The book begins with the author visiting Dibs’s well-off family in New York. Concerns about Dibs involve him showing aggression issues and lack of social interaction. The boy shows two different sides of him, the disordered anger and high intelligence. Dibs’s parents, especially his mother, seem to have given up on the boy, and the author is his last resort.
The therapy sessions with Dibs are based on creating a safe environment for him to open up. The author lets him play, explore and talk without her initiative. As the time progresses and Dibs begins to open up, he shows a conflicting childish behavior with moments of extreme intelligence. He also reveals to the author his contempt towards his family.
Dibs’s mother also has a therapy session with the author, revealing her thoughts and concerns about her son. She is grateful that Dibs is showing progress and expresses her insecurities, fear of judgement and despair after being told that the parents are the cause for Dibs’s emotional disorders.
Over the next few sessions, Dibs opens up even more and the author gets an even better understanding of the reasons of Dibs’s behavior. It all stems from misunderstanding and pressure from his cold parents, he reveals incidents of being locked up in his room and being harshly scolded on simple mistakes. After this, Dibs makes even more progress at school and at home, and both parents and teachers express their gratefulness to the author.
In the final session, Dibs still has some aggression issues left, but he is stable and sure of himself, and not afraid to open up and speak. After they visit a church, Dibs says his final goodbye to the author. A long time passes, and the author discovers that Dibs became an intelligent and upright young man.
At the end, the author reveals that after their sessions came to an end, Dibs scored extremely high on an intelligence test, and makes a final commentary on the importance of communication.
