Nobody Nowhere: the Extraordinary Autobiography of an Autistic

When I read reviews of this book, whether positive or negative, I am often disheartened. They focus on whether Donna is a typical autistic person (there ain't no such thing), whether she is autistic or "just" abused with severe PTSD or dissociation (the vast majority of the hundreds of autistic people I've met were either abused or had other disabilities as well as autism), whether her autism is "pure" enough to be worth reading about (Uta Frith, a famous autism researcher, says inn her book "Au

When I read reviews of this book, whether positive or negative, I am often disheartened.  They focus on whether Donna is a typical autistic person (there ain't no such thing), whether she is autistic or "just" abused with severe PTSD or dissociation (the vast majority of the hundreds of autistic people I've met were either abused or had other disabilities as well as autism), whether her autism is "pure" enough to be worth reading about (Uta Frith, a famous autism researcher, says inn her book "Autism: Explaining the Enigma" that the search for "pure" autism is both futile and pointless).  And while people fixate on those issues, the content of the book goes unheard.

Donna didn't write this as a book about autism. Like many of her books, it was other people who forced the focus on autism because it would sell or because of their own fascination with it. For instance, two of her textbooks were not originally written with "Autism" in the title, because she knew their content applied to a broader range of people, but her publisher insisted. So "The System of Sensing: The Unlost Instinct" became "Autism and Sensing: The Unlost Instinct", and so forth.

The original title of this book was "Dolly: The Autobiography of a Disturbed Child". She wrote it up, intending to hand it to a child psychiatrist, ask them "what kind of mad she was", and commit suicide after finding out. She told the psychiatrist every label she'd ever been given, and autism was only one of them. But that is how she ended up on the road to diagnosis, and to publication of the book at a time in her life when she had no idea of the repercussions this would have, for good or for ill.

I grew up with her books. I was diagnosed with autism, among other things, when I was fourteen. I read her book while going through the process of being diagnosed, without even knowing it. I was drawn to it in the library. I didn't even know what autism was. I'd once heard of it in a television special on cats (my special interest) and it said autistic people are in their own world. I thought world meant planet. I thought this meant their bodies were on earth but their senses were on Jupiter or something. How could someone who could only see Jupiter write a book? So I checked it out of the library.  I had no idea what I was getting into.

The book starts with a poem. Reading it felt like being punched in the gut. The content, the rhythm, even the metaphors were too close to my own poetry.  Then there's a short blurb about her simultaneous war to shut out the world and to join it. By this point I was shaking. I had never seen myself in a book before. And I don't mean that I had never read about someone exactly like me. I mean I'd never read about anyone like me, period. I'd tried to identify with characters. But this was the real thing, and I was barely able to handle it.

This continued as the book went on. Details of my life that I'd told nobody about, not been able even if I'd wanted to, we're right there in the page. My deepest secrets had been laid bare by a stranger. It was terrifying, but I couldn't put the book down.

I later learned how lucky I got. At that time, there were only a few autistic authors I'd have had easy access to: Sean Barron, Temple Grandin, Birger Sellin, Thomas McKean, and Donna Williams. (There are others but their books were much harder to get your hands on.)  Of those, Donna Williams came closest to my experience of the world. If I'd picked up Sean Barron's "There's A Boy In Here" I'd never have connected with it.  All autistic people have a few things in common but otherwise there are dozens of variations. Donna and I are in the same broad area of the spectrum in a way Sean and I aren't.  Of the rest, Birger Sellin comes the closest, although at the time I'd have had trouble recognizing that because of my own prejudices and misconceptions. It was only when rereading his work recently that I realized we had much in common despite very different life experiences and outside appearances.

When people read an  author, especially in a memoir or autobiography, they are used to filling in the blanks with experiences they can at least on some level understand and identify with. Donna creates a problem for most readers in that her experience of the world is radically different from most people's. Instead of filling in the blanks, they don't see anything in the blanks at all. This causes many readers to see the book as distant, unemotional, repetitive, boring, slow, or even impossible. But when I read it, it is easy for me to predict her responses because they are also my responses, many times. This was the first book I had this experience with. All other books I had to stretch to make them fit any experience I understood at all. That's why I know she's for real -- far more real than many people who question her reality. For many people, this is the first book they've read with experiences this alien to them. For some autistic people and other neurodivergent people, this is the first book we've read that is not alien at all but rather ultra-familiar.

At any rate, the book is the story of her life as she remembers it, from infancy up until just after she writes the book and gets diagnosed with autism, and begins to meet and interact with other autistic people.  Her home life is abusive to the point of endangering her life (her mother is the primary abuser, her father actually helped her learn to communicate in some very unorthodox ways), and she spends her adolescence either homeless or sleeping with adult men in exchange for room and board.  She goes through life barely understanding what is going on, but learning to mimic others to feign more understanding than she has.  It is only towards the end of the book that she begins to be able to take control over her life and stop being blown around like a leaf in the wind.

I've had mixed feelings about this book over the years. Strong ones. But overall, I have to say that without this book and her others, my life would be radically different. Even my least favorite of her biographies (Like Colour To The Blind, her third out of four so far) resulted in drastic changes in my life for the better, because of a treatment mentioned for visual perception problems that were making it impossible for me to learn in a particular classroom's lighting. But Nobody Nowhere was my first inkling that people like me existed.

And it wouldn't matter to me what her conditions were called, it's about who she is. That's something people miss. She didn't write this to enlighten the world about autism. She wrote it to understand who she was. Nobody writing an autobiography should be held to the standards I see many people holding Donna to:. "If it's not about autism as I understand autism, why is it in this book at all?" Understanding autism may be why her doctor sent it to a publisher, why the publisher published it, and why people read it, but it's not why our how she write it. And people should not be surprised that she's as complex and insightful as any other human being.  The idea that autistic people can't understand ourselves is itself a myth, or at least a gross exaggeration.  Francesca Happe, an autism professional who once suggested that autistic people's writing was useless for understanding autism because of our social deficits, has long since apologized and corrected herself.

And the value for self understanding of autistic people can't be overstated. Not every autistic person will identify with every author. But often we don't know how we look on the outside, so reading inside accounts is often our only possible route to self-understanding before we know how we appear to others. That is what this was for me, the first book to serve that role. The same is true for many autistic people from my generation and older. It was usually either Donna Williams or Temple Grandin that had this effect on us, depending on our experience of autism. For me, it was Donna Williams. I identified a little with Temple Grandin, but not nearly as much as I did with Donna. Even now, a collection of over a hundred books by autistic people later, Nobody Nowhere is still one of the easiest for me to identify with. When nobody speaks your language and you run across someone who does, you don't easily forget it in a hurry.