time.

There is humor in all of it because, as Tisha points out, that is simply who she is. But she is just as clear that The A Word does not romanticize what the family went through. The heartbreak, the fights for resources, the fear, the exhaustion and the mama-bear moments are all part of the same story as the love.

That is what makes this particular mother-and-son press stop hit differently. Tisha is not presenting Xen as an inspirational accessory to her story, and Xen is not sitting there simply to validate hers. They are talking to each other, correcting the frame when needed, laughing where they can and showing how much understanding can change once everyone at the table gets a voice.

Press play on a brand-new episode of this week’s Way Up With Angela Yee as Tisha Campbell and Xen open up about The A Word, autism, masking, family, advocacy and the years it took to turn their private journey into a book.

Tisha Campbell & Xen Discuss ‘The A Word’ on Way Up With Angela Yee

The 44-minute interview follows Tisha and Xen through the memoir’s origins, Xen’s perspective on autism and Tisha’s own recent neurodivergence testing.

Source: Way Up With Angela Yee; Amistad/HarperCollins.