Ever since he was young, John Robison longed to connect with other people, but by the time he was a teenager, his odd habits - an inclination to blurt out non sequiturs, avoid eye contact, dismantle radios, and dig five-foot holes (and stick his younger brother, Augusten Burroughs, in them) - had earned him the label "social deviant." It was not until he was forty that he was diagnosed with a form of autism called Asperger's syndrome. That understanding transformed the way he saw himself - and the world. A born storyteller, Robison has written a moving, darkly funny memoir about a life that has taken him from developing exploding guitars for KISS to building a family of his own. It's a strange, sly, indelible account - sometimes alien yet always deeply human.

Foreword

by Augusten Burroughs

MY BIG BROTHER and I were essentially raised by two different sets of parents. His mother and father were an optimistic young couple in their twenties, just starting out in their marriage, building a new life together. He was a young professor, she was an artistically gifted homemaker. My brother called them Dad and Mamma.

I was born eight years later. I was an accident that occurred within the wreckage of their marriage. By the time I was born, our mother's mental illness had taken root and our father was a dangerous, hopeless alcoholic. My brother's parents were hopeful and excited about their future together. My parents despised each other and were miserable together.

But my brother and I had each other.

He shaped my young life. First, he taught me how to walk. Then, armed with sticks and dead snakes, he chased me and I learned how to run.

I loved him and I hated him, in equal measure.

When I was eight, he abandoned me. At sixteen, he was a young, undisciplined, unsupervised genius, loose in the world. Our parents didn't try to stop him from leaving. They knew they couldn't give him whatever it was he needed. But I was devastated.

He would be away from home for weeks, then suddenly appear. And he didn't just come home with dirty laundry, he came home with stories about his life out there in the world. Stories so shocking and outlandish, so unspeakable and dangerous, they just had to be true. Plus, he had the scars, broken nose, and stuffed wallet to prove it all.

When he returned from one of his adventures, the tension at home evaporated. Suddenly, everyone was laughing. "What happened next?" we had to know. He entertained us for days with tales of his fantastical life, and I always hated to see him leave, to let him slip back into the world.

He was a natural and gifted storyteller. But when he grew up, he became a businessman, not a writer. And this always felt somewhat wrong to me. He was successful, but none of his employees or customers knew, would even believe, the stories the man contained.

In my memoir, Running with Scissors, I devote only one section to my older brother, because I saw him even less frequently during the years in which those events are set. In the chapter "He Was Raised Without a Proper Diagnosis," I describe some of his fascinating behavior as a young man who would later be diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, a mild form of autism. Much to my amazement, when I embarked on my first book tour, people with Asperger's showed up and introduced themselves. Running with Scissors contains (among many indignities) a crazy mother, a psychiatrist who dresses like Santa, toilet bowl readings, a woman I mistook for a wolf, and a Christmas tree that just would not go away. And yet without fail, at every event, somebody approached me and said, "I have Asperger's syndrome, just like your brother. Thank you for writing about it." Sometimes parents asked questions about their Asperger children. I was tempted to dispense medical advice while I had their attention, but I resisted.

Aren't there any proper hooks for these people? I wondered. To my amazement, I discovered there was not all that much out there on the subject. There were a few scholarly works, and some simpler though still clinical texts that made people feel the best they could do for their Asperger children would be to buy them a mainframe computer and not worry about teaching table manners. But there was nothing that could even begin to describe my brother.

Copyright © 2007 by John Elder Robison.

Tags: Autism, Child Psychology

About the Author

John Elder Robison lives with his wife and son in Amherst, Massachusetts. His company, J E Robison Service, repairs and restores fine European automobiles.