Women From Another Planet?: Our Lives in the Universe of Autism - Tapa blanda

Mention the word autism and the room suddenly turns silent. It’s the dreaded A word.

People’s attention turns to late night TV public service ads declaring that autistic children are “imprisoned” by autism and need curing at all cost. Recent autobiographies have helped dispel this dire description by suggesting that autism is not a prison and that the door is unlocked and you’re free to come in. Women from Another Planet? moves beyond these autistic life stories in important ways. It’s a collection of stories and conversations, all of them by women on the autism spectrum who speak candidly, insightfully, and often engagingly about both their gender in terms of their autism and their autism in terms of their gender. It is written not just for parents and professionals, like the other works, but also to those women still searching for ways to understand the unnamed difference they live with, as well as the wider audience of discerning readers. If you enter the unlocked door of these Women from Another Planet? you may end up with a question mark or two about your planet. Is normalcy really all it’s cracked up to be?

Jean Kearns Miller is a woman on the autism spectrum. Her official diagnoses are ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) with AS (Asperger Syndrome) traits, and recurrent major depression. She graduated from Marygrove College in 1970, has an MA in rhetoric & writing from the University of Tulsa, and completed doctoral coursework in rhetoric & composition at Purdue. She spent several years as a technical writer/editor before following a reluctant calling to teach, a job she absolutely hated when first she did it. She is an avid essayist and writer of poetry and fiction, and teaches writing full time at Washtenaw Community College in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she advocates for students dealing with mental health problems and neurological difficulties.