A Real Person

This is a beautiful and harrowing book—a first-person account of a life lived in difference and suffering, culminating in adulthood with hard-won clarity and peace.
Gunilla is an intelligent child trapped in a world of unease and pain. Her unease comes from symptoms she perceives acutely but that the outside world seems bent on ignoring: persistent, excruciating sensitivity in her teeth, the back of her neck, her spine; on her skin, an enormous struggle to form words, leaving her language sparse and concrete; difficulty controlling her body's movements; acute sensitivity to noise that floods her ears without discrimination; a profound aversion to being near other children, to mingling with people at all.

These and other difficulties torment the girl as she grows aware of her difference through comparison with her peers. She experiences the intolerance that "others" direct at her attempts to ease her physical and existential suffering—attempts that unfold as repetitive behaviors deemed unbearable, as violent outbursts. Gunilla experiences these as "panic"; others see "rage."

She is judged as a willful, stubborn, provocative child—hopeless, they decide.

She becomes an adolescent, then a young woman, increasingly unhappy and anxious. She yearns for acceptance, for her difference to be recognized and honored. She wants to be respected, included as a full member of the human community.

Trapped in a disastrous family and surrounded by incompetent adults, torn between forced imitation of her peers and flight into the "non-communities" of drug-addicted teenagers, Gunilla eventually turns inward. After many failed attempts to ease her anguish, she embarks on a search to understand herself and her mystery.
A course of psychotherapy leads nowhere, but then she begins reading psychology texts with fierce determination. Slowly, the reason for her difference comes into focus. With crucial help from a psychology professor, Gunilla arrives at recognition: her symptoms point to Asperger's syndrome—a mild form of autism that leaves intelligence and the capacity to communicate intact. A disability she has carried since birth.

That is the book's essence, though it resists summary. But perhaps the larger challenge is to answer the questions it raises. The book does what it sets out to do—it helps us understand, to care for, to heal. That is its greatest strength. Yet at the same time, it poses what we now call "intriguing" questions. First, there is the insistence—underlined by the title itself—with which the author aspires to be "a real person." "I want to be a real person," she says. Others want Gunilla to become "normal." What she wants above all is to become "real."

One cannot help asking whether this distinction applies to us as well, and if so, by what measure we judge this realness.

And then there is the theme of difference itself, which confronts us here in a wholly particular way. We manage, with difficulty, to understand difference when we can slowly, painfully come to comprehend it. But what when difference is irreducible, when it remains foreign to us and stirs profound unease? I wonder how much courage and faith we possess to let ourselves be challenged and led onto uncertain, even costly new paths—and how much instead we seek only to save ourselves.

— Lucia Bertolini, 1999