Book Review. Look Me in the Eye My Life With Aspergers. John Robison

For me to read a memoir, the author has to have gone through something truly uncommon. I don’t want to read about Jone Didian’s husband dying, if I was married to her, I’d be dead, too. I don’t want to read about someone’s fight with alcoholism, I don’t want to read, in short, three hundred pages of someone telling me, first, how much their life sucked, and second, that they’re a great person because they managed to struggle through whatever problems they had in the end, and gained understanding because of it.
Robison’s memoir, fortunately, isn’t like that. Well, it is. He was abused, parts of his life were awful, and he did get through it with talent and determination, but he had legitimate problems that weren’t self-inflicted.
Robison has Aspergers syndrome, a mild form of autism that leaves the afflicted person unable to pick up on social cues. Other symptoms include narrow interests, an unusually high vocabulary, an inability to pick up on body language, lack of empathy, and strange, quirky humor.
Robison has the deck stacked against him from the start. His mother is crazy, his father beats the shit out of him on a regular basis, and he has Aspergers.
The first third of the book skims over an unhappy childhood, which includes semi regular beatings, watching his mother and father scream drunkenly at each other, and Robison’s only friend drowning.
But we get away from that quickly enough, and Robison describes what’s it like to have Aspergers. He does so well, partially through the careful outlining of how he reacted in certain situations, and partly through his writing style.
Through most of the book, you only remember that he has the syndrome because of the events he describes, not because of a writing style. He does things like pet his fellow kindergarten students, say woof in the middle of conversations he doesn’t understand, and smiles when he hears of his aunt’s death.
A simple summary of these events makes him sound like a complete sociopath, and that doesn’t do him justice. He explains why all these things made perfect sense to him, and the description of the disease, rather than the description of his life, is what makes the book reading.
The best essay in the book, Units One through Three, is great because the tone of Aspergers really gets through. I can’t help but think whomever Robison’s editor was did some heavy edits, because most of the book sounds normal, that is, if Robison had written a novel in the same style, generally you wouldn’t ever think he had Aspergers.
Then you get to units One through Three, and you realize that this guy, however well he’s managed to cope still struggles to relate to normal people.
He talks about naming people according to what they look like, so his wife, being the middle child in her family, is unit Two, and his child is named Bear cub, his brother is named Varmint, his mother, slave, and his father, stupid.
He also displays the quirky sense of humor that’s a symptom of the disease. I never really understood exactly how humor could be abnormal, until I read this passage, quoted below. “

“I'd been timing him since we learned of his mom's pregnancy, eight months back. According to what the doctors had told us, Cubby was hatching a week early. I'd done a lot of reading, and I knew hatchlings put on quite a bit of weight in the three weeks before being born, so I was expecting him to come out somewhat small, but he was even littler then I expected.”
Does that strike anyone else as skincrawlingly fucked up? It sickened me in a way I can’t explain very well, I saw; sort of, why someone might think comparing children to hatchlings might be amusing, but it was also just so distasteful, not because of the analogy but because of the language.
It gets even stranger. Robison has his wife pet him, refers to her hand’s as paws, her hair as fur, her feet as hind legs. Again, fucked up.
I’ve known one or two people with Aspergers, and these passages reminded me of awkward conversations I’ve had with them.
This isn’t to say that I blame Robison for talking like this, but his voice, in all its weardness came through so clearly that I was a little repelled, at points, but that just means the book does its job, by showing the difficulties people with Aspergers go through all the time.

Robison does an excellent job of conveying what it’s like to have Aspergers, and I recommend the book for that reason alone.
Grade B+