Q&A: David Mitchell on autism, expectations and 'The Reason I Jump'
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Source: Los Angeles Times article by Carolyn Kellogg
October 28, 2013, 7:09 a.m.
David Mitchell, whose complex novel "Cloud Atlas" was adapted into a film last year, has quietly hit bestseller lists again as one of three authors of “The Reason I Jump.” He shares credit with KA Yoshida and young Japanese writer Naoki Higashida. Higashida has a severe form of autism, but, as a 13-year-old, wrote this book about what it’s like to live inside his head. Mitchell collaborated with his wife, Yoshida, on the translation from the Japanese; as parents of an autistic child, they see the book as a way to break through the speechlessness of autism.
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What are some of the misperceptions about autism the book can address?
The problem with received wisdom is you don’t know it’s received wisdom; that’s why it’s somewhat corrosive. I never really noticed that I had assumed that people with autism, to be direct, don’t have imaginations. Or, I never noticed how it had gotten into my head, I can’t pinpoint the moment I started to believe that people with autism are incapable of empathy. There’s a number of occasions in the book Naoki displays a level of empathy that’s unusual in any 13-year-old, let alone an autistic 13-year-old.
He’s asked at one point – he asks himself, the book’s mostly a list of questions and answers – at one point, the question is, what’s the worst thing about being autistic? And his answer is, it’s not actually what you’d think. It’s not the day-to-day hard grind of having a mind that’s editorless, that isn’t under your control. The hardest thing is knowing you’re making massive headaches and stress for everyone around you. That your autism is causing your parents to cry at night when they think you’re asleep. That kind of stuff, you know?
This is what Naoki does routinely in his book: Metaphor. Creating fiction. Imagining a world that isn’t. Which is what every storyteller does, and reporting from that world. A playfulness with language. The manipulation of the reader’s expectation. Pop-pop-pop-pop go falsehoods about autism. We confuse the symptoms and the causes. I’m making him sound like some sort of guru here – he really isn’t, he’s just describing what his life is like, and how his mind works.
We muddle the symptom and the cause. We do that, not him. We do that.
What do you see next for autism?
I look forward to a future that maybe talks more about autisms than autism. We need a revolution in autism. The book’s a little part of that. It offers one ripple of what I hope can turn into a big wave. We need to credit people with autism with much more imagination, intelligence, empathy and human potential – they have so much more than they are given credit for. They need help and understanding to make that intelligence, that potential, manifest but it really is there.
Read more: http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-david-mitchell-on-the-reason-i-jump-20131025,0,5912856.story#axzz2j2nWeMyC
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