Book review: Someone Like Me: An anthology of non-fiction by Autistic writers
Like a chorus of individual voices, new essay collection Someone Like Me illuminates Autistic experience.
Someone Like Me is a collection of voices both in chorus and in distinct, unique, refrains. Curated explicitly to provide a counter-narrative to the ‘nerdy white man’ stereotype of Autism, these are vital stories from twenty-five Autistic people, specifically women and gender diverse people, often further marginalised by under-diagnosis, deep pressures to conform, and stigma.
We hear about sensory pleasures and displeasures, burnout, relationships (with humans and animals), and body/space relations. The writers cook, catch planes, make love, go to therapy, read, cut their hair, dance, talk, write, dream. They interrogate systems which minimise their identities, their joys, their ability to function. They celebrate the people and things who are affirming, supportive, creative, understanding – including themselves.
Though some essays are inevitably stronger than others, each work is a window into Autistic ways of thinking and processing, and many living in a world built (often bafflingly) for neurotypical people. In Caitlin McGregor’s essay ‘Twelve Haircuts’, they detail a session with a speech pathologist interspersed with memories of haircuts and drawings of each cut. The speech path asks McGregor to assess photos of people doing various activities and describe what the people are feeling.
“The people are clearly actors,” McGregor notes, “so the task is to interpret not genuine emotion but the ones being intentionally projected. I don’t point this out.”
After McGregor provides several examples of potential feelings, the pathologist explains, “Neurotypical people don’t give so many options… I just look and know my instinct is right’. McGregor wonders “how she could possibly know this”.
Erin Riley’s essay on Autistic burnout is a meditative piece where dough rises and bread bakes in the background of their ruminations on stress, support, and “running on fumes”.
“Holding on to other people’s sentences was like free solo-ing a rockface,” Riley explains. They find that “doing less”, while in the “soft hospitality” of friends is a solution.
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In Anna Whateley and Kate Gordon’s essay ‘When Everyone Else Has a Conversation’ they discuss the conventions of conversation and how their Autistic traits can complicate this but also be liberating to share. In between discussions of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and World of Warcraft, Whateley wonders, “Do other people like themselves after they talk with people?” and Gordon states starkly, “Must be nice just to live now. Not always in before and always in after. Not always in past and in future.” The essay is itself a conversation, invitingly splayed across two columns.
The strength of this collection lies in its simultaneous diversity and collectively of experience. As editors Clem Bastow and Jo Case write in their introduction, “the twenty-five essays in these pages are both highly individual and collective… There’s a lot we share, but being Autistic is just one part of our identities.” While this collection does not do the lifting of boundary-pushing discourse, it doesn’t purport to or need to; this is a work of truth-telling and testimony, meant to educate as well as make visible and collate.
The editors and contributors of Someone Like Me have achieved a timely, touching, and important collection which will undoubtedly inspire and pave the way for future storytelling in this space.
Someone Like Me: An anthology of non-fiction by Autistic writers, edited by Clem Bastow and Jo Case, is published by UQP