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Autistic Characters, Infinite Possibilities by Sarah Kapit
I didn’t know I was autistic as a kid. But I knew that I was a reader. I was the kid who brought five books along on a day-long visit with my grandparents, just to make sure that I didn’t run out. Oftentimes, I’d read on a bench somewhere while other kids my age ran around the playground. This led to many awkward moments when adults tried to get me involved in some game or another when I was happier alone with my book, thank you very much. The characters I read about felt like friends to me.
I now notice that there is a common theme among many of my favorite characters. Like me, they were outsiders.
They were Harriet of Harriet the Spy, scribbling down not-so-nice thoughts in her trusty notebook.
They were A Wrinkle in Time’s Meg Murray, traveling to different worlds even as she struggled to fit into her own.
They were Animorphs‘ Tobias, who would rather fly around as a hawk than go to a dance at his former school.
I do not believe that these characters were explicitly written as autistic representation. Indeed, many of the books were first written at a time when scientific and popular understandings of autism were far different than our own. Nevertheless, I saw myself in them.
Upon finding the autistic community, I discovered that many other autistic people also related to Meg and her brother Charles Wallace. They related to Harriet and Tobias, to Anne Shirley and Hermione Granger and Luna Lovegood, among many others.
Perhaps the fact that these characters were not written as “autistic characters” contributes to their depth and relatability. Louise Fitzhugh did not set out to write an autistic character in Harriet. She wrote a girl detective who was observant and obsessive, who appeared prickly to others, who expressed her emotions best in a notebook. And that’s a character that many autistic people relate to, without ever having to use the word “autism.”
However, implicit representation is not quite the same thing as explicit representation. When we look at characters that have been explicitly identified in children’s literature, the picture becomes less positive.
In my childhood reading, I can recall coming across one explicitly autistic character. The book was The Baby-Sitters Club #32, Kristy and the Secret of Susan. In this book, our hero Kristy babysits for Susan, an autistic girl who spends most of her time at a boarding school that would be better termed an institution. Susan does not speak verbally and has what is commonly known as a savant skill: the ability to play the piano perfectly.
While being non-speaking and having savant skills are common stereotypes of autistic people, Susan could have still been a fully-fleshed out character. Planet Earth is Blue by Nicole Panteleakos is a wonderful book starring a non-speaking autistic girl.
Unfortunately, Susan is not accorded any agency or respect in the story. Like so many other disabled characters in older works of literature, she exists primarily to teach a lesson to non-disabled characters. Ultimately, she is packed up to go back to her institution and readers are told that it is for the best. People like her, apparently, do not belong with the rest of the kids in Stonybrook.
Today Susan is not the only autistic character in kidlit. I welcome the change. Unfortunately, however, there are still too many books that rely on tired stereotypes: The autistic person who doesn’t understand love. The autistic sibling who is a burden to others. The hyper-logical autistic scientist who has few other discernible personality traits.
These stereotypes are not reflective of my reality, or the many autistic people whom I have come to know and care for in nearly 15 years being part of the community. There are, of course, some exceptions, especially several #ownvoices books that have been published in recent years. My favorites include On the Edge of Gone by Corinne Duyvis, State of Grace by Rachael Lucas, and Planet Earth is Blue.
Yet overall, the state of autistic representation in kidlit is still disappointing. That’s one reason why I wrote Get a Grip, Vivy Cohen!
Vivy, like me, adores baseball–a trait not usually associated with autistic people. She learned how to throw a knuckleball–baseball’s quirkiest pitch–through a lot of grit and hard work. She cares deeply for her older brother, her parents, and the boy who becomes her best friend and catcher. Like all of us, she makes mistakes, but not because she is uncaring or lacks the ability to determine right from wrong. She has a strong sense of morality, like so many autistic people that I know.
And she is explicitly identified as autistic. That part is important.
I wanted to write a character like Vivy to give autistic kids a character they can relate to, much as I related to Meg and Harriet and Tobias. My hope is that Vivy, and other explicitly autistic characters, will begin to chip away at the harmful stereotypes that are so often found on our bookshelves.
In 2020, implicitly autistic characters are not enough. We need to give kids explicitly autistic characters so that the full humanity of all autistic people can, at last, be acknowledged.
This is part of the work of the neurodiversity movement. The neurodiversity movement is a political movement that advocates for the equality of all autistic people. We don’t believe that autistic people should be packed off to institutions, like Susan, or to segregated schools and programs where autistic people are taught to appear as non-disabled as possible. We want autistic people to be fully included in our community from childhood onwards.
My work as a writer is only a small part of that mission. Nevertheless, I hope Vivy’s story helps further these goals. Autistic kids deserve to be in classrooms with their non-disabled peers. They deserve to play sports, sing in choirs, and act in plays. And they deserve to see themselves in stories.
Sarah Kapit lives in Bellevue, Washington with her husband and their goofy orange cat. She earned a PhD in history from the University of California, Los Angeles, and she’s always happy to talk about the history of women, medicine, and any other history geek topic. She has a longstanding involvement in the disability rights and neurodiversity movements, and serves as chairperson of the Association for Autistic Community. Get a Grip, Vivy Cohen! is her first novel.
Nerdy Book Club 
I agree with you on all of this, as a teacher, a mother, and a grandmother, and fellow human being
Such an interesting read, thank you!
I love this piece and I’m so excited to read GET A GRIP, VIVY COHEN!
“I do not believe that these characters were explicitly written as autistic representation. Indeed, many of the books were first written at a time when scientific and popular understandings of autism were far different than our own. Nevertheless, I saw myself in them.” I feel the same way about the film character Tuco Ramírez from ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’.
I’m a little bit older than you, but Harriet and Meg Murray were definitely two of my childhood literary heroines, along with Lewis Carroll’s Alice, Jo Marsh, and Laura Ingalls. It would be another four decades (and four kids of my own) before I figured out that I am autistic. But what a delight it can be to revisit some of these old friends now with a full measure of awareness! Good luck to you in your quest to help create new heroes and heroines for the next generation of neurodivergent kids.
Thank you for this post and your insights, Sarah. This point jumped out at me, “Like so many other disabled characters in older works of literature, she exists primarily to teach a lesson to non-disabled characters.” You’ve created a full, fun character in Vivy.
Sarah and the readers of Nerdy Book Club [Beth and Laura too]:
Susan has two savant skills. [though probably the other is more splinter-ish than talented/prodigious]
She also calculates calendars – though the latter involves a level of learning.
[I am thinking the piano skill = adequate stimulation + implicit learning + lots of reinforcement
and I was VERY angry that Kristy and Mrs Felder said “it meant nothing to her”. THAT IS NOT TRUE!}
I recall she was able to use an account book/perpetual calendar of her father’s and get the 12/15/20 patterns.
She was able to get herself back on her personal trajectory after a major regression, and for that reason, she was inspiring to the young Adelaide [who encountered her in 1991].
How glad I was to learn about the camp and Dawn and the squeeze machine during a holiday. WOW! This is right on the money and for the market. [perhaps it was a ghost writer who did this…]
Yours truly only had that level of resource from World Book Commonwealth Edition 1994 and I was soon able to see how Felder did it.
And you don’t often see an early regressive/regression in literature – at least you didn’t in the 1990s. Perhaps in the 1970s and 1980s – if you knew where to look.
That book was so hard I vomited on it in a basket and I only re-read it in 1997.
Have wanted to support Vivy Cohen for a long long time and I enjoyed the extract I read a few months ago.
And it’s not like Mike and the others learnt anything. Which seems fairly real. Except how to better grift and graft future autists in their professional and personal careers.
In my headcanon Susan and the Hobarts are friends.
And when I learnt about Georgie Stehli and her love of skiing, snowboarding and anything which required balance and daring – both before Auditory Integration Therapy and after.
Thinking, too, of BEACHES – and to all the characters to whom we would love to say: “Did you ever know that you’re my hero?”
Some of those characters appear in books by Luna Rose who is rocking Wattpad and Episode – though the latter is not an accessible platform.
Thank you for the pointer about PLANET EARTH IS BLUE.
I am thinking of a good story called ME, KAREN, AND THE WHALE. There is a real-life Argentinian golfer who I think of when I read it.
Will run away and read Colby Sharp’s words.
Great points here — can’t wait to read this story!