The curious incident of the vote at the book club
The first time I read Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time was by force: I was in a graduate seminar on disability studies and the novel was part of the assigned reading. Prior to that point, I’d made the firm decision to refrain from reading it. The novel frequently came up in Livejournal, Wrong Planet, and Aspies for Freedom. And while some spectrumites thought positively of the book, it seemed to me that the negative remarks were enough to prevent me from being curious about Curious.
I don’t hate the book — but I don’t know that I like it, either. In fact, I don’t know how to respond to it. I feel as though I only know how to respond to the response to Haddon’s book. I don’t trust non-autistic audiences with it. And that statement of “trust” makes me feel sort of snobbish in a way, I suppose, but it comes from a very real place of hurt and frustration.
My first IRL, offline experience with Curious occurred prior to reading it. I was a Master’s student at the time, and I’d made the decision to tell no one of my Asperger’s. Instead, I went along with the imposed labels of shy and neurotic and OCD and friggin’ weird, man. (Any time someone hears me talk about ELO, they tend to walk away with the friggin’ weirds.) I was talking with a professor about teaching composition, and she started detailing some of the difficulties she’d encountered as an instructor, and some of those difficulties were students with LDs and ASDs. The moment I heard her mention Asperger’s, my head grew sort of faint, and I made the impulsive decision to come out. I started the coming out process by saying something to the effect of, “One of my teachers once suggested I had Asperger’s…”
She abruptly cut me off. You? Have Asperger’s? she balked. You’re such a good writer. You should take that comment as an insult.
I was completely taken aback, unsure of how to respond. At that moment, I suddenly didn’t want to be Aspergian any more — I was ashamed of myself, and I did my best throughout the rest of our conversation (or, rather, her conversation) to feign neurotypicality. As I turned to walk away, she suggested that I read Curious. I was obviously nothing like the main character in that book, and thus I couldn’t be autistic.
Fast-forward to the day when I was forced to read Curious. The book scared me. I knew I was about to enter into a non-autistic narrative of an autistic, and while I gathered that the author’s construction of Christopher wasn’t meant to essentialize spectrumites, it had nevertheless served an essentializing function for me. Moreover, I feared that, after reading it, I would begin to doubt my own diagnosis. Autism diagnosis is based on behavioral observations, and not on “objective” brain scans or blood tests. What if all of my doctors were idiots? Did they think that I was the female Christopher? Because I’m not the female Christopher, and if they thought that I was the female Christopher, then I would need a new neuropsych eval, post haste.
I hate that I have to defend my Asperger’s diagnosis to an uneducated public who refuses to be educated. I’ve been so brainwashed into being socially appropriate that the huge measures I take in order to appear neurotypical are largely invisible to the people I’m in contact with. Consequently, other than seeming weird or shy, I don’t seem to be much of anything. I’m certainly not the autistic who screams in supermarkets: I’m the autistic who mentally shuts down in supermarkets, the one who can’t talk to her husband by the time she reaches the produce aisle because the lights and noises have become one inseparable sense in her brain, the one who starts to taste sounds and choke on lights, the one who squeezes her arms and wrists so hard that they bruise, the one who is tiny, mute, and virtually invisible, like every good girl should be. I doubt I even know how to scream. If I can hear my voice, I think that others can hear it too, and I often talk in mumbles and whispers, unaware that I am talking in mumbles and whispers, unaware until someone briskly tells me to “speak up.”
Because I am silent and invisible, because I don’t fit the Christopher-esque mold, I have to defend myself and my diagnosis. And I realize that this isn’t the fault of Asperger’s: it’s how we think about Asperger’s, how we want to make neat little categories and stick to them.
Back to the book: When I first cracked open the seizure-red cover of Curious, I was immediately greeted with several book reviews, each of them sappy and gushy. I remember, upon reading them, having the instinctual desire to vomit.
Fast-forward to this week — two days ago, to be precise. I’m attending a book club for people with AS/HFA, a book club I’ve been attending since early summer. This book club has grown from a core of five aspies + one NT moderator to eleven aspies + four NT moderators. At this meeting, we’re voting on what our next book will be. We’ve just finished Twilight, a teenage vampire romance novel that half of us like and the other half want to burn (and I’m the middle one — the one who just wants to gag). After a couple rounds of voting, we’ve narrowed things down to two possibilities: Catch-22 and Curious.
Before the final vote, three aspies voice their vehement objections to Curious. They maintain that it’s the most simplistic, vilest, dumbest, evilest book they’ve ever read. We vote, and Curious wins — because two aspies have abstained from voting, and all four NTs cast their votes for Curious.
One aspie totally flips out in authentic autistic fashion, screaming and jumping and flailing. Another covers her ears. Two others start yelling. Two leave the table. One looks bewildered. My hard drive shuts down, then crashes, and I mentally leave planet earth, effectively mute and literally senseless.
I don’t remember much else, except that once my brain foggily deciphers the words “next time,” I grab my book and run, and a few alarmed people chase after me asking what’s wrong, and all I can hear and see in my brain is the f-word, which I try very hard not to say, so I run outside without my jacket, and the cold jars me, and one of the moderators tries to calm me down, and I mince my words, mince my breaths, mince my papercuts and bruises that I don’t remember acquiring, mince, mince, mince.
It is now today, and I have again cracked open Curious, again by force, reopening one of the papercuts I unknowingly formed with Twilight while tranced the other evening. I sit here, thinking about audience and its intersections with empathy, that favored NT buzzword. And I read the bylines:
“This original and affecting novel is a triumph of empathy.” — The New Yorker
“Mark Haddon’s portrayal of an emotionally dissociated mind is a superb achievement. He is a wise and bleakly funny writer with rare gifts of empathy.” — Ian McEwan, author of Atonement
“Exceptional by any standards. Haddon sticks rigidly to the limits imposed by autism without sacrificing literary viability. When we look at the world through Christopher’s eyes we see it more clearly and understand ourselves better. What more could you want of a book?” — The Sunday Telegraph
“Wonderfully surreal…. Heartbreaking and inspiring…. It is hard to think of anyone who would not be moved and delighted by this book.” — Financial Times (London)
Mince, mince, mince.