Reviewer Rebecca Foster Interviews Daniel Tammet, Author of Nine Minds
“One of the subjects, Amanda, a blind autistic academic from Australia, initially approached me for a doctoral thesis she was writing about a neurodivergent poet. I found her story and abilities—she can, for example, picture her surroundings in 3D by interpreting sound, a technique also found in bats and whales and called echolocation—so extraordinary that I was delighted when she agreed to be part of my book project.’’ —Daniel Tammet
Jerry Seinfeld. Courtney Love. Bill Gates. Temple Grandin. Tim Burton. Daryl Hannah. Heather Kuzmich. Dan Aykroyd. Sir Anthony Hopkins. Susan Boyle.
Emily Dickinson. Albert Einstein. James Joyce. Charles Darwin. Jane Austen. Wolfgang Mozart. Virginia Woolf. Thomas Jefferson. Barbara McClintock. Leonardo da Vinci. Andy Warhol.
Yes, you guessed it: all those people in the first paragraph are autistic, and, in the second, suspected to have been. Hopefully, the personalities above, and the interview below, will further open minds to the wonder of neurodiversity.
Here’s another list for you: Other Press. Princeton University Press. Godine. Biblioasis. North Atlantic Books. Graywolf Press. Weiser Books. Grove Press. University of Chicago Press. These are just a sample of the many dozens of superb independent publishers—not to mention The Experiment, publisher of Nine Minds—covered in the March/April issue of Foreword Reviews, as you’ll see in the PDF here. Did you know, digital subscriptions to the magazine are free?
The DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition) includes autism spectrum disorder. Greta Thunberg famously called Asperger’s her “superpower.” Where does the truth lie? Somewhere in between?
Autism is a complex neurobiological condition which affects each person on the spectrum differently. Long viewed primarily if not exclusively through the lens of handicap, it’s increasingly understood as a natural cognitive difference occurring in between 1 and 2 percent of the population, men and women alike. That’s how I understand neurodiversity, both in my own personal experience of the condition, as well as in my writing, and it’s how I’ve chosen to portray the nine men and women whose stories are told in my latest book, Nine Minds, respecting the reality of the difficulties and obstacles they each face while also giving voice to their talents, dreams, and numerous achievements.
How have you seen mindsets and language about autism change? I was recently told by someone who works in communications for a local council that it’s no longer appropriate to refer to people as “on the spectrum.” (Is it that the phrase is too open to abuse in a “well, aren’t we all on the spectrum?” sort of way?)
In the twenty years I’ve been writing, I’ve seen a lot of positive change around how society understands autistic lives. For one thing, autistic creativity and imagination are better understood and respected. Back when I brought out my first book, the memoir Born on a Blue Day, in the mid-2000s, a reporter could express surprise that an autistic person was able to compose a story, even their own, without the help of a ghostwriter. Fortunately, today’s young autistic men and women can find and interact with a wide range of media representations of neurodivergent lives, from Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory (or in Young Sheldon, which I prefer) to autistic surgeons (The Good Doctor) and detectives (Monk, Astrid) resembling the real ones I portray in Nine Minds. If none of these TV characters are wholly realistic, of course, they at least represent a genuine and growing attempt by society to grapple with the complexity and variety of autistic experiences.
As for language about autism, I’m gladdened by the emergence of new words like “neurodivergent” and “neurodiversity” and don’t mind at all neurotypical people using a phrase like “on the spectrum” (as I do myself), provided the sentence surrounding it is accurate and non-reductive.
The nine people you profile differ from each other in many ways. With the group biography format, did you hope to emphasize unity or diversity? Do you think of autism as having its own shared culture (perhaps in parallel to the Deaf community)?
I wanted to underline both the unity and diversity of autistic experience around the world, from the United States and Europe to Asia, and the ways in which culture, gender, different periods in history (the oldest people portrayed in the book grew up in the 1950s) all play an important role in shaping neurodivergent lives and minds. There’s certainly something to the notion of autism having its own shared culture, similar in some respects to the Deaf community, and this became clearer to me as I researched and wrote the different stories in the book, noticing how certain key aspects of autistic inner lives—such as the sense of profound loneliness stemming from a feeling of foreignness in one’s own nation and even mother tongue—repeated from one country and century to another.
How did you go about shaping the scope of the book and choosing the subjects? Did you approach them all, or did some find you? Although they are identifiable, were you keen to downplay the public figures’ celebrity (eg, it takes a few pages to work out that the Danny chapter is about actor Dan Aykroyd) to keep them on a level with the others?
Nine Minds was four years in the writing, involving hundreds of hours of research and interviews with the different subjects as well as with their friends and families. One of the subjects, Amanda, a blind autistic academic from Australia, initially approached me for a doctoral thesis she was writing about a neurodivergent poet. I found her story and abilities—she can, for example, picture her surroundings in 3D by interpreting sound, a technique also found in bats and whales and called echolocation—so extraordinary that I was delighted when she agreed to be part of my book project. For each person, it felt important to approach them without bias, setting aside any preconceptions about their celebrity (in the case of Dan Aykroyd) to get to the heart of how they each think, feel, and experience the world in their unique way.
The style varies from chapter to chapter, sometimes in imitation of the subject’s profession or internal world. What inspired the pastiche-like approach?
I don’t know about pastiche, but I wanted the style of each chapter to mimic the subject’s inner world—the better to draw readers inside their distinctive minds and experiences. It’s a fairly classic feature of literature, used extensively in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, for instance, which plays with language in a similar way to immerse us in the sights and thoughts of 16th-century England. If not a novel itself, Nine Minds is definitely what we’d call today creative nonfiction.
Do you consider yourself a character in the book, too? Is yours the tenth mind?
Graeme Simsion, the Australian novelist, wrote as much in a lovely review of the book and I suppose it’s true enough.
Have you encountered differences in how autism is viewed and spoken about between England, where you’re from, and France, where you live now?
I moved to France in 2008 and though there’s been a fair bit of progress made here as well concerning how autism is viewed, compared to England and the USA there’s definitely still some way to go.
Neuroatypique (neurodivergent) only entered French dictionaries last year and the concept remains unfamiliar to many of my readers in Paris, Lyon, or Marseille. But I’m confident that will continue to change in the years ahead, and it’s been a big motivation behind my publishing these diverse real-life stories with all the tools—scene-setting, dialogue, characterization—that literature gives me as an autistic writer.
Rebecca Foster
