The Eagle Tree

"Creating credible autistic protagonists is tricky for neurotypical writers. It took me about a year to drill down through the clinical clichés in my head and be able to portray people on the spectrum with as little unconscious stereotyping as possible. One of the little Jedi mind-tricks of NeuroTribes is that the autistic person in any scene is almost always the emotional center of the scene, even if clinicians or parents are also in the room — a subversive reversal of the usual framing of autistic lives. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . But The Eagle Tree , a gorgeously written novel by Ned Hayes, features one of the most accurate, finely drawn, and memorable autistic protagonists I’ve come across in literature: a boy named March whose passion is finding out everything he can about trees and then climbing them. Instead of portraying March in the usual clueless-Aspie way — as “obsessed” with trees and “perseverating” on them to the exasperation of everyone around him — the hero of the book is like a 14-year-old Walt Whitman with autism, seeking communion with the ancient magnificent beings that tower over the landscape around Olympia, Washington. Even when March is missing the import of the chatter of the adults who exert control over his life, Hayes plays with the conventions of the unreliable narrator so that you end up feeling like March is a very reliable narrator of glorious and terrifying aspects of the world that neurotypicals can’t see. We still have a long way to go, but part of that future is already happening. Six years ago, when I started writing NeuroTribes, it was almost unheard of to feature autistic voices in news stories about autism. The public conversation unfolded behind the backs of autistic people, in part because autism was still nearly universally framed only as a condition of childhood. One of the most insidious things about the anti-vaccine panic was that it rendered autistic adults even more invisible than they’d been for more than half a century behind the walls of institutions. “There were no autistic adults in the past. It’s all now,” said actress Jenny McCarthy, who became the public face of a generation of “mommy warriors” who felt robbed of having a typical child by vaccines. Now when a reporter calls to ask me for a comment about autism, I often advise them to talk to autistic adults for the story. Imagine stories about racism that only quoted white people or stories about blindness written entirely from a sighted perspective. Autistic-run organizations like the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network are also demanding a place at the table when public policy is set. It was ASAN that advised Hillary Clinton to incorporate an epidemiological survey of adults into her autism plan, which is decades overdue. There’s a thriving autistic culture in social media and new books coming out all the time by great autistic authors like Judy Endow and Lynne Soraya, as well as by parents and clinicians who understand the importance of listening to autistic people. Two reporters who talked to me about NeuroTribes for national publications — Dylan Matthews of Vox and Eric Michael Garcia of the National Review — are on the spectrum. I was also interviewed by Alex Plank of WrongPlanet.net, the biggest website for autistic people, and by Robyn Steward, an autistic author in England who hosts a community radio show called “Autism Matters.” Leo Kanner would have found the concept of autistic media surreally improbable, but it’s Asperger’s world now, hopefully minus the Nazis. I basically see myself as a transitional figure: a neurotypical science writer who promoted the inclusion of autistic voices in the global conversation at a crucial turning point in history. But that means I need to know when to get out of the way."