Autism in Heels (O'Toole)

[cahn]

2/5. This is a rare ranking for me, as usually I don't finish books I dislike. And I would absolutely not have finished this book either had I not been reading it for a friend (who thinks her daughter may be on the spectrum). It's one of those irritating half-memoir-half-pop-nonfiction books. (I first wrote "pop science" but I don't think it rises to that level; O'Toole occasionally cites a paper but it's mostly her pontificating.) I think this book could be reasonably useful for a person with ASD who is exactly like O'Toole, or who has a child with ASD who is exactly like her, but wow am I not that person.

I think if it had just been a straight memoir I would have liked it rather more; the thing that bugged the heck out of me was how I got the distinct impression O'Toole was often making the assumption that her story (which was traumatic in a number of ways, including pronounced bullying, lack of support from parents/teachers/psychiatrists, serious self-esteem problems, sexual abuse, and eating disorders) was the ur-story of every Asperger girl ever. I mean, a lot of the book is in first person plural ("we" are like this and "we" feel that). And I suppose that could be read as shorthand for "many girls could be like this, and you should watch for it," which I think is a really good message -- I had no idea that there was such a large correlation between ASD girls and eating disorders before reading this book -- but that's not the message she actually said. She's at best really sloppy about her pronouns, and I don't mean in the he/she/they sense, but in the I/we sense, often giving the sense that she is assigning all her traumas to all ASD girls ever (and honestly I think she actually believes this). I think if I were a parent reading this book who didn't have marked ASD tendencies myself, I'd be super panicked that my kid was doomed to all these horrible traumas.

(I'm not panicked, because even those of us growing up in the 80's like O'Toole and me weren't necessarily doomed. Like basically everyone else, I found middle school to be horrible, but no more than anyone else really, and had a bout with poor self-esteem/caring too much what other people think in my teens-to-20's (again, as far as I can tell, totally typical) but all things considered I honestly have had a pretty great life. I won't deny that quite a lot of that is probably due in large part to luck (including luck in my family, my personality, and what kinds of lessons I learned earlier than her, and early diverting into math/science, which is much more welcoming of certain types).)

To be honest, I kind of feel like the main point of the book is "let me spew my insecurities at you and assume that you share them," which is not at all my favorite kind of book. And I could have done with way fewer inspirationally-angsty sections where she pontificates about how she gets what it's like to be an autistic woman because we've all had those experiences and feelings! (We have not all had those experiences and feelings.)

I also feel like she is irritatingly prone to ascribe every single thing about her and everything that ever happened to her (particularly if it's bad, or if she has negative feelings about it) to ASD. She's also (by her own admission) extremely smart, and a lot of the stories she tells about "see!! how hard it is to grow up ASD??" I feel could just as well have been told about any smart child with a lot of peers (and a mom) who didn't know how to deal with her. For just one example, there's a story she tells about how she knew that menstruation involved an egg (and not much else), and so she asked her mom if she could see the "period egg," and then apparently to this day feels embarrassed about it, which... uhhh... okay, I'm not exactly NT, but that sounds actually like a really smart question given that she didn't know the egg is a single cell?? And one that any reasonably intelligent child growing up thirty-odd years ago who only knew that might ask??

In another example of how Everything Is ASD, she also blithely claims that her inability to do geometry is because she's autistic, in a passage that is just stunning for its wrongheadedness.

Neurotypical minds (and geometric proofs) work... top-down, based on deductive reasoning, which is usually thought of as a skill that develops without any teaching or training. And for nonspectrum thinkers, that's mostly true. They see a fact -- maybe a facial expression, maybe a social situation -- and easily link it to a clear, logical conclusion. Our spectrum minds operate differently... Generally, we [spectrum minds] understand things, people, ideas -- life -- using inductive reasoning. We go from the bottom-up, starting with specific, concrete experiences, facts, and examples. Then we spot trends, notice patterns, and discover bigger concepts that link it all together.

WHAT
NO
I mean... nothing about this makes any sense at all?? I've never heard of NT people learning social rules via deductive reasoning, or really with a formal reasoning process at all?? And NT minds (generally speaking, of course! and of course I know a lot of exceptions) are famously bad at deductive reasoning and good at (often fallacious) inductive reasoning, and if deductive reasoning is not taught or trained it's because it's kind of hard to do so! I will not go as far as to say that Aspergers minds are deductive reasoning minds -- that would be falling into O'Toole's terrible fallacious generalization habits -- but E's mind, at least, is a deductive reasoning mind; she's always been really good at it, but earlier in her life it was really hard for her to reason inductively (it wasn't a rigid rule! she might be wrong!), and this was a big problem for her. (She can do it now, but it's definitely not her most natural mode.) I mean, O'Toole is clearly flamingly bad at deductive reasoning, but I... don't think she can say it's because she's on the spectrum.

In somewhat more shallow news, there's a lot about O'Toole's style that just grates on me, it's very breathless and all over the place and she uses italics like they're going out of style, and she will be making one point and then just start talking about something else, and just keeps going even when she's only talking tangentially about the point that she was making earlier -- well, okay. As you can see, this is the way I naturally write (and speak) myself! (D had to repeatedly ask me, when we dated/married, to add some context/transition words when I completely changed the subject during a conversation, because I was totally not used to doing that.) So I didn't have too much trouble reading it, but I do think that this is what editors (betas, lol) are for, and an editor should have edited the heck out of this and structured it a lot more and taken out a lot of italics. (Okay, I'll... mostly... stop with the italics now. But that is kind of what it felt like.)

As you might have expected from that last paragraph, the book is extremely disorganized, with her flitting from random story to other subject, often without clearly saying what she's talking about. I think she thinks she's being ~genuine~ and ~individualistic~, but really she's mostly being disorganized (which again! I write like this! This review is kind of like that! I get it! But this is why I always go through a bunch of drafts, because being able to communicate with other people is a Thing that is Useful), and an editor should really have gone through this. There's one chapter that's entitled "Predators and Fandom Families," and if you're scratching your head wondering what the connection is and if she's going to talk about, oh, idk, fandom scandals of the past, you would be wrong! She just... decided... she wanted to talk about predatory behavior that happened to her and also about how fandom is nice for ASD kids to meet other people who share interests. In the same chapter. I think the common thread is that... ASD kids want to fit in too?? (E only vaguely wants to fit in, but I certainly did when I was a kid and didn't know how) and that can lead to vulnerability to predators, which happened to her, but also a better solution to this is for them to find fandom "families." I think. Mind you, she never draws these connections very clearly, so you have to kind of infer it from the stream of consciousness.

I'm not sure what her main thesis is given the disorganization, but I think it's that we should ~celebrate~ every individual person as being individual people and each having differences, but also that ASD explains everything about Asperger girls, who are all Exactly Like Her. Yeah. It's kinda inconsistent.

With all that, as I've mentioned in places above, there were bits and pieces here and there where I did find out things I didn't know, or that made me think about things a little differently. ASD kids not being good at context -- I've seen that before, but not phrased quite that way, and, yeah, that's me.
This bit was interesting to me:

For many girls, "showwomanship" [sic] skills far exceed comfort with spontaneous or one-on-one social interaction. Intuitive use of this sidestep around social anxiety can lead to excellence in teaching, narrative presentation, litigation, and performance.

Because, huh. I wouldn't say I had social anxiety exactly, but I have always been much better at performance skills than in social interaction, and I've discovered this late-breaking talent of actually being... quite good at giving talks at church and teaching adults at church. (Not kids; kids are too unpredictable, lol. But adults are reasonably predictable! Also, sadly this doesn't magically make me better at giving talks in general, it's just that I've had more experience in figuring out the specific rules for church talks. And also, this was only once I figured out the rules; I was an extremely terrible teacher the first time they called me to do it, in grad school, to the point where my poor home teachers had to stage an intervention.) E is probably better at performance skills than social interaction, but she doesn't particularly like it.

Also, this passage. She's talking about doing research to figure out what was wrong with her daughter's GI problems (which is a harrowing story of how doctors wouldn't listen to her and thought she was just complaining about "too much laundry," omg -- and again, when she talks about her own experiences, they're often quite compelling!):

Back then, much as later on, I did serious, responsible research and spoke with enough authority that every single physician we met asked if I'd gone to med school. Not rudely. They just figured I must have. Oh, how I wish I'd known to have said, 'No, I'm not an MD. I'm autistic, so I can absorb, retain, and access vast amounts of information. In a way that I've only ever encountered among others on the spectrum, my mind grabs onto something, like a little ankle-biting dog, and until the pieces make sense simply will not let go.'

Okay, uh, aside from the irritating part where, again, the wording implies that she ascribes her ability to absorb information as something that one can do if and only if one is autistic (both sides of which I take issue with), mildred_of_midgard, you know whom I thought of :P

(Also, this is just one two small but super annoying bits: she brings up drapetomania (an 1851 hypothesized mental illness causing enslaved Africans from fleeing plantations, because why else would anyone ever do that??) to (I think, because her writing is super unclear) make the point that doctors don't look at the whole person... and then later talks about and appropriates Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a woman?" speech (she even uses the word "hijacking"!) to ask why other women drag on her for being (she quotes a critic) "smart, pretty, popular." I don't disagree that she should still be able to talk about her trauma without getting slammed for it even if she is attractive and intelligent! But argh, in a 2018 book about a white upper-middle-class profoundly-gifted ASD woman, I think these particular analogies could 100% have been left out. And yes, I can see that this is not being able to do context/not reading the room/mind-blindness at its peak, but like. Again: Don't you have a NT editor?)

Anyway -- if you can sort of disassociate the interesting and compelling stories she tells from either needing them to have structure or from the extreme tendency to group all ASD girls together, or from the bits which are either offensive or flat-out wrong -- there are some good things here! It's just that, oof.

Comments

[brainwane]

Today I Learned about "drapetomania"! WOW.

[(Anonymous)]

When I wish to talk about inappropriately pathologizing normal human behavior, my go-to analogy is "tank sickness" from World War II, which was the disease suffered by inadequately trained and equipped Soviet soldiers when facing heavily armed Nazis in tanks. The disease presented itself in the form of an urge to cower, run away or even surrender.

[cahn]

See, this would have been a LOT BETTER of an analogy! (Which I also did not know about, thanks!)

[cahn]

I gotta say I learned about it from this book, so it taught me something!

[mildred_of_midgard]

In the interests of getting stuff done today that is not ranting, I'm just going to reply to the part where you mentioned me. :P

my mind grabs onto something, like a little ankle-biting dog, and until the pieces make sense simply will not let go

Lol, yes, there are not and have never been any non-spectrum terriers, and certainly not in the 18th century.

[cahn]

Ha, you are wise, I have already spent way too much time ranting about this book :) (I actually have even more rant that I wrote up but could not figure out how to shoehorn in a way that even kind of followed any kind of flow.)

But yeah, the whole book is like this! I mean, I know there's a lot of her issues showing up -- it makes her feel special, I think, and gives her a unifying Answer to Everything to ascribe everything about herself to being on the spectrum, which seems comforting to her. And also she's probably suffering from a really skewed sample set -- she's apparently become a bit of a spokesperson for female autism, so I imagine she sees a lot of people who are on the spectrum or spectrum-adjacent, which would help her make assumptions that properties that can totally be found in the typical human population are actually spectrum properties. And is not around tech people at all, which would falsify some of her hypotheses pretty quickly. But still, argh.

[mildred_of_midgard]

(I actually have even more rant that I wrote up but could not figure out how to shoehorn in a way that even kind of followed any kind of flow.)

Lol, yeah, I could never read this book, I would still be ranting 10 years later. You're right that it would have been much better as a straight up "here's my experience" memoir.

And is not around tech people at all, which would falsify some of her hypotheses pretty quickly.

Like, deductive vs. inductive thinking. I ask you! Is she not familiar with even basic stereotypes?

[cahn]

Right??

[thistleingrey]

Wow, that sounds like a lot.

I have cheerfully borrowed coping bits from advice written for folks on the spectrum, though I think I'm not on it, because they're useful coping bits! But that's ... respect for the utility and thoughtfulness of someone's approach, not trying to belong with/to them, their modes of thought, etc.--whereas it sounds as though some of O'Toole's generalizations are from a wish for community.

[cahn]

Oh, yes, O'Toole seems to have a lot of things she's working through -- I hadn't recognized the wish for community until you said it, but now that you have I do think you're right, that's part of it. And also a skewed sample set, and I think she has a lot of self-esteem issues that are soothed if she can view all of it from the unifying lens of being on the spectrum. (She actually says in the book that when she was diagnosed it was a huge relief because then she could think of herself as not a failure. Which makes me sad for her!)

[rushthatspeaks]

I see what you mean, as both the eating disorder info and the performance skills thing were click moments for me just now, and she sounds kind of insufferable.

[cahn]

Right?!

I do feel like a lot of her insufferable-sounding-ness is, in fact, spectrum-ish behaviors (including a seeming total lack of self-analysis) coupled with her other issues that she still hasn't figured out how to rein in. For example, she talks a lot, in multiple places, about how incredibly smart she is, which is rather offputting, and then at some point in the book mentions how she got the idea at an early age that showing off how smart she was was the way to get approval from adults, and didn't realize that this was not effective with other kids. She makes it clear that she has realized as an adult that this isn't a desirable thing to do with peers... but she does it anyway. I do feel sorry for her, but she does also have to live in this world, especially if she's going to write books that a wide variety of people are going to read.

[mildred_of_midgard]

how she got the idea at an early age that showing off how smart she was was the way to get approval from adults, and didn't realize that this was not effective with other kids.

See, I knew it was the way to get approval from adults (modulo my inconsistent mother), and knew full well that it wasn't always effective with other kids (except I was kind of surprised by how often it was--I was pretty popular, to the annoyance of both me and my sister), but as you and I have talked about, the adults were my in-group and the only people whose opinion mattered.

Like many people, I did tone it down as an adult, but not because I suddenly had the social skills to realize it was not the thing to do with my peers. For other reasons.

But then I also didn't have anything like the sense of failure or longing for community that you describe of O'Toole. Which is a common thing I see among people on the spectrum, the "I didn't realize!" or "I want to, but I don't know how!" or "I don't understand why I'm not getting the outcome I want!" phenomena. Whereas for me it's almost always "I know what you all want me to do, and I perfectly well could, I just make different choices, and I'm comfortable with the outcomes of those choices."

Which, as we've discussed, is why I have a hard time identifying as on the spectrum. By and large, it doesn't feel like a disability. It feels like having different psychological needs than everyone else, whether spectrum or NT, and getting those needs met my way.

[cahn]

So I learned the "don't brag" rule very early on, but not from my mother (who was always very frustrated that I was as modest as I was) -- I suspect it was from books, especially ones written before the (then) present day. (E.g., Nellie Oleson, the Great Brain, etc. It was never portrayed as a good thing.)

We've talked about this before, but as a kid I definitely had some "I'd like to have friends, but this isn't quite working?" going on. (Though this got way, way better after my parents put me in gifted camps.)

As an adult, I don't have a sense of failure or longing for community particularly, at least partially because I feel that I'm able to use my brain to analyze any social skills I would like to learn. I don't think I'm nearly as good as it as people who were naturally born with those skills, and I constantly am running algorithms on how I might have optimized previous conversations as well as learning new techniques, but I'm good enough that I can get by reasonably well (as long as people are reasonably accepting), and sometimes it's useful to have an analytical viewpoint on it. I would much rather have an analytical brain that can figure out societal rules than a brain that could easily do societal rules but... those aren't usually that useful for doing more academic analysis?
(As for the community aspect, I'm also a member of a couple of RL communities that I enjoy and find mutually beneficial and accepting, and also I get a lot of other needs met by DW -- though I suspect that's not exactly NT ;) So I don't really need to go looking for other communities. Especially autistic communities, omg. I actually find it hard to talk to some other Aspergers-like people, even ones I really like, because we (the ones it is hard for me to talk to, that is) just tend to be kind of quiet in person, and my skills aren't good enough for running a whole conversation by myself. But the ones who will just talk basically in parallel, as we've discussed, are rather easier!)

Like many people, I did tone it down as an adult, but not because I suddenly had the social skills to realize it was not the thing to do with my peers. For other reasons.

LOLOLOL to this, because after reading this I thought, "E doesn't ever talk about her accomplishments, not because this is a social skill she has mastered or anything, but because then it's possible someone would want to TALK to her about them!" and I thought it would be entirely consistent if that were part of your reasoning as well!

(The one exception is that if you mention her violin playing, she WILL correct you that it's really VIOLA.)

[likeadeuce]

Isn't geometry based on inductive reasoning anyway???

[cahn]

Well, kind of? In the sense that it's supposed to mimic what we see in the real world. But the actual reasoning processes in geometric proofs are all "here are some axioms which we take to be true, now let us derive all the theorems from the axioms" which is all deductive.

[mildred_of_midgard]

Yeah, the whole point of geometry is that proto-geometry started off as people making observations about the real world, and going, "This is probably a valid generalization!" and then the breakthroughs came when people started doing *deductive* logic and proving that, for example, the square of the hypotenuse will *always* (given axioms of Euclidean geometry) be equal to the sum of the squares of the sides. Always always, not just "For the 49 triangles I checked before I got bored, and I don't know if the 50th would have been a counterexample."

[regshoe]

That sounds like a very frustrating book! I have often been annoyed by over-generalisations about What Autistic Women Are Like, which this seems like a particularly strange example of, and that writing style sounds very irritating. But it's good that you found some useful bits of insight in there as well!

[cahn]

There are some very strange bits, and a lot of frustrating things! But yes, a few interesting/useful bits in there too :)

[ethelmay]

I do think often some people find algebraic thinking much more comfortable than geometry, or vice versa. (I am way better with algebra myself, or was.) Possibly this person dumps everything to do with her personal learning style or intellectual preferences into the It Must Be Because I Am Autistic bucket?

[cahn]

Oh, sure! I also am better with algebra than geometry! But that has not all that much to do with deductive vs. inductive thinking -- D (my spouse) pointed out that O'Toole probably wasn't much good at algebraic proofs either. (The difference being that most people don't see algebraic proofs so much in high school.)

But yeah, she seems to attribute everything to Must Be Because I Am Autistic, including things that as far as I can tell have totally different causes (like the story about period eggs).

[ethelmay]

There was an episode of Call the Midwife in the most recent season where a couple of the younger midwives are teaching a sex ed class in the school, and laughing themselves silly over some of the questions the kids put in the question box. One girl apparently asked, re human ovulation, "But what happens to the eggshells?" Which is a reasonable question, if the only kind of egg you have ever thought about before is a bird's egg!

[mildred_of_midgard]

So! Tangentially related: I read a really good book yesterday. It's called Lost at School: Why Our Kids with Behavioral Challenges are Falling Through the Cracks and How We Can Help Them. It's a how-to manual for collaborate problem-solving with these children, intermingled with a story about made-up characters illustrating the technique in practice.

It didn't tell me anything I didn't already know and wasn't practicing, but the reason I'm reccing it to everyone is that it's so clear and so readable--and short! ~250 pages--that it seems like it would be a great way to communicate this information to other people.

For example, the concepts and techniques are things that it sounds like you're already doing with E (go you), but it might be useful for you to rec to teachers and parents in your life. (The author also has a book that I haven't read, which is aimed at parents rather than teachers. My hope is that that book is equally useful.)

Also? More broadly applied, these communication techniques are applicable to all walks of life. They're what I use at work in my role as team lead! At one point, the line "You probably already do this with your spouse" even crops up in the book [Me: I don't always succeed, but I aim to!], and my wife and I talked last night about how these concepts and techniques are also applicable to like, therapy, and the criminal justice system, and just, you know, humans.

I'm thinking of reccing the book to my boss, because while I'm getting him on board with the concepts, the actual techniques would probably be easier to learn with a manual to follow at your own pace and refer to, than with someone explaining them once in a meeting. And god knows this author is way clearer than I can be when speaking off the cuff.

Anyway, recommended for the people in your life who don't already know this. ;)

[cahn]

Oh, very interesting! I've read The Explosive Child, which I think is his parent-aimed book, but a long time ago. I read the sample of Lost today and it was good enough that I think I'll get it from the library.

I remember that at the time I read Explosive E. was young enough (and delayed enough) that collaborative problem-solving was just not a thing she could do yet. But she's definitely old enough now!

[mildred_of_midgard]

Yes, that's the book! I've been thinking about checking it out next time my brain wants to read that type of book.

He does actually talk in Lost at School about a technique for children who have limited vocabulary, like giving them pictures to point to to indicate what the problem is. It wouldn't work on my brothers, but once E was at the point where she could understand "this picture means I'm too hot" right before her meltdown, maybe it would have been something you could work with? I'll be curious to see what you think of Lost!

I will have another book rec in my upcoming wall-of-text to your most recent wall-of-text. ;) (Actually, I'll probably put it in its own comment so it doesn't get lost.)