Asperger's in Pink Book Review
Asperger's in Pink by Julie Clark
Book Review.
Rather too much pink for some readers, in fact. The cover design is a cream background, with a picture of a small blonde girl blowing a big bubblegum bubble, and very pink text and trim. I feel the urge to shout, "OK already! I get it! It's Asperger Syndrome only pink for girls!" Inside is just as hard-core pink in tone if mercifully not in colour. There's a fancy curly stripy lower border, an outbreak of frame borders with pastel-grey bubbles every chapter, and the little bite-sized pearls of wisdom at the ends of the chapters are actually called Pink Pearls. The cover design, size and cutesy visuals, even down to the grey page edges, where the graphics bleed through from the borders, make this look like a very girly manga. In pink.
All right, that's enough medium, what about the message?
It's not a bad little book, although it could have done with a decent copy-editor occasionally, because there's a mention of Kristina's "pallet" (sense of taste), and a couple of places where words appear to have been left out. This makes the book seem thoroughly spell-checked but un-proofed. There's freshness and verve, not in the parts where Julie Clark is trying to describe beauty and comes up with rather hackneyed flowers and rainbows, but in the detailed description of Kristina's daily life. She makes you see how living with Kristina is like living with a lie detector hooked up to a loudspeaker, for example. The family's love and frequent exasperation really show.
Read on if you struggle with the first half of the book. It feels as though the reader is overhearing an argument between Julie Clark and the various experts. Through gritted teeth she enlarges on the Educational Alphabet Soup offered her in place of help.
It may be useful to some parents, but to readers like me with no interest in bringing up an Aspie girl, it's much more boring than the details about Kristina's life where the book really shines.
Who would have guessed she'd have a horror of buttons, for example?
There's plenty of detail about Kristina's senses. Her "pressure sensors" appear to be out-of-whack, so she feels a light tap on the arm as like being hit, but sometimes misses noticing bumps and grazes entirely.
She runs out of assembly in tears, but she's annoyed when the teacher runs after her. After all, she knows she's just running to the toilets in search of quiet, but she doesn't understand why the teacher's worried that she might run away from school. I haven't had that experience myself, but I seem to be able to get how Kristina's brain works fairly naturally. I suspect that part of the problem about theory of mind is that an Aspie child is thinking her neurotypical parents can read her mind like magic. Because she is unaware of the cues and inferences they're using, she then has difficulty figuring out what others know or don't know.
Kristina won't put her hood up on a winter day, pointing out perfectly logically that her hair can't feel the cold.
She's highly sensitive to social exclusion in school, and yet she doesn't choose to sit with others in the book group she goes to. This seems very strange to her mum, yet I find it perfectly understandable and rather reminiscent of my own childhood. Aspies can be very front-focused, and I certainly was. To Kristina, the book group is 'about' the books, not about random chatter. Neurotypicals have a sort of seeking behaviour in reciprocal conversation, rather like cold reading. If the topic of conversation doesn't strike a 'hit' with the other person, they quickly try another. Because Aspies have a monotropic style of thinking anyway, this won't work easily for us.
At school, on the other hand, Kristina can pick up enough of what's going on around her to know she's being judged, sometimes harshly. To an Aspie child, school is their job. They may attend to the pure academic side of things, but they may also be aware enough to realise that the other kids measure popularity in a game they never signed up for and can't play. A game where everyone knows the rules but them.
Stylistically, Julie Clark has a verbal trick where she follows a normal paragraph with three one-sentence paragraphs: clunk, clunk, clunk.
Here's a few paragraphs about Kristina's good teacher, for example:
"He mentioned areas he felt did not apply to Kristina --- and was correct. He mentioned areas where he could see fitting Kristina [sic] -- and was also correct.
"He focused on Kristina, not our family.
"For the first time, Kristina garnered all the attention.
"Finally."
This irritates the hell out of me but I'm prepared to admit it doesn't bother other people too much. The extremely-popular thriller writer Lee Child has exactly the same mannerism, and it hasn't hurt his sales a bit.
There are two big differences between me and Kristina as Aspie girls. The first is change-aversion. This is very common among Aspies, but I never seem to have much of it. Kristina feels tremendous strain being taken out of school for the day to go to an appointment. Family days out have to work around her sensitivities to noise or new food, sometimes unsuccessfully.
I didn't have change-aversion as much as' informality-aversion'. I found informal situations, particularly noisy ones, very stressful. Structured situations were far more comfortable to me, especially if I knew what to expect. I preferred theatre, book readings or book groups, or board games to a situation where you go into a room and start talking to people with no focus.
The other difference is the pink thing. Kristina is very definitely a girly-girl. I think she added a rule for How Girls Differ From Boys to her mental toolkit in a way I never did.
This is so marked that she can't stand the sporty-tough-girl chants at her local school, because she prefers the skirts and dolls and lemonade opposed to the sports kit, 'bats and balls' and energy drinks in the song. Because she's blind to particular social contexts, she can't pick up on the fact that the song is 'for' psyching-out the other team, so she sees it as 'for' excluding feminine girls.
Meanwhile I always thought that the big difference between me and the neurotypical girls around me (including my sister) was that they loved pink and pretty and ponies, while I just wasn't interested.
It's fascinating for me to read Asperger's in Pink, because Kristina is aware of all the appropriate gender-marker stuff, yet she doesn't find this builds a bridge between her and the other girls.
But there are parts of Asperger's in Pink where Kristina's behaviour seems startlingly-familiar to me. She loves to play with her soft toys just like I did, but she seems to be quite happy to do it on her own. I'm sure I'd have been just the same if I was an only child. As things were, I played with my younger sister, but not with other kids.
Kristina learns rules, but won't necessarily pick up on how or when to modify them. She learned to avoid a particular author's books, for example, but did not remember that her family said that some of the books were less unacceptable, and it was all right for the teacher to ask her to read those ones. I remember, cringing slightly, the day I refused to learn the teacher's ugly round-hand, because I wanted to write like my dad, whose italic hand was much more beautiful. Incidentally, I may cringe, but actually I wish I'd stuck to my point, because now when I write fast the ugly round-hand sometimes infects my otherwise-graceful style.
Kristina is loud in her contempt or boredom with presents she doesn't actually like, and so was I. A plaid outfit that doesn't match her taste is soundly condemned, while I remember ignoring gifts of clothes, totally oblivious to the idea that people wanted me to try them on. After all, clothes were boring. They'd either fit you or they wouldn't, and I didn't actually care which.
This book is very American in its acceptance of tight cultural conformity. Julie Clarke talks unembarrassedly about her faith in a way that is much less common in Britain. Britain is a largely-secular society with specific and sometimes rather divisive 'faith contexts' for particular communities. Julie Clark comes close to suggesting Halloween is the Devil's evil work, which seems a pity to me because Halloween can function as a modern-day Feast of Misrule offering a night's licensed freedom from stifling cultural norms.
In conclusion, if the reader is comfortable with the book's upbeat, peppy, rather moralistic tone, this book can be useful. It offers a 'road map' for parents of Aspie girls. Parents of Aspie boys will find other books on Asperger Syndrome more useful because of the common gender bias. Those other books tend to have one chapter on girls and talk about boys for the rest of the book.
Kristina's unique perspective on life shines through. This is a girl who draws a smiley face for the concept 'lonely', because she's always happy and comfortable on her own when nobody is making implicit or explicit demands on her.