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Parallel Play (2009)

by Tim Page(Favorite Author)

3.24 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0385525621 (ISBN13: 9780385525626)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Doubleday

review 1: I read through several different books about adults with asperger's, or that were found to have been diagnosed with asperger's as adults, as most of the material you find right now deals with kids. He spent a lot more time talking about his life in general than talking about his asperger's. I really found the book "Look me in the Eye" to be a much more interesting and useful read, along with a few other books.(Tim Page, has recently noted that he dropped the "growing up with undiagnosed asperger's subtitle from the paperback copy, as he didn't want it to seem to be a sort of guidebook to the autism spectrum, which could be better found elsewhere)
review 2: This is a short and sweet little narrative about the early life of Tim Page, who was apparently a badass... more music critic for the Washington Post. It combines two of my interests, music and autism, into a nice, balanced work that is entertaining and informative.As the author cautions in his introduction, it is far from a how-to manual about raising or interacting with people with autism. In fact, his condition is more like a passenger, always along for the ride but not always immediately relevant to the trip. He writes that if he could do his life over again without having Asperger’s he would likely decline, because of the many gifts his condition has given him. Perhaps the greatest of these is his ability to connect intensely and viscerally with music because of his laser-like concentration on things that interest him. He does justice to the downside of this as well, describing it as near torture when someone traps him in conversation about something that he is definitely not interested in. The book mostly deals with Tim’s early life from childhood through college, and in fact only the Epilogue contains any information about his life after that. He takes us through his early obsession with death (and all the anger, confusion, and sadness that went along with it), through his family’s year in Caracas, Venezuela for his father’s sabbatical, and through his counterculture “hippie” acid-dropping days. Like other books written by those with autism, this one confirms that they do experience the same range of human emotions that everyone else does, even if they do not show it the way others do. The best example here is the way Tim describes a car accident involving the death of two local friends of his in Storrs, Connecticut. He continues to mark the anniversary of the event every 20th of May, and feels close to the same gut-wrenching horror that he did at the time. Quotes:That’s me, I thought – alone, unsupported, and hurtling through space, on my way toward nothingness.In life, you’ll find very few people with whom you share a unique laughter that belongs only to the two of you, and it is one of the highest forms of communication.Once somebody becomes a part of my life, I will let them out only for the most urgent of reasons. Death doesn’t count.For some of us, stories where the characters don’t live happily ever after, where the hero is too late to save the day, where nothing is redeemed, are curiously restorative, for they present a vision of the world that serves to reinforce what we see with our own eyes, and the truth isn’t so terrible that it can’t be told. less

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