Our Lives in the Universe of Autism

Dedicated to Women in the universe of autism everywhere: officially diagnosed or self-diagnosed, living independently or with supports, low or high functioning, aware of their AS or still searching for their truth.

We invite you to join us on our journey of discovery into realms of inner space. This is not a book that will give you a list of pathologies and signs. Rather we ask you to admire our surprising gifts and our insights that push the boundaries of what the human mind can accomplish. But we also ask you to recognize the very real limitations that frustrate us....

We invite you to travel in parallel with us for a while, and see how the world looks from our angle. We invite women, but welcome men too, for we are not *real* women according to any of the known guidebooks!..

What we are is the first of a new wave of consciousness in a planet coming to awareness of its extraordinary diversity. We are the first wave of a new liberation movement, a very late wave, and a big one, just when you thought the storm of identity politics, with its different minorities jockeying for recognition, was surely over. We are part of the ground swell of what I want to call *Neurological Liberation.* It is my hope that this book will begin the task of adding a further intersection to the current framework of gender, class, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, age, and disability. I hope it will add *neurological difference* to the existing set of social variables...

The title of this book is, among other things, a play on the title of an immensely popular book by John Gray call _Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus_. Gray's book typifies men and women with a set of characteristics associated with the warrior planet, Mars (men), and the amorous planet, Venus (women). So resonant is this taxonomy with the public that it has spawned a cottage industry of sorts, complete with novelties and training courses. People seem to find it a useful interpersonal tool. For me and the other women whose writings and conversations appear here, Gray's book can serve, at best, as a field guide to two subgroups of the same culture, a culture we find as bewildering as you may find us, and to which we belong only provisionally, as though on permanent visa. We are from neither Mars nor Venus, but---from another planet? Our planet may be as far away as Pluto or, as a number of us speculate, as near as Earth. We are women on the autism spectrum.

Taken as a whole, this book is amazing -- and I'm not saying that just because autistic people wrote it. . . I read it and it gets into my life as a whole person and an autistic woman, not just the bits and pieces people want to hear about when they read autism books. Nobody in the book has a life precisely like mine, but somehow it doesn't matter -- somehow the most important internal parts are represented. It blends the personal, medical, and political effectively and gracefully. Most books about autism, even the personal ones, look mainly at our brains and "symptoms". This one is not so limited by convention. It looks into our lives and souls.