10/03/2026
Wonderful book and a very insightful memoir from a man who lived with Asperger's hid whole life a not knowing until his later adult years โค๏ธ
One of the things autism made me think about while reading Look Me in the Eye is how exhausting it must be to spend your entire life learning rules that everyone else seems to know naturally.
When should you make eye contact? How long is too long? When is someone joking? Why is saying exactly what you mean sometimes considered inappropriate?
For John Elder Robison, these weren't abstract questions. They were the strange little negotiations of everyday life. Except he grew up without knowing there was a name for why so many of these things felt difficult. He knew he was different. He just didn't know why.
And that is what makes this memoir so affecting. Robison doesn't sit outside his childhood and explain autism to us. He takes us back inside it, and lets us experience, as closely as a reader can, what it was like to grow up autistic.
His mother struggled with mental illness and spent time in psychiatric hospitals. His father drank heavily and could be violent. School wasn't a particularly kind place either. So here was a child already trying to decode a world he experienced differently, doing it inside a home that gave him very little safety or stability.
There is a moment when John smiles after hearing that someone has died, simply because he doesn't understand the social meaning attached to that reaction. Someone looks at him in horror and asks, "What! Do you think that's funny?"
I kept thinking about that scene because it captures something bigger than the moment itself: how frightening it must be to repeatedly hurt, offend, or confuse people without understanding what rule you have broken.
But the book doesn't leave him there.
John eventually discovers music, electronics and engineering, and the qualities that made ordinary social life so bewildering become remarkable strengths somewhere else. He works on elaborate stage effects for rock bands, including KISS. He finds places where his mind isn't something that needs to be corrected, but is exactly what the work requires.
And I loved that part of his story.
Because Robison doesn't suddenly become "normal." He learns. He adapts. He watches people and figures out their rules. He builds relationships, marries, has children, creates a career.
All the while, he still doesn't quite understand why he is the way he is. Then, much later in life, he discovers that there is a name for it.
Asperger's.
And suddenly, so much of his life has a context.
What stayed with me most is how easily we can mistake difference for deficiency. We see a behaviour without knowing the mind behind it, and we fill in the explanation ourselves. Rude. Strange. Difficult. Cold. Uncaring.
Sometimes we are simply looking at a person whose world works differently from ours. And maybe that's why the book works.
It isn't simply an explanation of autism. It's a reminder of how much of a person can be misunderstood when we judge their behaviour without ever knowing what is happening underneath it.
And I finished the book wondering how many people around us are carrying their own version of that story, being judged for a difference nobody has bothered to understand.
BOOK: https://amzn.to/4eayXhc
