Description
Book SynopsisIn Like Colour to the Blind, Donna Williams enters the most exposing and fragile realm of human interaction: her relationship and eventual marriage with someone with whom she can 'simply be', a relationship she terms a 'specialship'. But loving involves exposure, and to love she must expose the very things which protected her all her life - the masks she has hidden behind, the patchwork creations which stood in place of self.
In Donna's relationship with Ian, a man with difficulties related to her own, we watch the two of them break through their rock-solid emotional barriers and dare to defy all the rules imposed by the autistic condition of 'exposure anxiety'. Their struggle is told with Donna's characteristic humour, insight and sense of fragility.
Like Colour to the Blind is also the story of Alex, who was misdiagnosed as 'retarded' as well as autistic, and so gripped by 'exposure anxiety' that he has been virtually non-communicative all his life. Alex's fear of being left behind by Donna and Ian inspires him to push fiercely beyond the boundaries of his limitations and, in his own words, `to fly'.
Trade Review'Nobody Nowhere tears aside the veil that conceals the mind of the autistic person. Donna Williams' account has the magnetic and unrivalled power of authenticity ... this book is absorbing, disturbing, enriching and it will cause many to substantially revise their views of what it is that constitutes psychological normality.' - Professor Anthony Clare - 'Donna Williams isn't just teaching us what it is like to be autistic, she is teaching us what it is like to be human.' - The New York Book Times Review (of Somebody Somewhere)
