How David Byrne self identified

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Years ago, Byrne self-diagnosed himself as being on the autism spectrum. The suggestion came first from his friend, Darcy Lee, who ran a gift shop. She had watched the behavior others labeled odd or quirky. Huddling in the corner at parties. Disappearing from social events without a warning. One day, Lee was reading an article about Asperger’s syndrome.
“I’d never heard of it and she was just kind of like, ‘David, this is you,’ ” Byrne says. “She goes on to read about people who are fairly mildly on the spectrum. And I thought, I’m not totally that way now but a lot of those kinds of behaviors and feelings were things I totally got.”

When he was a boy, Byrne remembers a birthday party in which he simply hid in another room until it was over. And as Talking Heads found a first taste of stardom in 1977, his unapproachability came off as almost high theater — except that it was no performance. The stage, Byrne says, was the only place he could escape and feel free to express himself.