Steve Silberman's Reading List

"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."

"The Real Experts is another book that couldn’t have existed 25 years ago. It’s a collection of advice for parents of autistic children, written by autistic adults, and published by an autistic-run publishing imprint called Autonomous Press . Why is this important? For a long time, parents were told by clinicians that having an autistic child was a fate worse than death. They allegedly had no chance of ever living independently, of developing new skills and making meaningful contributions to society, of having intimate relationships, and, perhaps most devastatingly of all, of even feeling love for their own parents. Many of these dire predictions were based on the behavior of autistic people in institutions, because that was the default “treatment” recommended by alleged experts through the 1980s. The Real Experts is a much-needed antidote to the poisonous misconceptions that have caused autistic people and their families untold grief for decades, and offers parents of young people on the spectrum something they never had in the past: role models of successful, empowered autistic lives."

"I immediately recognized Uniquely Human as a perfect companion book to my own, particularly suited for parents, educators, and clinicians. If my book offers a panoramic overview of autism history, Uniquely Human is the lessons of that history applied. One of its primary messages is that there’s no such thing as “autistic behavior” — there’s just human behavior. If a child is having a meltdown, it’s not particularly helpful to regard their distress as just another manifestation of pathology. Instead, Prizant and Fields-Meyer suggest asking why a child is behaving in a certain way, which can often reveal a source of discomfort that can be ameliorated, such as a scratchy garment or a buzzing fluorescent light. It seems like a simple insight, but after decades of expensive, time-consuming, and occasionally brutal interventions focused on training autistic children to suppress “odd” behavior that helps them regulate their emotions and anxiety, it’s a revolution. The authors also provide helpful strategies for enabling autistic children to build on their natural strengths, instead of dwelling on what they can’t do."

"The fear that keeps many parents of autistic children — particularly those with significant support needs — turning over and over in their beds at night is, “What will my son or daughter do when I’m no longer around to help them?” In her frank and deeply touching new book Autism Adulthood: Strategies and Insights for a Fulfilling Life , Susan Senator shares the intimate details of her journey with her son, Nat, as he takes his first steps toward maturity in a society that offers few resources for people on the spectrum after they “age out” of the meager level of services provided to school-age children. She faces the big issues — housing, employment, relationships with siblings, finding trustworthy caregivers — head-on, and offers practical strategies for giving young autistic people the best chance to lead happy, safe, and secure lives, mapping a pathway to the future that offers autistic people and their families real hope, rather than false hopes built on misguided promises of a cure. By doing so, she offers a blueprint for a world in which people at every point on the spectrum are treated as fellow citizens who deserve respect and the ability to make choices, rather than puzzles to be solved by the next medical breakthrough. By the way, one addition to the five books I’ve chosen is a charming book that came out last summer, Everyday Aspergers by Samantha Craft. By exploring her own experience of being autistic in witty and finely observed detail, Craft teaches us all about what it means to be human. One hilarious and poignant section called “116 Reasons I Know I Have Asperger’s Syndrome” is worth the price of the book alone."

"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."