The Autistic Writer: Coming of Age
Last week I mentioned how stories of bullying don’t appeal to me in fiction, as both a writer and a reader. In quick review, it hits too close to home for me to find any redeeming qualities in such story arcs.
Today I want to talk about another common narrative theme in fiction that I dislike just as strongly. Only in this case, it’s for what amounts to the opposite reason.
I’m talking about so called “coming of age” stories.
If a movie or book is described as such, it’s already lost me. Not spending the time.
Why? Not because it hits too close to home, but because it is too foreign, not relatable at all to me.
I have of course been on the Autism Spectrum my entire life. Yet this wasn’t discovered until well into my adulthood. So imagine not only going through the difficulties of growing up Autistic, but not having enough knowledge to label very specific problems for what they were. I knew only I was weird in such a way as to repel and repulse most people my own age.
Even erstwhile friends kept a certain distance to point.
One of course gets older, more mature perhaps, but in a vacuum of social isolation I endured for most of my lonesome childhood, one is never anointed with the sacred oils of a “coming-of-age” story.
Being seven when my father died, and having no other family males step into my life to be even a partial male role model for this often “feminine” boy certainly put a hell of a damper on a more typical coming of age experience. Yes, I would have rejected much of what could have been offered, but knowing it was there would have provided at least some rungs on archetypical ladder to what was once called “manhood.”
Let’s be frank about the topic, though. Though any number of turning points in a child/teen’s life can be the focus of a coming of age tale, what little I have read/watched almost exclusively involves the rapturous loss of virginity. Short of that, it centers around a first kiss or first love situation.
Sex has never been a driving force in my life, even when it is supposedly “everyone’s” driving force. It becomes exhausting in 7th or 8th grade to pretend you enjoy talking about someone’s “tits bouncing” during track practice for the 4th time during that lunch period, so you just stay quiet and let other people talk.
Which means, of course, you are labeled gay. On top of everything else you’ve already been labeled, that is.
To this day as I write this, I am not at all certain that the 9th grade subterfuge to get me to go out or at least flirt with a girl that supposedly expressed her attraction to me in secret was legitimate or an attempted humiliation. Autism means I wasn’t perspective enough to know, and I wasn’t desperately horny enough to barrel into anything without more information.
“Lack of information” was also the reason I talked myself out of crushes and interest in girls at a young age. Yes, fear of being rejected acted as ballast at times, it does for everyone. Yet if I couldn’t explain why a girl was more interesting than the others to me for a while, I dismissed it.
This is not riveting, or even moving plot fuel for novels.
My first kiss was my first kiss. It occurred, I appreciated it, it concluded. I describe my first sexual experience in the exact same way. Neither were, and have not in retrospect become pivotal moments of my existence. If I’m honest with you, I don’t even recall all of the exact details of either event, anymore than I can recall the exact details of the very first time I ever rode a bike or shook somebody’s hand.
And I was supposedly more of a man after these moments than I was before?
If I, a writer, am that ambivalent about the moments of my life that were literally my own “coming of age” story, how am I to ever come up with thoughtful fiction about a character’s “awakening”?
I could of course, read and watch more of those stories, and study them. Get an idea, as I so often have in life, how the rest of the world feels things I have never felt in order to write fiction about same. I have the intellectual capacity to do so, I suppose.
The problem is, as you have determined by now, I don’t give a rat’s ass about somebody coming of age. It is without a doubt some of the most boring fodder for storytelling in the entirety of the human experience.
As I mentioned above, not all stories labeled as coming of age must deal with these topics. I stand by my assertion that a majority do to at least a degree. Yet even the works that don’t even touch on (no pun intended) a sexual awakening as it were, delve into topics that overwhelming conform to a narrow definition of what it is to pass from childhood into adulthood, particularly in the United States.
I went through none of it, and am happy to keep it both off my bookshelves and out of my catalog.
Ty Unglebower 