Finding Neurodiversity in... Nonfiction: Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life

This is a little trickier than my usual posts, because it's about a memoir. I don't want to create an autistic headcanon for Amy Krouse Rosenthal --

(and let me take a moment to mourn the deletion of feminist aspie's blog and her wonderful post "A Headcanon Called Autism." I hope she is well.)

-- but I do think this book has... let's call it an autistic sensibility. Rosenthal, who sadly died fairly young, had a passion for wordplay and interesting patterns. This is apparent in the very form of this book, which is written as a series of alphabetic entries -- they start with "Amy" and end with "You." It's also apparent in what the entries are about... random feelings about life, odd memorable coincidences, observations. Reading the book is like briefly living inside someone's special interest.

A moment of personal sadness about this book:

"1989 Reads The Day I Became an Autodidact by Kendall Hailey. Writes author and receives letter back."

That's a real gut-puncher for me, because I read that book sometime in the 90s and also was also inspired to write to the author... but never mailed it. 

Rosenthal had a policy of always answering letters and she created numerous situations in which readers of her books could be inspired to contact her and participate in something with her. (For example, one reader got to propose a tattoo design, which they both got together.) So that also makes it a bit of a sad read, since she is no longer here to respond. The entire last chapter is a plea to "You" -- me, the reader-- to recognize her ordinary life:

"I picked at a scab. I wished I was older. I wished I was younger. I loved my children. I loved mayonnaise. I sucked my thumb. I chewed on a blade of grass.
I was here, you see. I was."

I can't read that without crying.

But most of the book made me smile in recognition... of the fun of wordplay (She tried to get her client Kraft to do a show called the Krafterschool Special,) of those embarrassing memories you can't forget, of just being a person in the world.

Finding Neurodiversity in Fiction: When the Moon was Ours by Anna-Maria McLemore

This isn't canon, or even headcanon -- that is, I'm not claiming any of the characters in this book should be read as neurodiverse. But it did strike me as containing a wonderful metaphor, and one wide open for neurodiverse people to embrace, if we want to.

(With one caveat... part of the metaphor is so viscerally unappealing to me, I almost stopped reading the book.)

When the Moon Was Ours is a work of magic realism, a story about claiming one's identity, and a tender romance. It's probably most aptly targeted at a YA audience, but adults will love it too. The plot is so fantastical it's probably simplest not to try to explain it, but here is the relevant part: Miel, a teenaged girl, comes from a family of "brujos and brujas," who have helpful gifts like being able to heal broken bones. But Miel's strange gift is considered a curse: she --

-- ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh! --

-- grows roses from her wrist, beautiful fragrant roses that express her innermost feelings. Miel's father believes that anyone who grows roses from their body -- ugh! -- will ultimately turn on their family, and Miel underwent genuine torture from her family's efforts to cure or exorcise her.

You see.

Here are some sections that particularly stuck with me (all emphases are mine):

"'She loved you,' Aracely said. 'But she got lost thinking that your roses were something outside of you... ' [spoilers deleted] 'She never wanted to hurt you.'

'You really believe that?' Miel asked, and she heard in her own voice both skepticism and forgiveness. A suspicion both that her mother had been trying to hurt her and that she had been justified in doing it. 

'Yes,' Aracely said. 'I've always believed that. But just because she loved you doesn't mean you deserved what she did. Or what he did.'

It takes Miel some time to accept that Aracely is right: that her roses aren't a curse, that her mother was wrong, but that she did act from love.

"Her mother hadn't hated her. She knew that. She'd feared for her. She'd loved Miel, seen her a daughter she could lose to petals and thorns. She'd been a young mother little older than Aracely, panicked and desperate to hold on to the children she'd made.

What mother could resist a hundred tales of roses that had stolen the souls of sons and daughters? What mother could stand against her husband's insistence that their daughter was sick and needed to be cured?"

I hope this doesn't come off as sounding like an apologist for curebie parents, but part of Miel's journey towards accepting herself is believing in her mother's love for her. It helps lift the shame that keeps her from protecting herself against those that threaten her.

There's also a wonderful, complex self-acceptance journey for Miel's beloved friend and new lover Samir, which adds to the richness of the story. I highly recommend it.

Crosspost: On the Edge of Gone by Corinne Duyvis

(I originally wrote this for my reading blog, then realized it would make sense to put it here as well.)

I'm having so many thoughts and feelings while reading this that I decided to write a reaction post as I read, rather than try to do a traditional review.

The story is narrated by Denise, a biracial autistic teen living in Amsterdam. It opens as the earth is just about to be hit by a comet. Denise and her mother are late leaving for their assigned shelter, because they're waiting for Denise's missing sister, Iris.

-- I wonder if the author wrote this partially to address her own fears about how she might survive as an autistic person in a cataclysmic disaster? I know it's something I've thought about a lot myself -- one of the reasons I'm really not attracted to dystopian fiction -- and especially now that I have an autistic son.  When I told my husband the premise, that's immediately where his mind went and he thought the book would be too scary to read.

(One of my favorite stories is John Varley's The Manhattan Phone Book (Abridged). You can read it online. In it he writes,

"We all love after-the-bomb stories. If we didn’t, why would there be so many of them? There’s something attractive about all those people being gone, about wandering in a depopulated world, scrounging cans of Campbell’s pork and beans, defending one’s family from marauders. Sure, it’s horrible, sure we weep for all those dead people. But some secret part of us thinks it would be good to survive, to start all over.

Secretly, we know we’ll survive. All those other folks will die. That’s what after-the-bomb stories are all about."

Not me. I have never believed that. In my scenario, if I survive, I will undoubtedly die shortly thereafter.)

-- Denise's beloved missing sister is a trans woman. This worries me in a post-apocalyptic story. (It turns out not to be an issue at all.)

-- (32%) I appreciate the nuance of this portrait and it feels really well balanced. Denise is realistically having trouble dealing with stress and melting down, but she's also contributing. She's neither SuperAutistic Girl or Autistic Robot Girl.

--  (37%) "It's the end of the world; I knew I would have to change. "

I pondered this sentence for awhile. It seems an ableist point of view. I guess Denise means she will have to be really brave? To do things that are very hard for her? Does she really think she can just decide to change?

-- (60-something%) This plan is so messed up. Does no one think about what it will be like to spend the rest of your life stuck with people who will utterly hate you?

-- The moral ambiguity in this scenario is excruciating. I hope the story will find some good way to resolve it, but I can't imagine what.

-- Oh. Now I understand what the earlier thought about needing to change was about. It is an ableist point of view, because it's internalized ableism. Denise thinks she has to be more "normal" and useful in order to justify her existence in the post-apocalyptic world.

Ending -- Wow. Just wow. I'm so impressed with how this played out. It's an amazing book. I wish I could read it to my son without scaring him to death. This is why #ownvoices matter.

Finding Neurodiversity in Fiction: The Innocents by Margery Sharp

Content Warning: use of R word

The Innocents, published in 1972, has been one of my favorite books since I was a teenager. The narrator is an elderly woman in a small English village who, because of World War II, sort of accidentally adopts a young girl named Antoinette who is intellectually handicapped. She becomes very fond of Antoinette and finds herself going to extreme measures to protect her.

It is absolutely fascinating to me to examine this book as the person I am now. My first thought was that it holds up surprisingly well to a modern reading because it's very unsentimental about disability. Antoinette is not "inspiring" or sweet or attractive; she loves dead things and poop and has a tendency to throw up when stressed. Her foster mother (I don't think she's ever named, which is interesting) nonetheless loves her just as she is. The more I think about it, the more I realize the book is actually a fabulous blueprint for loving and accepting a neurodiverse person.

Antoniette's foster mother fulfills her needs for quiet and routine, while gently encouraging her to develop without pushing or forcing. She lets her enjoy her solitary pursuits, puts up with Antoinette's love for keeping dead frogs in her pockets (only making sure to wash her hands well before meals), and even plays tiddlywinks with Antoinette's preferred pieces:

"Tiddlywinks, played with rabbit-droppings instead of ivorine counters, is naturally a slow game, in fact not the same game at all, but suited Antoinette all the better, who needed in everything to go slowly."

She finds a way to introduce Antoniette to the company of other children in a non-intimidating way, though horseback riding (something now often used as a therapy for disabled children), and encourages her to speak by reading her interesting sounding words. A perfect example of how she modifies the traditional upbringing of children is that she always recites a bedtime prayer to Antoinette, and is thrilled when the little girl starts chiming in at the "amen" with "vermin," one of her favorite words and a term of affection.

Antoinette, who is almost completely nonverbal, is specifically diagnosed as "simply retarded, not autistic." Having read Neurotribes, (which everyone needs to read!) I understand now how meaningless that diagnosis was, because the definition of autism at the time was extremely limited. If Antoinette were diagnosed today, I think the outcome might be quite different.

Either way, I think Sharp was outlining a wonderful example of how to parent a neurodiverse person with love and acceptance. And to make it more fascinating and still relevant, the danger that Antoinette is faced with, from her returned biological mother, is that of living with someone who refuses to accept her needs and will attempt to force her to conform to societal convention. Without spoilers, this is a danger taken very seriously by the book, the narrator, and by Antoinette herself -- who may not be verbal, but who clearly does have feelings, thoughts, and agency. The story's ending is morally ambiguous but an absolute validation of Antoinette's rights as a human being.