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Finding myself in prose
Apr. 2nd, 2023 07:34 pmI am reading one of the (many) books about autism I've acquired in the last couple of years, trying to work out whether I can see myself in them enough to justify identiying myself as autistic instead of just weird and a bit useless. (Answer; yes, definitely.)
Picking this one up, I wondered vaguely if "books about autism" has now become a special interest. And then I remembered how, at the age of seven or eight, I was so obsessed with reading Doctor Spock's Book of Baby and Child Care (trying to work out what I was meant to be like) that my mother ended up hiding it from me. And then later, when I started to work out that I wasn't straight, I tried to find myself in queer fiction (of which not much was available in the local library, and none of it was terribly helpful, because I had no idea I was looking for ace rep and even if I had done, I don't think there was a lot of it about in the 80s).
Later on, I mostly tried to learn how to interpret and interact with other people from books, but I've always been trying to find myself there, too.
Picking this one up, I wondered vaguely if "books about autism" has now become a special interest. And then I remembered how, at the age of seven or eight, I was so obsessed with reading Doctor Spock's Book of Baby and Child Care (trying to work out what I was meant to be like) that my mother ended up hiding it from me. And then later, when I started to work out that I wasn't straight, I tried to find myself in queer fiction (of which not much was available in the local library, and none of it was terribly helpful, because I had no idea I was looking for ace rep and even if I had done, I don't think there was a lot of it about in the 80s).
Later on, I mostly tried to learn how to interpret and interact with other people from books, but I've always been trying to find myself there, too.
