[…] (I rarely make revisions once I have written).
p. 216
No shit girl, we can tell.
This story is about an autistic woman who remembers and describes being born, she goes through some shit (homelessness and stripping, etc.), discovers a passion for gorillas and leverages her understanding of gorillas to help her understand other people.
It’s a little too precious and twee for my taste. For fuck’s sake, she touches a gorilla and instantly discovers the meaning of true love.
Fucking hell.
Whoever greenlit the god awful poetry that is interspersed throughout this novel should be shot.
This novel has a few nuggets of gold throughout but there’s a LOT of problematic and bad writing here. I can’t recommend sifting through all this shit to get to the good stuff.
This is an older book (pushing 20+ years old at the time of writing this) and parts of it definitely do not hold up.
The biggest offender is probably the conclusion of the book, which speaks for itself.
Though their research is rarely if ever cited any more, I agree with Elisabeth and Niko Tinbergen, the authors of “Autistic” Children: New Hope for a Cure, who believe that modern life, with its unnatural living conditions, chemicals, broken-down social systems, and chronic stress, overstimulates and assaults the human animal, causing some to manifest the biological and psychological matrix we call autism.
p. 223
Yikes. Truly heinous beliefs to be dropping on the last page of your book. The “cure” for autism is a more understanding society that isn’t fixated on alienating and othering people who don’t fit into the very specific moulds society expects of us to fit into.
Reading through Songs Of The Gorilla Nation has convinced me that it’s not good enough for an author to be autistic and all of a sudden decide to tell their story and expect it to resonate. You have to be a good storyteller if you want to tell a story that expresses your autistic experience in a genuine yet compelling way.
This book does NOT do that.
If you’re interested in one that does, check out Cassandra in Reverse or The Autistic Experience - Silenced Voices Finally Heard !