The pain of being the butt of someone else’s joke comes back to me whenever I read fiction that depicts characters on the autism spectrum who repeatedly take idioms and other expressions literally, or fail to understand the double meaning of words in embarrassing ways.
The world does its best to remove our autism from the mainstream narrative of life, hiding either it or us whenever possible. In the world of fiction, we often see these same attempts.
This book portrays its autistic protagonist in ways that will give readers negative, incorrect, and in some cases abusive ideas about autistic people.
Overall, I was very pleased with Al Capone Does My Shirts and how it depicts autism. Moose and Natalie are complex and endearing characters who remain with you long after the book is closed.
Marketing departments choose to focus a book in a certain way when they write these summaries, and summaries for kidlit featuring autism often seem to focus on the same things.
What’s missing here is not any aspect of how the autistic character is depicted, per se—what’s missing is something subtler in the narrator’s depiction, and in her point of view.
During April 2015, we’re holding an event dubbed Autism on the Page. Why is this event important? And what can you expect from us?
Background, details, and other information regarding our upcoming “Autism on the Page” event.
At its core, the Mystical Disabled Person trope is about a disabled character—frequently mentally ill, developmentally disabled, and/or blind—with some sort of unusual ability. This trope is varied, flexible, and depressingly common.
When privileged outsiders define us, they often do so out of ignorance, self-interest, or malice, and their versions of ourselves, rather than our own realities, become the norm.