Asperger’s

Wednesday

Sam Leith

Daniel Tammet: Nine Minds, Inner Lives on the Spectrum

38 min listen

In this week’s Books podcast, I am joined by the writer Daniel Tammet, whose new book Nine Minds: Inner Lives on the Spectrum is a pen portrait of nine lives of people on the autism spectrum. On the podcast, he tells me how he happened upon these nine lives, whether ‘spectrum’ is a helpful term when understanding autism and Asperger’s syndrome, and how popular culture’s most famous depiction of autism – Dustin Hoffman’s Rain Man – is based on an individual who wasn’t autistic at all.

Thursday

Elisa Segrave

Lockdown can be overwhelming for those with autism

National Autism Month in April coincided with our strictest phase of lockdown. My son, 36, who has Asperger’s, has consequently been unable to stick to all his routines — one being the Sunday car boot sale on Brighton Racecourse — and I was worried about how he’d cope. He suggested we watch classic EastEnders together from our separate homes and text each other about the personalities and plot. It worked. The episodes from the early 1990s are fast-moving and the characters very real. One scriptwriter then, Susan Boyd, born in Glasgow, hung out with the Jamaican community in Ladbroke Grove in the 1970s. She died at only 55. I looked