For Tom Cutler, being diagnosed autistic was the happiest day of his life

It’s easy to forget that until the late 1980s the notion of an autistic person being able to write a compelling autobiography was dismissed by the psychiatric establishment as highly unlikely. Though the term ‘autism’ was originally derived from the Greek word for self, autos, people with ‘self-ism’ — who were routinely described by non-autistic experts as being ‘trapped in their own world’ — were ironically thought to be incapable of the kind of introspection and self-reflection necessary to produce trustworthy documentation of their own experience.

When the industrial designer Temple Grandin published Emergence: Labeled Autistic in 1986, it was billed as ‘the first book written by a recovered autistic individual’ — the assumption being that a person self-aware enough to tell their own story must no longer be autistic. (Today, Emergence is still described by Google Books as ‘the first-hand account of a courageous autistic woman who beat the odds and cured herself’.) Even as sympathetic a reader as the late neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, whose sensitive profile of Grandin in the New Yorker became the centrepiece of his bestseller An Anthropologist on Mars, initially suspected that Grandin’s non-autistic co-author Margaret Scariano must have done the lion’s share of organising the material into a book. But then Sacks read a pile of scientific papers that Grandin had published on her own and found her authorial voice consistent, unmistakable, inimitable and full of insight. Clearly, she had not ‘cured herself’ of autism. Instead, she had turned her distinctively autistic experience of the world into a compelling narrative.

So much has changed in a dizzyingly short time. Rather than being regarded as an exceptionally rare and narrowly defined form of childhood psychosis, as it was for most of the 20th century, autism has been recognised as a broad spectrum of common cognitive disabilities that includes everyone from chatty blockchain entrepreneurs who binge-watch Doctor Who to individuals who require assistive technology such as text-to-speech software to communicate their basic needs.

Autistic autobiographies have become their own thriving literary sub-genre, spanning a range from self-published accounts to international bestsellers, including John Elder Robison’s hilarious Look Me in the Eye (which tells not only of his social faux pas, but his adventures on the road, building fire-spitting guitars for the rock band Kiss), Donna Williams’s Nobody Nowhere, and Naoki Higashida’s The Reason I Jump, which is being made into a feature-length documentary.