I’m a guest on this podcast. Does that mean we’re friends?

I’ve stopped saying yes to interviews because I piss people off. Or I scare them. I’m not sure I can tell the difference. If someone hangs up in the middle I know they hate me, but if someone doesn’t hang up in the middle but also doesn’t use the interview, I think, maybe they liked talking with me but they’re saving the interview for a really special time. In ten years.

I broke my vow of silence to be a guest on a podcast with Meghan and Sarah. They have a cool-girl vibe that victimized me the first 50 years of my life. But I think my time has come.

Also, I read that women are supposed to make a lot of friends in their 20s in order to learn about social norms. And then women cull their friends to just a few special ones in their 30s so they can focus on family.  So women are set for family and friends in their middle age.

I am pretty sure I’m still at the first part: learn about social norms. But I’m definitely making progress because Meghan and Sarah posted the interview! Here it is, hooray.

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Read this quick. I’m breaking news about Harry and Meghan!

Read this quick. I’m breaking news about Harry and Meghan!Why is no one wondering why Netflix paid so much money for Harry and Megan’s documentary? I’m surprised. It seems so obvious to me, so I haven’t said anything, but it’s one day before the show starts and I have to say it now so everyone knows I was right.

Before I tell you what’s in the Netflix movie, I want to acknowledge that I have a history of being incompetent at breaking news. For example, Alexis Ohanian accidentally told me that he sold Reddit before he told anyone else. I didn’t realize how big it was and I broke the news, buried in paragraph five of an umpteenth blog post about how to manage your career. Then I had no idea why it was catapulted to the top post on Reddit.

I also accidentally broke the news that Obama would win Iowa propelled by millennials. This is the thing about being right about that though — I was already writing trend pieces about millennials every day.

Anyway, media outlets didn’t pay attention to the part where I said that I was in Iowa visiting my brother and had never seen a caucus before in my life. Reporters starting putting me on tons of interviews for the news and I didn’t realize that I predicted Hilary to win the New Hampshire primary after she had already lost.

I did that on live TV. Whatever. Breaking news is hard business.

That didn’t deter me from running five blocks to go see Will and Kate the minute they arrived in Boston.

Unfortunately the only news I could break is that it’s totally annoying to make everyone listen to a speech about how we are all standing on stolen ground before we can see Will and Kate. It’s too much. If the Americans can have 200 years of over-the-top racism and still bitch about British racism when Will and Kate get here, then I think it might just be the end of royal family goodwill tourism.

But still, William and Kate looked adorable in their matching outfits. I am not reporting this though. I saw it secondhand from all the press pictures of them gallivanting around Boston. I am no good at breaking news, but I am great at patterns — I have looked at every outfit Kate has worn since she got engaged and they do not ever dress like twins.

Which brings me back to what’s in the Netflix documentary. I wasn’t going to scream about how I’m right until I saw Will and Kate being all matchy-matchy.

Look, Harry needs two very big things to reveal in order to get a big deal from Netflix and a big deal from his book publisher. These are two places that know what is worth paying for and what isn’t. The trick to figuring out it out is knowing Netflix has the smaller of the two big things, because the book is coming out after the show.

Harry and Meghan are going on and on about how the royal family didn’t protect Meghan from the press. Because it’s true. William had an affair with Kate’s friend. It was going on for awhile, but there was a handshake agreement between the royal family and the British press to not write about it.

But press outside England wrote about it, so then the British press did too. The royal family went ballistic, so the British press retracted, but it was too late. A Scottish journalist who worked at the newspaper refused to removed it from his Twitter, saying everyone in the media knew about the affair and he’s Scottish so the injunction doesn’t apply and the London press is pathetic in the way they kowtow to the royal family.

Fine. Press outside England covered the story. And it still blew over.

But while the hullabaloo was happening, Meghan and Harry got engaged and the PR team for the royal family tried to distract people by throwing Meghan to the press.

I actually thought it was so obvious that everyone must know this, but no one is writing about it. In the eyes of the royal family, it was way better to have Meghan and Harry take a hit than Will and Kate, because Will and Kate’s marriage is the future of the monarchy.

I feel like, okay, fine. I get it. The royal family acts as a unit, protects the crown.

And William and Kate look so adorable in their matching outfits that how can you not root for the monarchy? If we were the future ruler of a commonwealth who among us would not have a dalliance with the marchioness next door? Whatever. No one cares. Because it’s relatable.

Meanwhile Harry and Meghan are whining and whinging that we don’t have enough empathy for them about being thrown to the wolves but it’s because they have made us so sick of them. Which means the rest of their documentary is filled with literal stock images because they have pretty much nothing else to say except Will cheated boohoo.

Here is where I have empathy for Meghan and Harry. I know what it’s like to be bad at breaking news. And they are really, really bad at breaking news.

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Why autistic women have brains built for writing memoir

 

Crystalized Book, by Alexis Arnold

My earliest memory is when I learned to read. I was three. I sat in a tiny rocking chair in my grandma’s house with Dick and Jane. And it just clicked. I didn’t know how I read the words, but I did.

In kindergarten a teacher asked, “Who knows what elamenopee means?” I could already read long books but I didn’t know what I was singing with L-M-N-O-P.

In first grade, I told the teacher I can already read. She gave me the dictionary and told me to read it. I read it. She asked me what it meant. I said I didn’t know. To me it was not obvious that reading and understanding went together. Now I know autistic girls have poor reading comprehension.

The only time I felt like it mattered was fifth grade when I got put in the gifted program. We read The Witch of Blackbird Pond. I spent three weeks trying to understand the first two pages and was relieved to be removed from the program.

My first semester in college my professor announced I got the highest grade in a class of 200 kids where I was the only freshman. I didn’t do any of the reading. At some point I realized there is no correlation between reading the material and understanding the material.

Those famously long books like Anna Karenina and One Hundred Years of Solitude? I threw them away.

I like a book I can read in one day. When I walk into a book store, I shop the spines. I know the authors who write short — because I feel like they write for me. Jamaica Kincaid. Sandra Cisneros. Susan Minot. Susana Kaysen. Who cares that teachers sprinkle these books across eighth-grade reading lists?

I love telling you about books because I love telling you about words. But the price of that is autism — reading words early cost me reading faces later.

Autistic brains are full of imbalances. For example, our brains are extraordinary at retrieving past events that happened to us. But just like our lack of executive function means we have a flat hierarchy for our to do lists, we also have a flat hierarchy for our memories — we have categories rather than chronology.

Now I see why nitpickers say I’m not a reliable narrator. It’s not about reliability it’s about relatability — their memories don’t match my patterns.

Neurotypical people have the type of autobiographical memory that creates a chronological unfolding of events. Autistic people have episodic memory which is nonlinear.

In literature, autobiographical memory is canonized in the narrative arc. We describe that like epic (Odyssey), philosophical discussion (War and Peace), or the Great American Novel (Moby Dick).

Nonlinear writing by men commands serious words like stream-of-consciousness (As I Lay Dying) or just The Longest (Proust). Nonlinear writing by women receives diminutive labels like flash fiction (Lydia Davis) and slice-of-life (Annie Ernaux).

This is why, when Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize in Literature, I cried. The spines of her books are thin. Her chapters are short and the sentences slide across the white of the page.

The Nobel committee commended Annie Ernaux’s courageous approach to personal memory. I hear this as a call to arms for autistic women to write our stories.

Because there is no body of work from women describing the autistic experience. We have not known about autism long enough. Annie Ernaux reflects our sensibilities but not our context. She provides a blueprint and the literary legitimacy, but it’s up to us to create a canon of consciously autistic literature for the next generation to look to as they grow from autistic girls into autistic women.

The more memories we have the more compelled we should feel to write them down. And we up to the task. Because just like autistic men dominate math, autistic women dominate memoir.

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