Parallel Play : Growing up with Undiagnosed Asperger's

by Page, Tim

• ISBN13: 9780385525626
• ISBN10: 0385525621
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-09-08
• Publisher: Doubleday

Summary

In this captivating memoir, Pulitzer Prize winner Tim Page writes about growing up gifted and unknowingly suffering from Asperger's syndrome, expanding on a tremendously popular essay he wrote forThe New Yorker. In 1997, Tim Page won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism for his work as the chief classical music critic of theWashington Post, work that the Pulitzer board called "lucid and illuminating." Three years later, at the age of forty-five, he was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome-an autistic disorder characterized by often superior intellectual abilities but also by obsessive behavior, ineffective communication, and social awkwardness. Now, in a personal chronicle that is both hilarious and heartbreaking, Page tells his early story through the prism of newfound clarity. Here is the tale of a boy who was writing and directing his own silent films at the age of twelve, yet lacked the coordination to participate in the simplest childhood games. It is the story of a child who was regularly described as a genius, but was unable to pass elementary school math and science. And it is the triumphant account of a disadvantaged boy who grew into a high-functioning, highly successful adult-perhaps not despite his Asperger's but because of it, as Tim believes. A poignant portrait of a lifelong search for understanding,Parallel Playprovides a unique perspective on Asperger's and the well of creativity that can spring forth as a result of the condition.

Author Biography

TIM PAGE is a professor of journalism and music at the University of Southern California. He has been a music critic at the New York Times, Newsday, and the Washington Post. He lives in Baltimore and Los Angeles.

Excerpts

PROLOGUE

My second- grade teacher never liked me much, and one assignment I turned in annoyed her so extravagantly that the red pencil with which she scrawled "See me!" broke through the lined paper. Our class had been asked to write about a recent field trip, and, as was so often the case in those days, I had noticed the wrong things:

Well, we went to Boston, Massachusetts through the town of Warrenville, Connecticut on Route 44A. It was very pretty and there was a church that reminded me of pictures of Russia from our book that is published by Time- Life. We arrived in Boston at 9:17. At 11 we went on a big tour of Boston on Gray Line 43, made by the Superior Bus Company like School Bus Six, which goes down Hunting Lodge Road where Maria lives and then on to Separatist Road and then to South Eagleville before it comes to our school. We saw lots of good things like the Boston Massacre site. The tour ended at 1:05. Before I knew it we were going home. We went through Warrenville again but it was too dark to see much. A few
days later it was Easter. We got a cuckoo clock.

It is an unconventional but hardly unobservant report. In truth, I cared not one bit about Boston on that windy spring day in 1963. Instead, I wanted to learn about Warrenville, a village a few miles northeast of the township of Mansfield, Connecticut, where my family was then living. I had memorized the map of Mansfield—available for one dollar from our municipal office—and knew all the school- bus routes by heart, a litany I sang out to anybody I could corner. But Warrenville was in the township of Ashford, for which I had no guide, and I remember my blissful sense of resolution when I verified that Route 44A crossed Route 89 in the town center, for I had long hypothesized that they might meet there. Of such joys and pains was my childhood composed.

I received a grade of "Unsatisfactory" in Social Development from the Mansfield Public Schools that year. I did not work to the best of my ability, did not show neatness and care in assignments, did not cooperate with the group, and did not exercise self- control. About the only positive assessment was that I worked well independently. Of course. Then as now, it was all that I could do.

In the years since the phrase became a cliché, I have received any number of compliments for my supposed ability to "think outside the box." Actually, it has been a struggle for me to perceive just what these "boxes" were—why they were there, why other people regarded them as important, where their borderlines might be, how to live safely within and without them. My efforts have only partly succeeded; at the age of fifty- three, I am left with the melancholy sensation that my life has been spent in a perpetual state of parallel play, alongside, but distinctly apart from, the rest of humanity.

From early childhood, my memory was so acute and my wit so bleak that I was described as a genius—by my parents, by neighbors, and even, on occasion, by the same teachers who handed me failing marks. I wrapped myself in this mantle, of course, as a poetic justification for behavior that might otherwise have been judged unhinged, and I did my best to believe in it. But the explanation made no sense. A genius atwhat? Were other "geniuses" so oblivious that they needed mnemonic devices to tell right from left, and idly wet their pants into adolescence? What accounted for my rages and frustrations, for the imperious contempt I showed to people who were in a position to do me harm? Although I delighted in younger children, whom I could instruct and gently dominate, and exulted when I ran across an adult who was willing to discuss my pet subjects, I could establish no connection with most of my classmates. My pervasive childhood memory is an excruciating awareness of my own strangeness.

And so, between the ages of seven and fifteen, I was given glucose- tolera

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Excerpted from Parallel Play: Life as an Outsider by Tim Page
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