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What an important book. What an important perspective. It's--okay, look, I'm thirty one years old and I needed to have this and I needed to read it, because it's the kind of autistic perspective that makes me feel completely seen and validated. And that is not common for me--not EVER--and it's weird and amazing to see a work that feels like a mirror.

The bit about special interests as a route to connection is of course incredibly true and important. I am always kind of amazed when Autism Parents (tm) are so negative about them and insist on seeing them as a harbinger of doom; mine have opened so many doors for me over the years and allowed me to make friends with lots of kinds of people. That's especially true when certain hobbies seem to attract and fill up with autistic people!

Anyway, what a good book. What a good perspective. I'm so glad this is filtering out into the world.

This one pissed me off, as... uh, another autistic reader diagnosed as a kid. The constant emphasis on the "obvious" differences between autistic experiences and NT experiences and on diagnostic gatekeeping by medical professionals was alienating and frustrating, as was the constant "there's no such thing as a little bit autistic" reminding. Buddy, it's a spectrum. That's literally in the name now. There isn't a single unifying Autistic Experience, as McCreary clearly knows and explicitly says, and there are wide-ranging variations in access to diagnosis for people of different socioeconomic classes, races, gender, ages, and family expectations with respect to psych professionals.

McCreary's experience of autism is so clearly that of a young white man, and it's really frustrating to see that specific autistic experience sucking up all the air again. I'd wanted to find someone telling jokes that made me giggle, aimed at an audience of Us, and that isn't who this book is written for. It's written, very clearly, for an audience that assumes the audience is mostly NT folks who don't have any familiarity with autism but who have absolutely not been missed by the diagnostic establishment, because real doctors would have caught this by now.

I'm really disappointed, and I'm pretty sad about it. I think I would have really enjoyed this if it wasn't for the weird potshots, but they completely threw me out of the book.