Curious Incident?

[conuly]

Remember that book? That lovely piece of fiction? Written by somebody who is not autistic?

Yeah, that.

It isn't a good reference material. For anybody. Because the person writing the book lacked any sort of personal experience with autism. And it's fiction. FICTION.

There are scads of autistic authors out there. Some of them are quite well-known. (And, to head off this argument, if you want to know how autistic people think, you really would want to read works by more than one autistic person, because not all autistics think the same way.)

Now, go forth and educate yourself.

Thank you.

Comments

[prezzey.livejournal.com]

But it was cute. (Umm, will this prove an unpopular opinion here, you say?) If you think it's bad, you should not read Speed of Dark. That beats everything at badness, hands down. And it won the Nebula! Sheesh *rolleyes* Crudely put, the book is a single long rant about how bad it is to have bad social skills. The protagonist is also reputedly obsessed with his job, but he never talks about it. I waited and waited to read long-winded passages about his supposedly interesting job, but nope!

My life would be pretty sad if I spent all the time agonizing over OMG my bad social skillz!, and besides, I'm too busy with my obsessions to spend that amount of time over OMG people!. I'm not saying it never occurs to me, but it is not the ultimate focus of my life or anything, and I think it's the same with most people. Getting focused on our shortcomings would be kind of... inadaptive for us humans as a species (autistic or not).

And the book also develops a really, really nasty curebie theme over time.

[ex-chaos-by-699.livejournal.com]

Oh god, that book gave me sheer rage with it's fucking curebie agenda.

[conuly]

I didn't dislike Curious Incident, I just didn't find it all that great.