Category Autism

Auto Added by WPeMatico

‘I was in the pit of despair’: Non-speaking autistic novelist Woody Brown on his journey from write-off to writer

As a child, Brown was underestimated, infantilised and dismissed by specialists and teachers. Now 28, he has written an acclaimed debut novel set in an adult day care centre that gives people like him a voice

‘May I say that I’m very glad to meet you,”  Woody Brown taps on his word board. Brown is formal, funny and strikingly eloquent. He has a formidable ability to tell stories that reach into the mind of his characters and express what they are thinking, and what they think others are thinking about them. Brown is also autistic and non-speaking.

His first novel, Upward Bound, tells the story of everyday life at the eponymous adult day care centre in southern California. The title is ironic – the young adults, referred to as clients, are anything but upward bound. By and large, they are stifled, patronised, unheard and unseen. Despite their shortcomings, the staff are portrayed with a surprising tenderness.

Continue reading...

The Matchbox Girl by Alice Jolly review – horror, humanity and Dr Asperger

The reader grapples with fascism and complicity through the eyes of a mute autistic girl being treated during the second world war

As I started reading Alice Jolly’s new novel, whose narrator is a mute autistic girl in wartime Vienna, I realised that I was resisting its very premise. I am generally sceptical about books that use child narrators to add poignancy to dark plots, or novels that use nazism as a means of introducing moral jeopardy to their characters’ journeys. And yet by the end Jolly had won me over. This is a book that walks a tightrope between sentimentality and honesty, between realism and imagination, and creates something spirited and memorable as it does so.

We meet our fierce narrator, Adelheid Brunner, when she is brought into a children’s hospital by her grandmother, who cannot cope with the little girl’s fixations. Adelheid is obsessed with the matchboxes of the title, which she is constantly studying, ordering and occasionally discarding. In the hospital, she finds that she and her fellow child inmates are the object of obsessive study in turn by their doctors – sometimes understood, sometimes valued, and then, tragically, sometimes discarded.

Continue reading...

His research on autism was compassionate – how could Hans Asperger have collaborated with the Nazis?

The Vienna-based ‘father of neurodiversity’ was ahead of his time in his work but was also implicated in the Third Reich’s crimes. My novel set out to explore these contradictions

In 2015, I decided to write a novel about Dr Hans Asperger, who worked at the University Children’s Hospital in Vienna during the second world war. My interest was sparked by two nonfiction books: NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who Think Differently by Steve Silberman and In a Different Key: The Story of Autism by John Donvan and Caren Zucker.

Reading these stories told about Asperger, you would have thought they were talking about two different people. To Silberman, Asperger was a compassionate and original thinker, whereas Donvan and Zucker depict him as an enthusiastic supporter of Hitler. For a historical novelist, widely differing accounts of the same person are gold dust, and I began to dig deeper.

Continue reading...