Book Review: Improve Your Social Skills

Improve Your Social Skills by Daniel Wendler, is a plainspoken, relatively brief, "what it says on the tin" guide, written by an autistic adult who makes a business out of teaching this subject.  Surprisingly to me, since it's such a complicated subject, it delivers.  In a perfect world, this book could be given to every autistic teenager so we'd always have a good place to start from, when social stuff gets complicated.

Topics include how to start a conversation and keep it going, a really basic guide to body language, how to make friendships that are meaningful, how to date, and how to tell stories well.  The book does this in just over 200 pages.  You can thusly guess, then, that it's written to address these subjects very, very broadly.

Even at such a broad level, though, I was impressed with this book.  The subjects it tackles are complicated as heck, yet the author was able to boil them down to basics.  Or the bedrock, as he seems to like to call it.  Almost all of the advice and guidelines in the book I agreed with, or at least thought were a good start.  

I've reviewed a piece from this author before, and like the other one, it's written in the  same, basically accurate but adorably optimistic writing style.  While I don't particularly disagree with any of the information in this book, I suppose reading so much optimism (bordering on idealism) may have clashed with my remarkably pessimistic (read: cynical and depressed in the long term) nature.  I had a similar reaction to watching an episode of the new My Little Pony TV show a few years back.

My personal optimism poisoning aside, Mr. Wendler has a gift for creating visual, teachable metaphors.  The one that's stuck with the most is his concept for creating a successful conversation, which involves making a sandwich from opposite sides of a deli counter.  The conversation is the sandwich, and you take turns with your partner adding ingredients to it before sliding it back to the other person.  It sounds odd, but it made a lot of sense to me, both visually and in practice for how a good conversation actually works.  

A couple improvements come to mind when It's a bit outside the scope of the book, but I would have appreciated a bit more in the section about getting a good therapist.  The scope of the book does not cover fighting through mental illness to learn these social skills.  In fact, it quite literally says, in a few places, that if you're struggling with mental illness, to get a therapist to work on that.  

Which is good advice, and fine, but the section to help you choose one was limited at best.  A good therapist is essential, but you aren't always going to find one that fits well the first time.  Trust is an essential component.  I'm unsure if the author simply hasn't needed to therapist-shop or if he simply didn't consider it important information... but considering that up to 80% of autistic people suffer mental illness, it strikes me as far more important than it was made to be here.  

A last note: like the other one I read, this seems to be a self-published book.  I can't tell you how much that disappoints me.  Not that the book exists, but that it doesn't have conventional advertising or a network to distribute it.  This guide is what a lot of teenagers deeply, truly need in their lives (autistic or not).  Sure, you can buy this book on Amazon, and that's certainly better than nothing.  But this book probably won't receive the publicity and exposure it's due.  

Read This Book If

You want a primer on the fundamentals being social.  This book is light on the "why" of social stuff, but the information it contains is all accurate as far as I can tell.  This is a good book for autistic people, especially teens and up, that want to brush up on the thing everyone hammers on us about: social skills.  I found it a useful refresher, and it has earned its place on my bookshelf.