In the middle of fourth grade, my class got a new student. I immediately realized he wasn’t like the rest of us. He didn’t raise his hand before speaking and often blurted out inappropriate, unrelated comments in class. He spit chewed-up cracker onto his sandwich and ate it in the cafeteria. He flapped his hands like a bird when he got excited. When I look back, I realize that the boy may have had Asperger’s syndrome. But I can never be sure, because I never spoke to him. I wasn’t one of the students who taunted him or called him “loser,” but I did something that author Jesse A. Saperstein considers to be just as terrible: I completely ignored him. Now, I wish I hadn’t. In the book Atypical: Life With Asperger’s in 20 1/3 Chapters, Saperstein recounts the trials and tribulations of living with a mild form of autism that was not accepted as a disability by the American Psychiatric Association until he was twelve. By learning to accept his diagnosis and use it to his advantage, Saperstein is a positive role model for anyone struggling to find a place in the confines of normalcy.
Saperstein’s twenty (and one-third) essays describe just about every detail of his life from elementary school until adulthood. The author regales us with stories of emptying the cat litter box, his Bar Mitzvah at age thirteen and his obsession with Disney movies. It’s not the usual memoir fare, that’s for sure. Saperstein explains that due to his Asperger’s syndrome, his writing is full of “overbearing randomness.” To his acquaintances and a long roster of blind dates, Saperstein’s inability to self-edit is an off-putting character trait. But in his book, the meandering stories are a window into the author’s mind. Due to Asperger’s, Saperstein is unabashedly honest in all situations—this is the best quality a memoir writer can have, especially when it’s combined with a downright wacky imagination. (more)
