The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Touching and Revealing -- Seeing Our Selves and Our World "More Primarily" through Autism....

Of course I loved the book. It's so much more than "young-adult combing-of-age". For me, it was deeply moving, an often gripping story, particularly at the end, and it opened a window not just into teenagers, but into life at all stages -- this while being extremely well-written and without calling attention to its well-written-ness. What I found most striking, was showing life through a different kind of mind, what's sometimes called Asperger's Syndrome or High-Functioning Autism. AS/HFA isn't a disease, but an important difference, important to us all. What makes AS/HFA an important difference is its talents, particularly its special "perceptiveness", though not "perceptiveness" in the usual sense. More as a deep meaning to what Robert Burns wrote, "And would some power, the Gods give us, To see ourselves as others see us!" (Know this book deals directly with many painful topics including abuse, suicide and violent bullying. It's not for "more sensitive" readers.) Reading several reviews, I'm not surprised that some reviewers found the lead character, Charlie, "too sweet" and "improbable". In this, understandably, they miss Charlie's "diffferent" mind and more, his "different" way of being. I'm a psychotherapist, specializing for several decades in people for whom therapy has failed, often people, like Charlie, who've been hospitalized. And a dozen years ago, I discovered that maybe a quarter of my clients were in the autism spectrum, almost always AS/HFA -- often highly intelligent and able to relate to the neurotypically-structured social world, though relating "differently" and needing much more conscious struggling with the basics. After working several years with AS/HFA, I found these people had remarkable powers, and the usual "unable to relate or care" descritpion of autism just wasn't true in the ordinary sense. Most were neither uninterested nor uncaring -- in fact, quite the opposite. They desperately wanted to relate and, in some ways, they were over...