Tag Archives: Autism

TTT – Top Ten Books by Autistic Authors

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So I’ve mentioned it on Twitter, but I have been remiss in mentioning it here – April is Autism Acceptance Month! This is another cause close to my heart, because my husband is on the spectrum. We didn’t actually realize this until a year ago, but having realized it, it has given us SO MANY tools to use to manage daily life. The improvement has been amazing. So in the last year I’ve been doing a lot of self-education about autism, and I recently learned that there is a publishing house specifically for autistic authors, because so many mainstream publishers were turning them away! It’s called Autonomous Press, and their slogan is Weird Books for Weird People. Goodreads also has a list of books by autistic authors; some are explicitly about autism, some are fiction with autistic characters, and some aren’t about autism at all. But reading books by autistic authors is a great way to support the community and neurodivergence. This list is more of a to-be-read list for me; these are books I want to read. My library only has a few of them, though, and a few of them are working their way through the system to me.

journalThe first book on my list is one I HAVE read – The Journal of Best Practices: A Memoir of Marriage, Aperger Syndrome, and One Man’s Quest to be a Better Husband. I really enjoyed this one, as a chronicle of a marriage almost torn apart but ultimately saved by their new understanding of how his brain works. So many of the author’s behaviors are things I also see in my husband – I often stopped to read passages to him, only to have him stare at me in surprised recognition. It was also surprising to me – I’d have to stop and say “wait, is that really the way you think about that subject?” To which he’d reply “what, that isn’t normal?” So it was a journey of discovery for us both.

queens of geekCurrently out from the library I have Queens of Geek, which I didn’t realize was by an autistic author and only makes me more eager to read it. (Also, look at that cover! Bright hair FTW!) Nerdy, Shy, and Socially Inappropriate – A User Guide to an Asperger Life is by a blogger whose blog I pored through, reading nerdy shy socially inappropriate asperger autismentries to my husband and following links to quizzes and other resources. (Taking the diagnostic quizzes together was also enlightening – I really did not fully realize how differently his brain worked from mine – and we’ve been together over twelve years!)

pretending to be normal aspergerMaking their way to me through my extended library system (they’ll ship books to my county from any system in the state, it’s amazing!) are Pretending to be Normal – Living with Asperger’s Syndrome and Loud Hands – Autistic People Speaking. I really prefer loud hands autistic people speakingreading about autistic experiences through the eyes of actually autistic people. I know there’s several books out there by family members or doctors, but really. Who knows them better than themselves? I’m trying to be aware of the #ownvoices movement when reading about marginalized groups, and this is part of that.

So those are the five books I have read or am going to read. The next five are ones I either don’t have requested yet, or my library doesn’t have them at all. But they look interesting.

ABCs_of_Aut_Acceptance_Ebook_Cover3_largeThe ABCs of Autism Acceptance is one I should DEFINITELY read. I might be making an order from Autonomous Press soon! This is a collection of 26 short essays about autistic culture, systemic barriers that face autistics, and some of the history of autism. I really want to pick this one up.

The_Real_Experts_Online_Cover_largeThe Real Experts: Readings for Parents of Autistic Children doesn’t apply to me specifically, but I still thought it should receive a place in this top ten list. It’s another collection of essays, this time by a variety nothing is rightof autistic adults.

The Shaping Clay series of novels looks interesting; they’re about the life of an autistic man named Clay Dillon. They begin with Nothing is Right, set in first grade. The books continue through Imaginary Friends to Defiant, taking place when Clay is 30. The books are written by Michael Scott Monje Jr, who is transgender as well as autistic.

Spoon_Knife_Cover_Final_JPEG_largeThe Spoon Knife Anthology: thoughts on Compliance, Defiance, and Resistance looks like a fascinating book, edited by Michael Scott Monje Jr. and N.I. Nicholson. This appears to be an annually published book, with Spoon Knife 2 being called “Test Chamber.” They’re published by NeuroQueer, an imprint from Autonomous books that focuses on gender, sexuality, and race, and they’re billed as an “annual open-call collection to find new talent.”

barking sycamoresAlso under the NeuroQueer imprint is the first anthology of Barking Sycamores, a quarterly magazine of neurodivergent literature and art. The magazine publishes “poetry, artwork, short fiction, creative nonfiction, and hybrid genre work by emerging and established neurodivergent writers as well as book reviews.” They’re only available online at the website, though past issues can be bought as ebooks. They publish one piece per day on their blog until the issue is complete. I’ll definitely be following this blog!

So those are my Top Ten books to read this month for Autism Acceptance Month. (Technically I suppose that’s thirteen books, but I grouped the series together.) I think an order from Autonomous Press is in my near future!

So I had finished this post and had it ready to publish when a friend of mine gave me a few more titles! The Autism Women’s Network has published a few books like All The Weight of Our Dreams, which is a collection of essays by autistic people of color, and What Every Autistic Girl Wishes Her Parents Knew, a collection of essays by autistic women. So those are also worth checking out!

As I continue to find and read books by autistic authors, I’m just going to list them at the bottom of this post so they’re all in one place to refer back to!

All Cats Have Asperger Syndrome

The Kiss Quotient

Look Me In The Eye

 

 

Book Review: The Journal of Best Practices

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journalThe Journal of Best Practices: A Memoir of Marriage, Asperger Syndrome, and One Man’s Quest to Be a Better Husband
by David Finch
Memoir
222 pages
Published 2012

Well. I’m still not 100% back to health, but I’m well enough to get absorbed in a book again! This book was especially interesting to me because we are pretty sure that my husband is on the autism spectrum. What would have been called Asperger’s a few years ago, before they wrapped that back into autism, because it’s all the same syndrome – it just differs in how it impacts people. (The book was obviously written before that happened, though Asperger’s still seems to be shorthand for autistic people that don’t fit what most people think of as autistic – what some people would call high-functioning, I suppose, though that’s also not as cut and dried as it seems. Rebecca Burgess described it well in her comic on Tumblr.)

I read portions of this book aloud to my husband, because they described him to a T. The very first page mentions how Finch recalls his niece’s birthday, not because he’s a good uncle, but because it’s 3/14 – Pi. My husband remembers my birthday because it’s half a stick of RAM (well it used to be, anyway!) – 5/12. Now he remembers it as 2^9. The first chapter then goes on to describe how Finch’s wife sat him down with a self-diagnostic questionnaire (he received an official diagnosis later) and he was surprised at how many questions described him. While they didn’t list all 200 or so questions in the book, the ones that were mentioned I asked my husband. He was a Yes to all but one, and looked at me afterwards with a laugh and a joking “I’m feeling a little attacked right now!” That included questions like “Do you sometimes have an urge to jump over things?” (Yes) and “Have you been fascinated by making traps?” Husband told me about a book on survival he’d been given when he was 14 or so – he doesn’t remember much of it, but he can recall almost verbatim the chapter on traps and snares.

The book was a fascinating look into the mind of an adult with autism trying (and succeeding!) to navigate a relationship. It gave us a lot to talk about, and a few new strategies to try. If you know or love anyone on the autism spectrum, I highly recommend this book. It might help you understand how they see things.

I have another book on autism to read soon – Been There, Done That, Try This! – about coping strategies for autistic adults. I’m eager to see how much of that we can use in our daily lives.

From the cover of The Journal of Best Practices:

At some point in nearly every marriage, a wife finds herself asking, What the @#!% is wrong with my husband?! In David Finch’s case, this turns out to be an apt question. Five years after he married Kristen, the love of his life, they learn that he has Asperger syndrome. The diagnosis explains David’s ever-growing list of quirks and compulsions, his lifelong propensity to quack and otherwise melt down in social exchanges, and his clinical-strength inflexibility. But it doesn’t make him any easier to live with.

Determined to change, David sets out to understand Asperger syndrome and learn to be a better husband – no easy task for a guy whose inability to express himself rivals his two-year-old daughter’s, who thinks his responsibility for laundry extends no further than throwing things in (or at) the hamper, and whose autism-spectrum condition makes seeing his wife’s point of view a near impossibility.

Nevertheless, David devotes himself to improving his marriage with an endearing yet hilarious zeal that involves excessive note-taking, performance reviews, and most of all, the Journal of Best Practices: a collection of hundreds of maxims and hard-won epiphanies that result from self-reflection both comic and painful. They include “Don’t change the radio station when she’s singing along,” “Apologies do not count when you shout them,” and “Be her friend, first and always.” Guided by the Journal of Best Practices, David transforms himself over the course of two years from the world’s most trying husband to the husband who tries the hardest, the husband he’d always meant to be.