Christine recommended this book to me when I asked her for some book recommendations, saying that it was a fun read while she was in grad school and coming out of a bout of depression. I was so touched and thankful for her recommendation, thoughtfulness and vulnerability — it’s weird to think of Adults (especially professors) as people who were once my age/in grad school, and even weirder to imagine that they, too, struggled.
I know that I’ve read this book before — probably ages ago — because it had been sitting on my bookshelf at home for a while and I saw that I underlined a word and its definition somewhere in the middle of the book. But I can’t remember how I felt about the book upon my initial read — maybe it didn’t leave a strong impression back then because I was just struggling with trying to understand what some of those then-difficult words meant.
This time around, my heart ached the whole time. Christopher, the protagonist, is a young boy with ASD and his first-person narration made me realize just how difficult it must be for anyone on the spectrum to navigate this neurotypical-tailored world/society. How exhausting it must be! To feel overstimulated by new places, new people, new smells, new sights, and just in general by an impatient society that doesn’t bother to understand how a neurodivergent person may struggle to navigate this world. I don’t know if some readers found Christopher’s ‘quirks’ to be funny but those ‘quirks’ actually made my heart hurt and got me thinking about how we can make sure that people are more aware of neurodiversity and neurodivergent people’s needs — should there be a unit on neurodiversity during a mandatory health class? That probably wouldn’t be as effective as I’d like it to be because teenagers hardly ever take health class seriously but it’d be better than nothing.
There are SO many things that should be changed/added if we want to talk about improving health education, but I (sort of) digress.
Christopher’s mom made me think about how, although no one is fully prepared to be a parent, there are some who just really should not be parents. And she left Christopher’s dad for an asshole like Mr. Shears?! It’s probably more like she left Christopher, rather than leaving for Mr. Shears, but still, geez.
Christopher’s dad is flawed — he lied to Christopher about his mom, killed Wellington, Mrs. Shears’ dog, and sometimes bursts out in anger/out of impatience at Christopher — but it broke my heart when Christopher ran away from him to join his mom in London and when he came back only to refuse to speak to his dad. The reality is that it must be so hard for neurodivergent children but it must be really, really hard for their parents as well.
Reading this made me wonder if the author Mark Haddon is himself on the spectrum or if he has a loved one who is. It’d be a little weird/questionable if neither were the case. I actually really hate when media ‘use’ people/characters on ASD to ‘add a little quirk’ to a side character or as a diversity token. Even if the main character is on the spectrum like 이상한 변호사 우영우, something just feels offensive and it makes me want to unpack why the author/director chose to represent someone on the spectrum as the main character. And what does it look like for a neurotypical actor to act as a neurodivergent character without being offensive? Like, what’s the ‘right/polite amount’ of stutter one can/should imitate?
Again, I sort of digress.
I did a bit of reading on Mark Haddon and autism. According to this article, Mark Haddon admitted on a blog post that he did not do any research on autism before writing this novel — wtf?? The author of the article says, “while Christopher does have many traits of someone with autism, this novel teaches readers autism’s stereotypes, rather than the reality. I wish that Mark Haddon could have made a new edition with a disclaimer at the beginning of the novel.” I agree.
From an article Haddon wrote himself: “As it happens, when I was putting Christopher together I drew upon a long list of beliefs, habits, quirks and behaviours which I borrowed from friends and acquaintances and members of my own family. It would be unfair of me to name the person who can’t eat a plate of food if the broccoli and salmon are touching, or the person who can’t use a toilet if a stranger has used it. Suffice to say that neither of them would be labelled as having a disability. Which is only to say that Christopher is not that different from the rest of us. It’s the number and combination of his eccentricities which cause him difficulties.”
Hmm. I don’t know about that, Mark. I think what’s unfair is that you “drew upon a long list of beliefs, habits, quirks and behaviors” from friends and family, instead of doing some proper research, before publishing a freaking novel. Not saying people should read Curious as a textbook that should have ‘properly portrayed’ someone with Asperger’s (who even knows if such a proper portrayal exists?) but not doing any research before writing a novel sounds lazy to me. Contrast this with Min-Jin Lee, who did years of anthropological/ethnographic/historical research before and as she wrote Pachinko, a work of historical fiction. But alas.
