Mention the word autism and the room suddenly turns silent. It’s the dreaded A word.

People’s attention turns to late night TV public service ads declaring that autistic children are “imprisoned” by autism and need curing at all cost. Recent autobiographies have helped dispel this dire description by suggesting that autism is not a prison and that the door is unlocked and you’re free to come in. Women from Another Planet? moves beyond these autistic life stories in important ways. It’s a collection of stories and conversations, all of them by women on the autism spectrum who speak candidly, insightfully, and often engagingly about both their gender in terms of their autism and their autism in terms of their gender. It is written not just for parents and professionals, like the other works, but also to those women still searching for ways to understand the unnamed difference they live with, as well as the wider audience of discerning readers. If you enter the unlocked door of these Women from Another Planet? you may end up with a question mark or two about your planet. Is normalcy really all it’s cracked up to be?

Jean Kearns Miller is a woman on the autism spectrum. Her official diagnoses are ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) with AS (Asperger Syndrome) traits, and recurrent major depression. She graduated from Marygrove College in 1970, has an MA in rhetoric & writing from the University of Tulsa, and completed doctoral coursework in rhetoric & composition at Purdue. She spent several years as a technical writer/editor before following a reluctant calling to teach, a job she absolutely hated when first she did it. She is an avid essayist and writer of poetry and fiction, and teaches writing full time at Washtenaw Community College in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she advocates for students dealing with mental health problems and neurological difficulties.

Sample excerpt:
From Jane Meyerding:

Little girls...and bigger girls...are supposed to chatter and giggle and gossip and share secrets and have best friends and so on. Much of what they do together is preparation for later, when they reach the age for dating, school dances, and romance. The way they play together is partially a rehearsal for their teen years and beyond, just as other young mammals from social species (e.g., lions) play together in ways that help them develop the skills they will rely upon as adults. Little girls at play are practicing the social skills they pick up automatically from the children and adults around them, skills they will rely upon to form alliances, gain favor, avoid censure (and rejection), keep informed of important news within their social group, attract friends (and a mate), and present themselves to the various facets of the social world in the best possible light. They have fun, and they learn how to negotiate with sensitivity the relationships they establish or that are imposed upon them by circumstance...by school, by family, by community, and, eventually, by the workplace.

I didn't do that. My wiring (the neurological configuration of crucial parts of my brain) didn't let me. For example, I was enrolled in a Girl Scout Camp one summer when I was about eight. I was a cheerful child from a loving home, and I generally expected the best from everyone. Going to camp every day in a nearby county park was fine with me, and I looked forward eagerly to the one night at the end of the term when, instead of going home at the end of the day, we would be camping out in tents overnight. (My family camped in a tent on vacations, so the idea was not new to me.) Every day I participated in whatever activities the staff had programmed. I learned (with greater difficulty than most) to braid a four-strand lanyard. I helped write a little song for my group (Bluebirds) to sing. I went where I was told, did what I was told to do, never objected or fussed. As far as I remember, it was only on the final night, inside the tent with the other Bluebirds, that I became aware of something odd.

The other girls had become friends with one another. Alone there, with no adult present to direct us, they chatted and whispered and laughed and interacted with seamless ease. How did they know what to say? They weren't talking about anything, and yet they talked constantly. My conversation was limited to specific subjects, not including anything as nebulous as girl talk or small talk. Moreover, they seemed to know each other in a way they didn't know me...and I certainly didn't know them. I had been with them as much during the summer as they had been with each other. I had done everything they had done (as far as I could tell). And yet I was a stranger there. The only stranger in the tent. I realize now that one or more of the other little girls in that tent may not have been happy and socially successful. But all of them knew how to put on the act. They may have felt lonely. They may have felt inadequate. But they knew...even at eight years old...how to behave in a social situation. They could, and did, interact successfully, no matter what uncertainties may have lurked within. They knew how to be little girls together, whereas I had no idea what to do at all. I was frozen and silent not because I was shy or scared but because I literally had no idea what words to say, no idea how to move or when to move. It was as if everyone else had studied a script and learned their parts beforehand. In fact, of course, they were improvising brilliantly, thanks to the social code capacity programmed into their brains and to the natural ease with which they acquired their gender identity from the culture around them.

My classmates in third grade played a game I didn't understand. It involved the girls running away from the boys. I could see that, but I didn't understand why, nor could I figure out the rules. When I tried to join in by imitating, it didn't work. I didn't know how to shriek properly, nor did I want to (it hurt my ears), but I considered myself pretty good at running. The trouble was that nobody chased me. It was a relief when I fell down a hill and cut my legs all up. That accident, and the subsequent discovery that I was allergic to the antiseptic the nurse applied, gave me an excuse to give up that game. I often thought back to it in later years, however, whenever all the girls and boys around me became engaged in some mysterious interaction I couldn't understand. The consistent element (besides my lack of comprehension) that reminded me of my third grade failure was that nobody ever chased me. Whatever the chancing analogue might be at any given time, I was exempted from it by a silently arrived at but universal consensus among my age peers. They tended to detour around me as if I were a tree or a boulder in their midst. Apparently I was as alien to them as they were to me, probably because I was a dead zone in terms of social signals. I neither responded to the non-verbal signals they were sending out nor initiated any of my own.

Life proceeded more or less placidly for me until seventh grade. I had two older sisters who took turns playing with me. They created games and gave me explicit instructions about the role I was to play. When they were otherwise occupied, I enjoyed myself alone. There were occasional opportunities for me to play with some other child several years younger than I was, and I usually enjoyed it. Once, I remember, I strained a neighbor child's manners to the breaking point by insisting that we imitate the ducks in a children's book. I knew the book by heart and wanted to recite it as we repeated...again and again and again...the motions I considered the nearest possible equivalent of the way the ducks tipped their front ends down into the water to feed. My friend was patient for a while, but I am sure she thought such behavior (sticking our bottoms up into the breeze on the parking strip at the intersection of two streets) was beneath the dignity of a 10 year old.