i like the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime

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what i wasn't aware of is that the protoganist, chris boone, doesn't have AS (according to someone on this forum), but rather is an autistic savant; i'm starting a new thread about it because it was a really long thread.
'Indeed, if Christopher John Francis Boone has Asperger's, as we've been led to believe, he has one of the most extreme forms of the disorder ever recorded.'
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-olea ... 99692.html
i'm not sure whether i have AS, but if i do it isn't like chris'. everyone i've met with autism has been different. i hope i'm not the only one who honestly gets confused about what aspergers (and autism) is, due to people being like 'you're not a genius/stupid'/'you can make eye contact' so you don't have AS.

Ignorance about what autism/Asperger is or is not is not helped when autism is appropriated by popular authors, artists, actors, musicians, etc. who are not on the spectrum themselves nor have had any intimiate contact with us, as is the case with Mark Haddon's book.

I won't say that creative people can't include austistic characters in their work, but they need to know what they are talking about. I'm a playwright and I would not personally write a play about life among longshoremen in 1930s New York when I have no knowledge of it whatsoever. In order to do so, I would have to do a lot of research first. Likewise, research is what people need to do before they decide to write about autistics.

There's a fiction novel coming out next year called 'Commoner the Vagabond.' The protagonist has many traits of Aspergers, but because the timeline of the story was set in the early 80's, he was mainly diagnosed by his more overt symptoms like schizophrenia, anxiety, etc.

I read the book and liked it. There was a forward or something that said Christopher Boon had Asperger's but Mark Haddon never intended it as such. Also, I heard there are some autistic people who don't identify with the character in the book. Interestingly, some of my mom's friends who have read the book has said that Christopher reminded them of me, though I'm not so sure about that.

I enjoyed the book.

Earlier this year I read an article on Mark Haddon (I can't remember where it was now) where he was quite upset that it had been misinterpreted that Christopher had Aspergers. Christopher and the other characters never say what condition he has and that is deliberate, as Haddon said he didn't know enough to be able to "diagnose" him.

It does say in the blurb on the back cover that Christopher has Aspergers, but if I remember rightly, the author doesn't have control over what goes in there, it's for marketing purposes by the publishers.

Haddon was also upset that in some circles the book is being read as an all-about-Aspergers manual, when that wasn't what he was trying to write and he admits he doesn't have the medical knowledge to write that.

As a work of fiction, it was an enjoyable & uplifting coming-of-age story about a young lad struggling his way through life who gets there in the end.