Book Review: Parallel Play

(Hey folks, I've moved!  Please find the new site at Wordpress!  This will be one of the last posts on Blogger- I hope you like the new site as much as I do!)

Parallel Play: Growing Up With Undiagnosed Asperger's, by Tim Page, is a "my life with autism" story from one of our older survivors.  The book mainly deals with his childhood, as the title suggests, and is written in the typical autistic conversational-explanational tone that so frequently graces our literature.  Mr. Page's prose is more polished than most, I would say, which is likely due to his many years of wordsmithing.  

I call this autistic generation The Lost Generation, personally, because few of these autistic people avoided institutionalization, and those that did typically suffered immensely.  Autism was simply not understood, let alone supported.  There was no community to which we could find advice from others like us.  No comradery and fellowship.  No support services designed to meet our needs.  

Those of us that survived without being sent to the destructive prison-institutions typically bear scars and unhealthy adaptations from the experience.  Depression and anxiety are common.  For this author?  One of those unhealthy adaptations is a fixation on death.  This isn't uncommon for autistic people- anything can turn into a hobby or fascination.  Morbid subjects aren't unreasonable, especially when a close family member (such as the author's grandfather) dies when the autistic person is young.  

In the author's case, there are no gory details to be had.  His interest in the subject included a much-heightened fear of death and interests in deceased authors, musicians, and silent films.  I suspect this book would be quite a nostalgia trip for an older person, especially one that grew up in the Northeast US at around the same time.  In that sense, I am very much not the target audience.

One thing is painfully consistent regardless of generation, though.  The pain of living in a world that constantly misunderstands and willfully rejects you is clear throughout this book.  You can see this same pain in Liane Holliday Wiley's writing.  Both Tim Page and Liane suffered immensely, and neither of them had any kind of fellow autistic community.  They were simply alone, and found their way as best they could with other misfits.  

Another painful echo found in this book as well as other autistic accounts was perhaps summarized best by Jennifer Cook O'Toole: "How can I be so smart, yet so stupid?"  Tim Page mentions scoring well on IQ tests (though no specific numbers) a couple times in the book, and inevitably with those mentions also comes a certain disbelief, and the suggestion that his father might have tampered with the results.  I certainly have no special insight into that suggestion, but I suspect Mr. Page, like many people, operates on the idea that IQ is somehow a blanket score for intelligence.  

I strongly suspect I will go blue in the face before I ever finish convincing people that no, it is not.  IQ is a measure of how well a person is likely to learn in a typical school setting, using typical teaching methods.  It does not account for learning disabilities.  It does not cover common sense, emotional intelligence, musical ability, hand-eye coordination, and social skills.  It's a highly restrictive scale that should only be considered useful in highly restrictive settings.  But because of the value people place on it, a person with a high IQ score is assumed to be good at all these other things.  When they turn out not to be, disappointment is about the kindest response I've seen.  Rejection, disbelief, and avoidance are significantly more common.

This aloneness and rejection tends to breed a mindset of "I don't fit in and it's my fault.  If only I wasn't so ____, I would have friends and be happy."  This sense of being wrong and bad is pervasive.  I should know: a part of me still believes that even though it's definitely unhealthy, bad, and just flat-out wrong.  It's the same poisonous mindset as believing that I can't be beautiful because larger women can't be beautiful (except for every other larger woman, because obviously the beauty industry is manipulative and horrible).  

It's exactly these kinds of experiences that make it worthwhile for me to step forward and identify myself as autistic.  Simply knowing "there's someone else like me" is a massive relief and boost to quality of life.  It's why representation in the media, especially genuine representation, is so important.  Parents do better knowing autistic adults, because it gives them a picture of what their kids might grow to be.  Autistic kids can receive that same benefit, but they also can gain courage to be themselves.  Also strategies and insights they might never have had themselves.

In short, they can have the things I never had, and hopefully be healthier and happier humans for it.  We march to our own drums, we autistic people.  Each of us stunningly unique.  One day I hope that uniqueness won't contain a rainbow of trauma as a given.  

Read This Book If

You want to experience a vivid slice of life narrative from an autistic man who grew up in the 50s and 60s.  They were a remarkably different time, those days before the Internet came to everyone's phones, computers, and homes.  This era wasn't my era, but I think there's value in knowing what life was like before the modern one... and in knowing the stories of the Lost Generation, perhaps find something of ourselves.