Nerdy, Shy, and Socially Inappropriate: A User Guide to an Asperger Life

"This is a warm, encouraging, and deeply honest book by a woman who didn’t now she was autistic until she was in her 40s because the Asperger’s syndrome diagnosis didn’t exist yet. Instead of presenting this moment as a tragedy, Kim makes clear how empowering a mid-life diagnosis can be: “Once it became clear that I was on the autism spectrum, my first reaction was relief,” she writes. “It explained so much that I thought was my fault — for not trying hard enough or being good enough.” Then Kim offers a multitude of practical tips for managing stress and sensory sensitivities, making sense of confusing social interactions, listening to your body’s subtle signals, coping with aging, and navigating a world built for neurotypicals. The term “neurotypical” started out as a pointed parody that ended up being so useful that it has passed into general usage. I’ve even seen it in research papers. In 1998, an autistic woman named Laura Tisoncik launched an official-looking website credited to the Institute for the Study of the Neurologically Typical. The pitch-perfect FAQ explained, “Neurotypical syndrome is a neurobiological disorder characterized by preoccupation with social concerns, delusions of superiority, and obsession with conformity. There is no known cure.” The term subversively turned the medical lens back on non-autistic people, making the point that what is considered psychologically pathological is, at least in part, socially constructed. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders , I suffered from a serious form of deviancy myself in high school: homosexuality. My parents even sent me to a therapist for the cure. Luckily, it didn’t take. Now I’m a happily married man who is no longer defined as deviant by the so-called bible of psychiatry."