10:45am August 13, 2014

Okay so the autiebiography I was talking about earlier is called:

Atypical: Life with Asperger’s in 20 1/3 Chapters by Jesse Saperstein.

It’s the one that dealt in a great deal of detail with the author’s desire for attention, growing up, and the lengths that he would go through to get it. (Including the gym floor farting incident. Which sounded more like a regular occurrence than an incident.)

I don’t actually remember a whole lot about the book other than the stuff about how much he wanted attention, and what he would do in order to seek it. I also remember that he sometimes reminded me so much of my brother that I was shocked when I saw pictures of him and he looked nothing like my brother, because I’d just been picturing him as my brother all the way through the book. (My brother and I are both autistic, but we are polar opposites in just about every possible area of the spectrum.) It did, I think, help me understand my brother better, even though there were a lot of things that were clearly different from my brother.

Whether I like an autiebiography depends on a lot of different factors. It doesn’t necessarily depend on whether it’s well-written. It doesn’t necessarily depend on whether I can relate to it. It doesn’t necessarily depend on whether I share the author’s beliefs about autism. Mostly, it depends on whether it is unique (I have over a hundred of these things, and uniqueness becomes important after awhile), and on whether it can make me care about the author, and learn something new about experiences of autism that differ from my own, or learn something new about myself (or learn how to articulate something about myself I couldn’t articulate before).

And I loved this book. Because I’ve never seen another autistic person deal so frankly with what happens when you crave attention and can’t get it the normal ways. Because he reminded me of my brother. Because he was so different from me, and from a lot of autistic people I know. (I’ve come to realize that just as I am somewhat unusual in the autistic community, so is my polar opposite – people resembling my brother.) Because he was honest, very honest, about things that most people would be too ashamed to be honest about. And I really like when the authors of autiebiographies are willing to take a chance revealing traits like that.

Anyway, YMMV, but I really really enjoyed this book and would recommend it to anyone interested in the sorts of things I just described. I originally posted about it in a discussion about attention-seeking and what that can mean, and someone asked me to post the name of the book if I ever found it. So I searched out the name online (I remembered it had 1/3 in the title, which helped) and found it more easily than I expected.

Atypical: Life With Asperger’s in 20 1/3 Chapters by Jesse Saperstein

That link just there will take you to the Amazon page for the book, which includes both a paperback version and a Kindle version in case you want to read it on your Kindle (or Kindle app).

Anyway, sometimes there’s an autiebiography that for no reason I can totally explain, just hits me the right way, I read through it as fast as I can, and I love it. And this was one of those. I can’t guarantee at all that any of you will have the same response that I did, because my responses to autiebiographies have become more and more idiosyncratic the more of them I read. But I can at least say that if you’re interested in the topic of autistic people who really badly want attention and will do negative things to get it, this author covers that in great detail. And since I'm not that type of person, it gave me a lot more understanding for people who are.

(Not that I don’t like attention. But I would be mortified by doing some of the things that he’s done. I like my attention quieter, more positive, and more personal. Despite having a fairly public life, I see the attention I get in public as a necessary evil, not something I enjoy.)