25 August 2024
A Grotesque Animal by Amy Lee Lillard
Amy Lee Lillard holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from Cedar Crest College in Allentown, PA. She’s published both fiction and creative nonfiction in literary journals such as Adroit, Foglifter, and Vox, among others, and received the Iowa Author Award in 2023. Lillard learned she was autistic at age 43, and A Grotesque Animal is a collection of her creative nonfiction essays illuminating the ways her autism has intersected with various other lived experiences (romance, sex, friendships, family, writing, career, etc.) Because for generations autism has been diagnosed only in young boys who fit a particular mold, many women Lillard’s age (and younger or older) are being diagnosed later in life. This phenomenon is sweeping through our culture right now, perhaps prodded by social media, where the overlooked and the alienated are finding like-minded communities online, then self-diagnosing with the RAADS-R (or with the help of a clinician—although this is more costly and rare).
In one chapter, Lillard explores the concept of autistic masking, comparing it to other masks and mask metaphors. Another, written in the very challenging second person “you,” is directed at herself, exploring her wants, her pains, her alienation, and her only possible path forward in a world designed by and for neurotypicals. Still other chapters explore her relationship with her family, in particular the women of her family, her mother and grandmother, who denied their own neurodivergence, disguising it with catty competition, slights, and insults. There are chapters about men, violent men, indecipherable men, with the guidepost of her father whom she does not understand, and her semi-strategic use of sexuality in an attempt to connect, to belong, to fill the void of living in a society where she feels eternally “other.”
The book, its essays, reverberate with profound truths—truths I’ve witnessed in my own upbringing, my relationships, my world. Still, I cannot help but wonder about the intersection of autism and toxic parenting, and the way that combination might be both chicken and egg: does neurodivergence lend itself to toxic relationships and toxic parenting? Clearly, toxic parenting lends itself to psychological distress in neurodivergent children. But which came first? Something within me believes it is the neurodivergent child that is most likely to break that streak of generational trauma; it is often the autistic child who speaks truths nobody wants to hear and is then punished for seeing and voicing what is meant to remain unseen and unvoiced. Or at least I want to believe this. Still, I wonder whether Lillard’s mother and grandmother learned to mask so hard they shut down their neurodivergence, their sensitivity and sensibility. Whether they employed vicious one-upmanship because it was a system that worked for them, that they could understand, where they could not understand or follow other social cues.
In any case, Lillard’s collection gave me hope. Of course, for the growing community of late-diagnosed autistic women. But also, about the concept of creative nonfiction essays, each sufficient to stand alone, combined in a collection to become a 150-page book. Some of Lillard’s essays are distinct and almost rhythmic in structure. Others meander loosely about a particular theme. There is something to be learned here about craft. The thing I learned most: I am trying too hard. I am getting in my own way. Sometimes it is okay just to write about the thing that is driving my attention most acutely in any given moment. Perhaps it can be compiled someday into something larger. Don’t stop.
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