book review

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

Pretending to be Normal: Living with Asperger\’s Syndrome, by Liane Holliday Willey, is a \”my life with autism\” account written by an older autistic woman, one of the generation before mine that had little-to-no supports or help unless they were deemed \”completely disabled.\”  She was not, and so she had to fend her way through life mostly alone.  This is not a long book: less than 200 pages, almost 50 of that in appendices.  

I\’ve read Liane\’s work in the past, and actually met her in person during one of the DOD\’s yearly Autism Research Program conferences.  She lives in the same state as me, perhaps a few dozen miles north, and has ties to the same entity that diagnosed me as autistic about a decade ago.  

She is a very knowledgeable person, but like me, not a cheerful one.  In reading this book, one can easily see the myriad of ways life has battered her down.  In Japan, the saying is \”the nail that sticks up gets hammered down.\”  Meaning, that people who do not fit into proper social norms and expectations get pressured to conform until they do.  This is particularly true in Japan, but even in a more individualistic culture like the US, it is still true.  I have the depression and anxiety diagnoses to prove it.

I see a couple things of specific note in this account.  

First, there is a certain pervasive negativity to her view of autism.  I see this often with freshly diagnosed autistic people, those prone to depression, and parents that fit those categories or haven\’t been introduced to neurodiversity as a philosophy.  

When I, and others, first receive our diagnoses, there is the tendency to hyperfocus on it, and blame it for everything we don\’t like about ourselves.  The depression, the anxiety, the sensory differences, the low energy, even medical things like dietary sensitivities and gut dysbiosis.  

This is part of what contributes to the confusion around what exactly is meant when someone says \”autism,\” by the way.   

Perhaps more importantly, though, it is inherently unfair.   

Autism is not a collection of negative traits that serve only to disable a person.  It is not \”everything that\’s wrong with me/my child.\”  It is a brain difference, and that comes with positives and negatives.  Neurodiversity teaches us to celebrate those positives.  

For example, I would say I am a very reliable human.  If I say I\’m going to do something, I do it.  I am rarely, if ever, late to appointments.  I don\’t make promises lightly, or say things I don\’t mean.  I make efforts to be conscientious of others\’ time and energy.  These traits are a facet of the autistic tendency to adhere to rules.  

There are dozens of ways to spin that tendency negatively.  \”Rigidity\” is one of them.  \”Change intolerant\” is another.  \”Inflexible\” is yet another I hear regularly.  It\’s true that autistic people can have great difficulty shifting gears and accepting rule changes, and that can make our lives harder.  Most recently my friend needed to reschedule my hair appointment due to a sudden change of schedule, and I was doing so poorly at the time that I quite literally couldn\’t face rescheduling it for a couple weeks.  

Does my difficulty with sudden changes of plan negate the value of my reliability as a person?  I don\’t think it does.  Or I don\’t think it should, ideally.  But in the course of communication, especially with parents and professionals, it basically does.  The strength and value of my differences is ignored in favor of spotlighting my weakness.

It\’s a very cruel thing to do to people.  Having our parents, our friends, our support staff, constantly preaching to us all our failings and ignoring our successes and good points… well, it\’s no wonder many autistic people are depressed.  Having so many anti-cheerleaders is terribly damaging to one\’s self-worth.  Particularly on top of already being the metaphorical nail in the Japanese saying, which is hammered day and night to conform, by people who don\’t know us and don\’t care about us.  

The kind of relentless negativity can be internalized, and I wonder if Liane perhaps struggles with exactly that.  There\’s certainly a mention here and there of \”becoming less AS [autistic]\” when talking about learning to get by in life better, or improving her social skills.  

In the book, Liane wishes in several places that she had found someone like herself earlier in life.  Based on how she talks about her daughters (one of which is also autistic), it seems like she eventually found that in her own family.  At the time I met her, more than 15 years after she wrote this book, she had also branched out into meeting other autistic people, which I\’m glad of.  

The main of the book ends with a hope and a wish for the sort of world that embraces differences, rather than rejecting them.  It was, I was glad to see, pretty much exactly what most people who identify as neurodiverse would wish for. 

At the very end is a set of seven appendices, which include the author\’s coping strategies, organizational suggestions, thoughts on disclosure of diagnosis, further reading, etc.  They span a bit less than 50 pages.  

Read This Book If

Dietary Interventions in Autism Spectrum Disorders: Why They Work When They Work, Why They Don\’t When They Don\’t, by Kenneth J. Aitken, provides a discussion of the history of special diets for symptom management in autistic people.  Despite the rather blunt title, the book seems to be aimed at healthcare professionals.  However, a layperson such as myself can follow the gist of the matter without understanding the specific formulas and chemical interactions described.  

I\’ll preface this review by informing you, sadly, that there is no one proposed diet that solves all autistic ills.  This won\’t surprise you if you\’re familiar with the saying, \”If you\’ve met one person with autism, you\’ve met one person with autism.\”  

Also, when the word \”diet\” is used in this book, it is not referring to the typical USian understanding of the word, which refers to the fad weight loss diets that come and go like the wind.  These diets are undertaken to lose weight, and, without assuming that goal is even accomplished, dropped quickly.  The book does not, in fact, give any care for weight loss at all.  Apparently a significant portion of the autistic population is rail thin instead of obese.  That sounds nice to me, but the author insists this is as much as problem as obesity.  

At any rate, the book\’s intention with the word \”diet\” hearkens back to an older understanding of the word: the food and drink regularly consumed.  In short, these diets are meant to be undertaken in the long term.  They are lifestyle changes, not temporary measures to appease one\’s guilt or prop up one\’s body image.  (I have a deep dislike of \”dieting,\” can you tell?)

The first section of the book discusses ASD and special diets.  It contains good background knowledge, some of which is helpful to understanding the how and why of the diets.  It also covers how food and nutrition has shifted in the development of humanity and technology, which I thought was quite interesting and helpful.  To cap it off, it contains information about particular toxins whose effects are particularly obvious in autistic people, as well as protective factors against these toxins.  

The second section is the meat of the title:  Nine diets are analyzed and summarized in brief (sometimes \”less than 10 pages\” brief).  Factors considered in each analysis include the evidence for and against each diet, possible health problems associated with the diet, and practical difficulties with following the diet.  

I was particularly impressed with the author\’s choice to have that last criteria in each section.  It strongly suggests he\’s aware of the challenges that come with making these changes.  The specific sections, too, suggest his awareness of the differing situational challenges any given family might come up against.  Not every family is going to be able to find farro to cook with, for example.  

Each analysis also includes a Resources section, which tends to include a healthy mix of books, websites, organizations, and scientific research.  This is in additon to the Resources section at the end, which contains all the same info but centralized.  The information in this book is about ten years old, so it\’s quite possible that some resources may not work.  However, the author has listed enough of them that at least one should serve to get you further information and likely other resources.  

Part three of the book is the author\’s answer to \”but which of these diets should I do!?\”  He proposes a 10th diet (the Simple Restriction Diet), drawing on the best parts of the most effective diets previously described.  He includes a proposed plan, complete with worksheets, a table to help you match problem foods with toxins, and a suggested timetable with which to implement the diet and subsequent re-introductions of food categories.  

In all honesty, I kind of want to try this Simple Restriction Diet.  It seems distinctly promising in terms of both weight loss and narrowing down whatever keeps wrecking my guts.  Maybe even whatever\’s wrecking my spouse\’s guts.  In practicality, I\’m… dubious of my ability to convince my spouse to try this diet.  \”Restriction\” is a very apt descriptor, because this diet has you eliminate or heftily reduce quite a bit of commonly consumed foods.  Feasibility is a serious concern.  

The suggested timeline for implementing the diet is actually only three weeks, after which you start adding in carbohydrates to a point, and watching for adverse reactions.  And then, assuming none, you move onto transitioning off the next category, and so on.  If adding a category back in causes a reaction, then you can take that to your doctor and get more specific tests.  

As such, it\’s still a significant expenditure of time and energy… but you aren\’t necessarily bound to a particular diet for life.  The author even stresses testing your final resulting diet every once in a while, because none of these are perfectly scientifically sound.  Improvements might be seen  while on a gluten-free/casein-free diet, but not actually be related to the diet itself, and the person may find some years hence that they don\’t need to adhere to it but still remain healthy.

I have a couple complaints.  The first is that no mention is made of the difficulties of transitioning off a typical USian diet.  Sugar addiction is a very real and very miserable thing to detox off of.  I have done so several times and will need to do so again at some point soon, because Halloween candy and Christmas sweets exist and I only have so much patience with not eating them.

The second is that I don\’t feel there are sufficient resources for the author\’s pet diet, the Simple Restriction Diet.  There are resources in plenty for the other nine he looks into, and one could, I suppose, research the relevant ones and try to combine them with a great deal of effort.  I would much rather have links to directly relevant cookbooks, with no guesswork about whether I\’m failing at this or that aspect.  

All in all, I was impressed with this book.  It\’s analytical and healthily skeptical while remaining positive and hopeful.  It acknowledges the shortcomings of the science without disallowing their effectiveness.  It explains the science in detail without being overly verbose, and you needn\’t truly understand the chemical formulas to follow the rest of the discussion.

Read This Book If

You\’re an interested care provider, interested parent, or interested autistic.  This is a pretty focused book.  It\’s written well, in a manner that seems aimed at healthcare providers but is accessible to laypeople (except maybe the chemical formulas).  It discusses the science (or what exists of the science) as well as providing feasibility information and potential positives and negatives to each diet.  In short, this is a good resource for anyone looking into special diets, and I\’m glad my local library has it in their collection.  

22 Things a Woman With Asperger\’s Syndrome Wants Her Partner to Know, by Rudy Simone, is a set of 22 short essays around the title\’s theme.  This is not a long book, at less than 150 pages.  Each essay gives a decent amount of food for thought, so this isn\’t a quick read despite the page count.  The tone and writing style is nearly conversational, and quite easy to follow, making this a book you could hand to pretty much anyone.  

As you might be able to guess by the label \”Asperger\’s Syndrome\” in the title, this is a book about a subtype of autism.  Specifically, women that were given the \”Aspie\” diagnosis rather than the \”autism\” or \”high functioning autism\” diagnosis.  Formally speaking, the difference doesn\’t exist any more.  The DSM 5 came out about a year after this book was published, and it erased the DSM 4R\’s existing autistic subtypes.  This book speaks to a subtype within one of those deleted subtypes.  

If this subtype applies to you, your partner, or your grown child, this book may be extremely useful.  It describes various facets of autistic behavior and how they may look in yourself or your loved one.  If the subtype does not apply, the book may still have some use, but it should be read with a salt shaker close at hand (ie: take the advice in these essays with a grain of salt, or in literalist terms, pay extra attention because the advice may or may not apply to your specific situation).

As for me personally?  The AsperGirl subtype seems to describe me fairly well.  Not perfectly, but enough that I\’ll be handing this book to my spouse and asking him to read it when I\’m done with this review.  

The most useful essay for me personally was the 5th one: \”Everyone\’s a critic… but she\’s better at it than you.\”  This is a sticking point for me and for our relationship.  I do have high standards and expectations, and those can be hard to live up to.  The essay puts those more in context, and recognizes that sometimes the autistic person simply needs to learn to lay off.  That\’s probably a lesson I should work on further…

I should note here that this book does not make the mistake of portraying the AsperGirl as perfect in every way, and the reader (assumed to be her partner) as simply not understanding her or not being good enough for her.  The author recognizes that a relationship is about balance, and that AsperGirls can be prone to various failings, including destructive behavior.  

Also, winning the award for Having a Clue, there was a section titled, \”Even if you think of her as a woman, she might not.\”  There is significant crossover in the autistic and nonbinary/trans populations.  I, for example, identify as agender, which is a type of nonbinary.  And I do not consider my gender to be female.  Biologically speaking (sex), I\’m female, but that\’s as far as that goes.  My physical parts have very little bearing on my interests, my values and initiative, and the people I care about.  This essay acknowledges this as a somewhat common.

Having read this book, I regret not looking into the AsperGirl community earlier.  I did know it existed but I guess I didn\’t put in sufficient time and effort to find it.  With the exception of a couple essays (one of them on motherhood), almost everything in this book accurately described me.  I can\’t stress enough how unusual that is for a book about autism: a diagnosis that\’s typically best described as a trashbin (where everything under the sun is chucked).  

Obviously, your mileage may vary.  Sensory sensitivities may vary.  Not every AsperGirl is going to be highly critical.  Coping mechanisms vary.  It\’s usually a massive red flag when an author gets very specific about descriptions and doesn\’t have too much by way of open-endedness, but in this case, for this subtype of a subtype?  Seems pretty accurate to me.  

Read This Book If

Drawing Autism, curated by Jill Mullin, is, at the most literal level, a collection of art and descriptions by autistic artists (some descriptions by their caretakers).  It could also be considered a deep dive into the unconscious minds of various autistic artists.  The contributors are mainly from the US, Canada, and India, but there are a few additional contributors from places like Singapore and Lithuania.  

Art isn\’t really my thing, so I picked this up more out of curiosity than the genuine desire to immerse myself in art.  Part of the reason I\’m not really an art person is because I don\’t process visual detail terribly well, so to see what everyone else sees in seconds, I have to take minutes.  Then there\’s the mystique that apparently separates art from whatever poorly crafted crap I doodled in my notebook in school… and in a lot of cases, when I go to art museums, I look at the modern stuff and go, \”but why is this art, and why this person over, say, me, or my friend who draws stuff that looks way better?\”

Presumably I\’m doomed to be an art heathen.  At any rate, I gave this book a fair shake.

The types of art in the book range from Temple Grandin\’s technical drawings to child\’s marker scrabbling I might technically have been able to reproduce, to near photorealistic landscapes, to collages.  The emotions covered are everything from joy to deepest frustration and rage turned into petty cruelty.  

After I read this book, I decided I was going to have to go through it and pick one piece of art that I connected with emotionally, because this was going to be a painfully short review otherwise.  So, on page 44, there\’s this piece, made with colored pencils and pastels.

The artist says he drew this after his niece and nephew died in a fire.  He was so sad and desperate that he didn\’t have words to express his emotions, so he drew this werewolf.  

This caught my attention because I have quite literally done a very similar drawing, for a similar depth of unexpressable emotion.  I spent about three weeks in college, between doing my summer job, trying to learn how to draw semi-people because the piece wouldn\’t stop tormenting me until I drew it.  

It actually took me about a half hour to dig up the scan of the piece, find something that could view the Photoshop file, and then screenshot it so you can look at it.  

This is titled \”HEAR ME!\” and as you can see, I have no formal (and precious little informal) art training, never mind any sense of how wing anatomy works.  The being there is a half-dragon paladin, and she\’s a character I created in Dungeons and Dragons.  (Why yes, she was a self-insert and that is why her body shape is roughly the same as mine, why do you ask?)  Rather than mourning the crushing loss of family like the werewolf above, she is expressing my despair at the state of the world and the apparent silence of God.  

Funny how that feeling seem to be perennially relevant.  If I were a better artist, I could have put more strain into her form, as she reaches upwards futilely, trying to experience the divine and failing.  But simply getting the anatomy as close to human as it is, was a strain on my artistic talents, so…  It is what it is.  I did try to clean it up, but the fact that I drew it on lined paper kind of means there\’s only so much to be done there.  

At any rate, the werewolf howling in despair at the moon struck me as markedly similar, and so that\’s the piece I chose.  

There are very many more pieces in this book, many cheerful ones as well as other less cheerful ones.  There are bright colors and subdued ones, many and varied art styles and subjects, and different levels of realism and seriousness.  If you like art and find meaning in such things, this book has something to offer you.  

Read This Book If

You like art and want to experience the autism spectrum by way of art.  There\’s 40 plus artists represented in this book, and a dizzying variety of styles, emotions, mediums, colors, subjects, and ideas.  I\’m not a big art person myself, but I strongly suspect there\’s something for everyone in this book, if you\’re willing to take the time to find it.  

 Life, Animated: A Story of Sidekicks, Heroes, and Autism, by Ron Suskind, is a \”my family\’s story with autism\” type book.  While there is a small mountain of these, this one is remarkable for the particular path the autistic person took.  Most of these stories have been about \”Aspergers\” type autistics.  That\’s me, and that\’s most of the people I know.    

Owen Suskind, on the other hand, fell into the most dreaded variant of autism: regressive autism.  That\’s the one where the child seems to develop normally until a certain point, and then loses developmental progress.  They stop talking or lose tons of vocabulary, their motor skills deteriorate, they stop conveying emotion through body language…  It\’s a parent\’s worst nightmare.  Many of these children backslide all the way to being nonverbal, and that\’s exactly what happened with Owen.  

Most of the stories of this type of autism offer hope in terms of alternative communication devices, finding new ways of listening and seeing from a very different perspective, and above all, an ongoing struggle to thrive in a world not made for humans so different from the norm.  In some ways, this particular story is similar to those.  

However, unlike most of those stories, and thanks to his parents\’ willingness to incorporate their child\’s special interest, a literal village\’s worth of people and support staff, and far more resources and privileges than most families with autistic people have access to… Owen was able to master words, learn to see things from others\’ perspectives, become independent, and even start dating.  You are brought through the process of all of these developments.

It\’s a particularly engaging, well-written story, likely because the author\’s journalism experience is extensive.  Suskind really brings you into the headspace of each family member, including Owen, as much as possible.  You experience the struggle of the parents, the mixed feelings of Walt (Owen\’s brother), and grow to understand Owen just as his parents do, over time.    

This is probably the best written \”my family\’s experience with autism\” account I\’ve ever read, and I\’ve read a hill of them at this point.  When reading these accounts, you always have to keep in mind that the adage about meeting autistic people also applies to their families.  Every family\’s story will be different.  I just wish every family had the kind of resources and privileges the Suskinds had for this journey.  

Read This Book If

You want to better understand how autism can affect a family (and have a guaranteed happy ending), or want an example of how to channel a special interest (in this case, Disney movies) into helping an autistic person engage with the real world.  The Suskinds are a privileged family in a lot of ways, but their struggle is no less real or valuable for that fact.  What they managed, together, shows what could be done for every autistic person, and the good that might result.  (There is also a documentary, for people who prefer video to books)

Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life, by Emily Nagoski, is not the usual fare for this blog, but… given how often autistic people miss out on proper sex education, the sections about the stress cycle (which are sadly highly relevant to autistic people), the importance of the subject overall, and the excellence of this particular book, I\’m making an exception.  

Fair warning: this is a book about sex.  If the subject makes you uncomfortable, you may feel you should skip this book.  Quite frankly, I strongly suggest you don\’t.  This book contains information you would typically need to pay a therapist thousands of dollars to obtain over a very long period of time, and only after you\’re literally at your wits\’ end (because that\’s typically the point at which people stop putting off getting help for this sort of thing).  

Also, while the book\’s cover suggests it mainly covers sex from women\’s point of view, the information therein is useful for all sexes (intersex people exist) and all genders (hi, I\’m agender!).  My spouse and I read this book together, and it cleared up a lot of falling down points we\’d had around the subject, as well as improving communication between us overall.  It\’ll take time to improve our actual sex life, since the book revealed some serious issues we have to work through, but I fully expect positive changes and a better relationship as a result.  

One of the key points that\’s stuck with me?  Sex is not a drive.  \”Sex drive\” is a common phrase to refer to peoples\’ desire to have sex, but the phrase is wrong, and worse, it\’s harmful.  Drives, you see, are things your body demands in order to live.  Food, air, and water, for example.  However, there are zero cases of someone dying because they didn\’t have sex for X years.  (There are cases of people believing they\’re owed sex, and because of inadequately supported mental illness and access to deadly weapons they definitely didn\’t need, killing people and/or committing suicide over it… but that\’s significantly different).   

Pop culture and media teach us that the hero always gets the girl (and the kiss, and the sex, etc).  And somewhere between that expectation that women throw themselves at the hero as soon as the hero succeeds, and the stigmatization of men who haven\’t had sex and/or aren\’t some kind of sexual genius with dozens of partners, this idea that sex is a physical need came into play.   

However, the research shows us this is wrong.  Sex can be pretty great, but it\’s merely an incentive-reward system, not a physical need.  Another thing that fall into this category is \”tasty food\” or snacks, which you might find yourself wanting even when you\’re not hungry.  

There are a lot of really helpful insights in this book regarding how much context matters (a lot!), your physical parts (are normal!), and how stress affects everything (also a lot!).  Shoutouts to the parts that talk about brakes and accelerators, which was easy language for my spouse and me to adopt in our discussions.  

I found the sections on the stress cycle especially helpful.  Autistic people like myself are often under a great deal of stress.  The Japanese saying is, \”The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.\”  Meaning, roughly, the person that doesn\’t fit in is going to get a lot of abuse until they do.  You can probably guess how I feel about that, but the point is that this book will teach you, broadly, how to allow your system to let go of that stress.  The specifics are up to you, since you have to find what works best for you.  

I could probably go on and on about the insights in this book, but in all honesty, the author will do a better job of explaining them than I would.  There are six copies of this book in my local library system and another seven (including two eBooks) in the neighboring library system.  Go get one.  

Please note: this book is not specifically written for autistic people.  It contains broad and highly useful explanations of our best (current) understanding of how sexuality works, especially as pertaining to physically female people.  Things like sensory sensitivities, communication difficulties, and consent are not covered.  You may want to refer to the resources listed here for information on these subjects.  

Read This Book

Read This Book If