Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's
Read Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's Online
Authors: John Elder Robison
Contents
For my brother, who encouraged me to write the story,
and most especially for Unit Two and Cubby
Author’s Note
I
N THIS BOOK,
I have done my very best to express my thoughts and feelings as accurately as possible. I have tried to do the same when it comes to people, places, and events, although that is sometimes more challenging. When writing of my time as a small child, it is obvious that there is no way for me to remember the exact words of conversations. But I do have a lifetime of experience with how my parents talked and acted, how I talk, and how I have interacted with other people over the years. Armed with that, I have reconstructed scenes and conversations that accurately describe how I thought, felt, and behaved at key times.
Memory is imperfect, even for Aspergians, and there might well be passages in which I have mixed up people or chronologies. However, this isn’t a story with time-sensitive components. In most cases, I’ve used people’s real names, but in cases where I do not want to embarrass someone or where I can’t remember someone’s name, I have used a pseudonym. In the case of characters that appeared in my brother Augusten Burroughs’s first memoir,
Running with Scissors,
I have used the same pseudonyms he used.
I hope all the people who appear in my book feel good about my treatment of them. There are a few who may not feel good, and I hope they at least feel I was fair. I thought very hard about my portrayals of everyone, and I tried to treat the tougher scenes with sensitivity and compassion.
Above all, I hope this book demonstrates once and for all that however robotic we Aspergians might seem, we do have deep emotions.
Foreword
by Augusten Burroughs
M
Y BIG BROTHER
and I were essentially raised by two different sets of parents. His mother and father were an optimistic young couple in their twenties, just starting out in their marriage, building a new life together. He was a young professor, she was an artistically gifted homemaker. My brother called them Dad and Mamma.
I was born eight years later. I was an accident that occurred within the wreckage of their marriage. By the time I was born, our mother’s mental illness had taken root and our father was a dangerous, hopeless alcoholic. My brother’s parents were hopeful and excited about their future together. My parents despised each other and were miserable together.
But my brother and I had each other.
He shaped my young life. First, he taught me how to walk. Then, armed with sticks and dead snakes, he chased me and I learned how to run.
I loved him and I hated him, in equal measure.
When I was eight, he abandoned me. At sixteen, he was a young, undisciplined, unsupervised genius, loose in the world. Our parents didn’t try to stop him from leaving. They knew they couldn’t give him whatever it was he needed. But I was devastated.
He would be away from home for weeks, then suddenly appear. And he didn’t just come home with dirty laundry, he came home with stories about his life out there in the world. Stories so shocking and outlandish, so unspeakable and dangerous, they just had to be true. Plus, he had the scars, broken nose, and stuffed wallet to prove it all.
When he returned from one of his adventures, the tension at home evaporated. Suddenly, everyone was laughing. “What happened next?” we had to know. He entertained us for days with tales of his fantastical life, and I always hated to see him leave, to let him slip back into the world.
He was a natural and gifted storyteller. But when he grew up, he became a businessman, not a writer. And this always felt somewhat
wrong
to me. He was successful, but none of his employees or customers knew, would even believe, the stories the man contained.
In my memoir,
Running with Scissors,
I devote only one section to my older brother, because I saw him even less frequently during the years in which those events are set. In the chapter “He Was Raised Without a Proper Diagnosis,” I describe some of his fascinating behavior as a young man who would later be diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, a mild form of autism. Much to my amazement, when I embarked on my first book tour, people with Asperger’s showed up and introduced themselves.
Running with Scissors
contains (among many indignities) a crazy mother, a psychiatrist who dresses like Santa, toilet bowl readings, a woman I mistook for a wolf, and a Christmas tree that just would not go away. And yet without fail, at every event, somebody approached me and said, “I have Asperger’s syndrome, just like your brother. Thank you for writing about it.” Sometimes parents asked questions about their Asperger children. I was tempted to dispense medical advice while I had their attention, but I resisted.
Aren’t there any
proper
books for these people?
I wondered. To my amazement, I discovered there was not all that much out there on the subject. There were a few scholarly works, and some simpler though still clinical texts that made people feel the best they could do for their Asperger children would be to buy them a mainframe computer and not worry about teaching table manners. But there was nothing that could even begin to describe my brother.
I wrote about him again in an essay in my collection
Magical Thinking.
And more people came forward. I began toying with the idea of writing a book about him. It would be fascinating, he would love the process, and all I’d really have to do is start him talking and type really, really fast. I could keep the essay’s heartwarming title (“Ass Burger”) and add the subtitle “A Memoir of My Brother.” Though I enjoyed designing the cover in my head, I wasn’t going to be free to write the book that went inside it anytime soon.
I
N
2005, our father became terminally ill and my brother became distraught, confused, and fully human. For the first time in my life, I saw him weep openly as he sat at our father’s hospital bed and stroked his head.
It had the outward appearance of a touching moment between father and son. But I’d never seen my brother behave like this before. People with Asperger’s don’t access or show feelings, certainly not to this extent. I’d never seen such an unbridled display of raw emotion.
I felt conflicted. On the one hand, it was a breakthrough. On the other hand, it’s a bit of an understatement to say there is a history of mental illness in our family, so I was worried that it might be less break
through
than break
down.
After our father died, my normally animated and “tail up and activated” brother was depleted and sad. He started to worry about his health and consider, perhaps for the first time, his own mortality.
Not knowing what else to do, I sent him an e-mail about our father’s death with the instruction “Write about it.” He responded with a question. “What am I supposed to write?” I explained that it might release some of the sad feelings he was dealing with, and I gave him the oldest rule in writing: Show, don’t tell.
A few days later, he sent me an essay about our father, about visiting him in the hospital as he lay dying, and the memories—most of them dark—that arose from the past. It was stunningly honest and undeniably beautifully written.
I knew he had a story to tell,
I thought,
but where the hell did that come from
?
The essay went up on my website and quickly became the most popular feature. Gratifyingly yet humblingly, about as much mail started to come in about him as about me. Will you publish more of his work online? Has he written anything else? How is your brother doing now?
So, in March 2006, I said to him, “You should write a memoir. About Asperger’s, about growing up not knowing what you had. A memoir where you tell all your stories. Tell everything.”
About five minutes later, he e-mailed me a sample chapter. “Like this?” was the subject line of the e-mail.
