ROBERTS You enjoyed reading, I assume.
NAZEER Yes. That’s true.
ROBERTS So your language development was retarded, even though you enjoyed reading. That’s unusual, I would think.
NAZEER I certainly didn’t enjoy reading at that age. I didn’t read much at all when I was a kid. I started reading a lot more when I was older.
ROBERTS Reading was something that you discovered you enjoyed relatively late in life.
NAZEER Yes.
ROBERTS So, while the other second graders are reading their books, you were not.
NAZEER No, I wasn’t.
ROBERTS Huh. So, did you have any other abilities? I think it’s common enough for people to develop late. There’s a word for it: late bloomers. We don’t normally hear this word in reference to autism. But you know more about it than I do. Is this a common developmental trajectory in autism? The person starts out slow, but slowly and surely passes everyone else?
NAZEER I’m not sure about the passing everyone else, and I’m not sure that’s the case with me, either.
ROBERTS Well, you are an extremely good writer.
NAZEER I chose to focus on a particular skill. What you’re seeing is the result of me having chosen to focus on that. So I’m more uncomfortable with the surpassing idea, but on your idea of developing late, I think that probably is true. I think that autistic young people find it very, very difficult to develop certain skills, but with the right support, they can develop them; they just often develop them much later and much more slowly than other kids.
ROBERTS Well, it helps to have many different kinds of people in the world, with many different kinds of brains, because we need many different skills to have a well-functioning economy. So from that point of view, the fact that autistic kids have different skills, or different abilities, let’s put it that way, makes a lot of sense, because then they’ll grow up to be adults who can do things the result of us can’t. But that’s really different from the idea that they’ve got a handicap that they’ve got to spend the rest of their life trying to overcome. Your story, in your book, suggests there are certain things that autistic kids can do as adults that other people can’t.
NAZEER I don’t think I am suggesting that.
ROBERTS You probably didn’t write the book with that in mind, obviously, but do you think that’s fair?
NAZEER No, I think, on the whole, it’s not fair because most autistic adults, even as adults, even though they might have developed the confidence to do certain things well, experience often quite profound difficulties. Everybody who’s in the book still has quite profound difficulties of one sort or another. So I don’t think it’s at all the case that all autistic adults, or even most, completely overcome the difficulties that they have. But that said, I think there is particular aspects of the condition of autism which might mean you have a particularly good focus on detail, which might suit you very well for certain types of jobs. It may mean that you think in a very structured way, which again, may suit you for particular jobs. I think another thing that comes about for autistic people is because they know that they have to work harder at things than other people, that kind of leads to a certain determination and resourcefulness and kind of reliance on being logical, which again, suits you for certain kinds of jobs.
ROBERTS Thanks very much for your time.
NAZEER Thanks, it was an interesting discussion.
Kamran Nazeer is the pen name of Emran Mian. He is the author of Send In the Idiots: Stories From the Other Side of Autism. Interview directory.Â