Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Autistic author Donna Williams never knew what it was to feel her hand and her leg at the same time let alone experience herself and other person within one moment of processing. Nor did she know the difference between real felt communication and the push button learned 'talking doll' responses and charicatures that made up almost all of her so called 'purposeful' communication and actions with others.
Now, in her new relationship with Ian, an Asexual man with 'multiple personalities' and somewhere on the Autistic Spectrum, finding out what is real from what is not becomes their life's quest.
With hilarious and reckless results they develop an NLP like strategy called 'checking' which appeals only to the feeling part of the brain and gets around stored learned responses. This 'checking' essentially triggers the thoughts, feelings and choices of the 'real self' buried under society-endorsed robotic facades and socially reinforced learned charicatures.
Like chainsaws in the rainforest of their lives, they pledge to follow through at all costs with what they find are their real wants and likes. The results are that they throw out much of the household furniture, their clothes, the contents of the cupboards and then realise they want to be married (but fail to check that it is actually to each other!) so, within a two week very Autistic marriage preparation, they recklessly marry one another!
Intertwined with their hilarious and surreal story is the story of their friendship with Alex, a functionally non-verbal teenager who knows all about being rather multiple, Autistic and out of control of one's own appearance, utterances and actions. Alex has just managed to communicate for the first time in his life through typing and afraid of being left behind by his reckless friends, he pleads movingly with great power and beauty through this only voice he has, not to be left behind. Along the way Donna, Ian and Alex all journey into the world of Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome and discover the world beyond visual fragmentation, meaning blindness, face blindness and fragmented bodies as they see each other and the world as cohesive, whole and three dimensional for the first time.
A remarkable addition to Donna Williams' first two international bestsellers in the mainstream publishing world and now sold internationally, you will laugh and you will cry, you will cringe and you will cheer your way through Like Color To The Blind.
About the Author
When Donna Williams was nine they found out that she actually couldn't understand sentences. Hard to imagine that from there she has become an author with 9 published books including two international bestsellers.
Her writing career began when a typewriter was left in her room at the age of nine. She typed a whole line of letter patterns. Over the next four years the letter patterns would become word lists and the word lists would eventually become poetry hidden in a roof void for nobody to see. Donna Williams' career as a writer had begun.
She went on to write songs, re-entered education and developed an ability to write essays, then exploded into the literary world with her first two autobiographical works, the international bestsellers, Nobody Nowhere and then Somebody Somewhere. She followed these with two more autobiographical works, Like Color To The Blind and Everyday Heaven, which also sold internationally and then wrote a series of text books, Autism; An Inside Out Approach, Autism and Sensing; The Unlost Instinct, Exposure Anxiety; The Invisible Cage of Involuntary Self Protection Responses and The Jumbled Jigsaw and the poetry work, Not Just Anything.
Today she continues to write in a range of genres, including moving into fiction and film. Outside of her writing, she is an accomplished artist, sculptor and songwriter and regularly gives international lectures. She lives in the hills in semi-rural Melbourne with her husband Chris.