I think I’ve broken my “bad memoir” streak! You see, the last couple memoirs I’ve started have not been very good. Well they haven’t been good to me… they had remarkably high ratings and great reviews, which is why I started them. However, once I started reading, I just couldn’t get into them, and ultimately with a lot of guilt, and a lot of passed time, I had to give myself permission to just let them go. Stop reading. Pick up something new.
So… I went to the library to pick up Ghost Boy (review coming soon), and it was checked out. I looked around in the biography/memoir section to see what I could find and Look Me in The Eye popped out at me. I have some friends who have Aspergers and I thought it would be interesting to read about it from the perspective of someone who experienced it.
Good choice.
This was a really remarkable book. Clear and honest, candid and captivating.
You probably don’t know John Elder Robison by name, but if you grew up in the 70s or 80s and knew the band KISS you know him. He was the person who conceptualized and created all the amazing guitars for the band. The flaming guitar, the one that lit up, and so many others.
It was really interesting to see how he managed to walk through the world, a practical engineering savant, and yet found it nearly impossible to connect/communicate with others. At times it was difficult to read, because, for most of his life, he had no idea he had Aspergers, or that Aspergers even existed! That’s right… he was ahead of the diagnosis. He was continually punished and teased, by kids and adults alike, for what we now know as typical Aspergers symptoms.
He did learn though. Through simply noticing and noting, he began to recognize the differences in how he behaved and how others behaved, and would remember the next time to act in a way other “normal” people did. However, he often ran into situations that were outside the scope of what he’d memorized, and end up in difficult situations.
John Edler’s life has been really interesting, not just because he has Aspergers, and has done some amazing things, but because of the things he’s been able to do, the situations he’s found himself in, and ultimately how he decided to follow a dream instead of what he thought he “should” do and ended up with a life he loved.
If you’re looking for an interesting memoir, one that’s hard to put down once you start, this is definitely one of those. If you know someone who has Aspergers, this book will definitely give you an inside peek at their world.
You can probably find this book at your local library, or you could hop on over to Amazon.com and grab it in Hardback, Paperback, on Audible, Audio CD or on Kindle.
