Autism in Heels (O'Toole)
Jun. 9th, 2022 10:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahn2/5. 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.
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:
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!):
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 justone 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.
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.
WHAT
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.
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
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.
Re: Another book rec
Date: 2022-07-08 05:37 am (UTC)Oh no! I feel for him too! I'm glad you found he recovered. I had a philosophy professor with a brain tumor, but it didn't affect his teaching, thankfully! (He was a very good teacher and was my first introduction to cognitive science, including some stuff he taught me that makes E's behavior not seem weird to me. ;) Staying well off that topic, though!)
what wasn't common was that in my nightmares it would always be specifically a topology class.
I can imagine, omg!
Also, it occurred to me recently that--okay, there are a few reasons junior high was the most stressful period of my life and my single least favorite to date, but a major one was that there was a running theme among the teachers of "teach X; test Y." Like, stuff totally unrelated to the class, that they didn't teach us the skills for, and that we didn't have the tools to even acquire the skills for. Almost all of these examples are from seventh and eighth grade. And those are just a subset!
I remember one particularly bad one was: my eighth grade American history teacher got it into his head that we were all dropout risks, and decided to make it his Holy Mission to scare us into staying in school.
Note: I was in the honors class. My best friend in that class went on to get a masters in engineering and work at Boeing. One of the other kids is now at Google. I'm me. When he first announced this, I thought he was overreacting and maybe he should stick to making his non-honors classes doing it.
Then he described the project, which was to find a source of income and come up with a budget that would cover things like car payments and car insurance payments. He told us this would be impossible. That was the point of the assignment.
We had to make phone calls (this was before internet!) to, like, car insurance companies to see what kind of a deal we could get. Not very good ones, given that we were like 13-14!
I handed in my best attempt and got, I believe, a B, with angry notes that things I'd proposed would never work in the real world. I knew that, this was my best floundering effort to do something he said was impossible!
He was giving off angry vibes the entire time he announced, discussed, and gave us feedback on this assignment. It was like, *personal*, like we'd all personally threatened to drop out of his class and become bums.
Me, in eighth grade: "I'm going to get a PhD in physics! Why are you punishing me for not knowing how car insurance works at age 13?? What does this have to do with American history? Why are you bringing my grade average in this class down?"
Of course, my two worst classes were:
7th grade biology: home of dissections, at the precise age when my gross animal squick peaked. Added to the random igloo and magazine assignments described in the post linked above, I was one stressed child in that class. That was the class I dreaded the most in my entire life.
8th grade math: teacher who didn't want to be there and was phoning it in. You never saw your graded homework until the day before the exam, at which point you got a whole pile back. Learning from wrong answers? What even was that? The homework was graded and sat piling up in her outbox, visible, for weeks until the exam. It wasn't taking her that long to grade it. We just weren't to touch it. This was 100% clearly because she didn't want to answer questions, and if we had our homework in hand, we might ask questions. That was the objectively worst teacher I had before college. (The all-time worst teacher I had was in grad school, but it was fun rather than stressful because first I could publicly humiliate him to general applause, then I could drop the class, to our mutual relief.)
Ugh, junior high was the *most* stressful. Even freshman year of college, living away from home and being sleep-deprived because of MY ROOMMATE, and my physics profs expecting us to intuit and apply math they hadn't taught us, and my various English class stresses that weren't the fault of the teacher so much as the system and my particular brain...didn't come close. (Besides, I'd escaped my parents! That was worth any amount of fears of losing my scholarships to physics and English grades.)
Ugh, I just want to say THIS, so much to everything I wrote in that comment.