Books about aspergers: Anyone reccomend anything?

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www.williamstillman.com - well known autistic author and self-advocate. Excellent books. I have an interview with him coming up soon on my blog as well.

When my boyfriend told me he thought I had AS, I plowed through a great number of books on the subject. It was always the stories in them - the real experiences, the examples - that gave me the best impressions on how AS actually work. I read Tony Attwood, who definitely points to the most significant parts of AS, but was very attracted to the quotes he used from Liane Holiday Willey's book, "Pretending to be Normal: Living with Asperger Syndrome". I just read that one, and I feel that these personal accounts give me a much more tangible and concrete understanding of AS. It is much easier to compare myself to these experiences than to compare myself to the sometimes more abstract ideas presented by psychologists and professionals.

Even though I have read many books on AS, I feel that they are all incomplete as to listing the symptoms of it. I think many smaller symptoms are being overlooked, and my desire for wholeness and perfection is simply longing for some kind of complete directory of all possible AS symptoms, big and small.

I do agree it was too exaggerated for Asperger's, and the maths stuff is stereotypical, but it's still a good story.

http://autistscorner.blogspot.com/2010/ ... raphy.html

That's the most complete current list of books by autistic people. Note they don't all have AS.

The first book I read after diagnosis was "Pretending to be Normal" and I found it very upsetting because Willey's experiences were so very remote from my own and her life seemed so much easier and almost as if there were nothing really different about her from the average person. I was devastated because my life has been such a train wreck of disaster by comparison and it made me feel like I must not have asperger's after all but rather something really serious and wrong and bad since I wasn't like her.

Of course now I know that's silly and that it's all a spectrum and we're each individuals with our own life experiences. Additionally, I had a long "talk" in e-mail with Willey and came to a different understanding of her book. And I'd like to read her book again, now that I'm nine years after diagnosis and have read so much more other stuff and developed so much more of a perspective on it all.

For me, of all the depictions of life with asperger's, the one that has come closest to my own life experience was written and acted by people with (as far as I know) no personal experience of asperger's, either in themselves or in loved ones. The movie "Ben X" is so clsoe to my own life. The extreme bullying at school is exactly what I endured year after year. People always say that it's different for females but I must have a very male manifestation of asperger's because my childhood does not match the descriptions I see of girls with asperger's; it matches the descriptions of boys with asperger's to a tee. So even though I make a point to read all the stuff out there about females with asperger's, it all feels pretty alien to me (though Dawn Prince-Hughes' autobiography hit several familiar points for me.) Most of the descriptions of asperger's that really "ring a bell" for me are written by or about men.

thank you for posting that.