Pretending to be Normal: Living with Asperger's Syndrome

First off, once again this is an older book that uses the term Asperger's throughout. The book was originally published in 1999, but a few more chapters were added and it was republished in 2014. (I read the updated version.)

Honestly I found it a little hard to get through. Unlike Nerdy, Shy, and Socially Inappropriate, (which I reviewed here) it was pretty much entirely memoir, and didn't really speak to the reader as if trying to have a conversation at all. It just told Willey's story. Which is fine, it just wasn't what I was expecting after reading Nerdy. The appendices are the only place that have tips and tricks for dealing with the neurotypical world as an autistic person, but there wasn't really anything new or unique there.

I also just don't think I like her writing style as much as I did the writing style in Nerdy, but that's such a personal thing. It's hard to make a recommendation based on that. Autistic people vary so widely in where their strengths and weaknesses are that it's difficult to say which books will be useful to which people, in general.

So - it's worth reading for yet another viewpoint on being autistic, and there are several parts on parenting as an autistic woman, so autistic parents might get more use out of the book than I did, as a childless spouse of an autistic man. But I personally did not like it nearly as much as Nerdy or The Journal of Best Practices (Reviewed here).

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

It was an interesting recollection of the author's life as an Asperger person. The childhood part was very interesting, but I found the parenting part quite long and boring.

Update: Omg I have such a bad memory sometimes! I read this book for the popsugar 2021 challenge for the ‘ugliest cover prompt' and I just reread it. At one point, I could recall the incident with the girls asking her to drive them to the mall, and the creepy guy at the university, and the red-dye hair, but it took me so long to remember that I had already read this book. And not even a year ago!