A Mind Apart: Travels in a Neurodiverse World
Reviews
“As inventive and full of mischief and deep feeling as Diane Ackerman, as adept at translating experience into life lessons as Anne Lamott, and an excellent adjunct to Oliver Sacks, Antonetta fashions an intriguingly meandering narrative as she describes her atypical neurological experiences . . . Once again, Antonetta alters our perception of ourselves and our place in the biosphere as she makes unexpected connections, traverses rarely charted territory, articulates provocative observations, and leaves readers pondering a startling question, is neurodiversity as essential to life as biodiversity?”
—Booklist, starred review
“It would be strange,” writes Susanne Antonetta in A Mind Apart, “if something like the human leg — if it were born sometimes two, sometimes eight, sometimes clawed, sometimes toed — showed the same variation as consciousness.” As Antonetta, a poet with manic-depressive disorder, explores in this book, minds are formed in many ways, some of which have been deemed illnesses — autism, attention deficit disorder and so forth. While not rejecting the drugs “that tether me to your world,” she argues that “the word cure is the wrong word, and that we must begin to respect the mental processes of the individual, think in terms of helping to get the gifts to emerge while the challenges become as manageable as they can.” But A Mind Apart isn’t a polemic, it’s a “bipolar book . . . alinear, associational,” in which Antonetta wonders how anyone could “resist the lusciousness of others’ minds, moving around us, with us, all the time, like a gallery of veiled art?”
—The Washington Post
“On the eve of an era when the genetic eradication of multiple-personality disorder, manic depression, Tourette’s, and autism has become a real possibility, Antonetta not only warns us against a world impoverished by the absence of the future Van Goghs, O’Keeffes, Virginia Woolfs, and William Blakes, she suggests that given the slipperiness of consciousness, and the fine lines between creativity, adaptability and madness, the rest of us may not be as neurotypical as we think.”
—Pam Houston, O: The Oprah Magazine
Awards
Winner of the 2006 NAMI/Ken Johnson Award