😎 4 Fiction Recs for Your Neurodivergent Awakening — with Bailey Lang
Hello and welcome to Pleasure Reading. I'm your host, Amelia Ruby, and this is a podcast about the pleasure of reading, where I share curated reading lists, author rankings, chats with my bookish friends and more. If you, too, take pleasure in reading, I hope that you will subscribe and share the show with a friend. Cheers to your next best book. Hello, and welcome to Pleasure Reading, a podcast about all of the joys, pleasures, and fun parts of reading, where we talk about books of all genres and curate lists on different themes.
Amelia Hruby:And I have been saying every episode so far that we also have bookish chats with my bookish friends. And today, we're having the first one. So I am so thrilled to be joined by Bailey Lang for a conversation about fiction reads that might support our own neurodivergent awakenings or, you know, empathy with different minds and experiences of the world. Bailey and I have been friends, peers, and colleagues through various online business spaces. And when Bailey reached out to me at the end of the last year asking if we could do an episode together, I was like, yes, please.
Amelia Hruby:So I'm really, really thrilled for this conversation, this episode, this list of books. And hi, Bailey. Welcome to Pleasure Reading.
Bailey Lang:Hi. Thank you so much for having me. I have been so excited to have this conversation. I love love the podcast. I listen to it.
Bailey Lang:I get so many book recommendations, so I'm very, very excited to be here.
Amelia Hruby:I am grateful to you for listening. Pleasure reading has been a little, like, labor of love and joy for me, honestly. You know, I've loved reading for a long time, but I think there is something inside of me that likes to turn everything into a project, and this podcast, like, gives me the opportunity to turn my reading into fun projects. And I think I used to be a pure mood reader, like, I would just kinda do what I wanted, and now I, like, as we're recording this, I'm in the middle of reading more than 10 You dark academia books to do an episode on that, which will have already come out by the time this airs. So if you're listening, you can go listen to my journey with that reading project, which is wild.
Amelia Hruby:Definitely over ambitious. Regardless, Bailey, could you tell us a little bit about your reading journey? Like, how did you find your love of reading? How has it developed? And then I would love to hear a little bit if you're open to sharing about sort of your own journey of self discovery and your autistic self discovery through books.
Bailey Lang:Yeah. So I've been reading for as long as I can remember. I started reading really, really early. I was what is referred to as hyperlexic. So very early reading, very early speaking, all of that kind of stuff, which I learned much, much later in life is has strong correlations with neurodivergence diagnosis.
Bailey Lang:So reading has always been a site of deep pleasure for me. It's a space that I go to recharge emotionally. And reading fiction specifically has always kind of been my window into understanding people because people as people make very little sense to me. And people in books, right, you see often on the page why they are the way they are. And so that's that's really helpful for someone with a pattern seeking brain to be able to see, like, oh, when someone does this, it might be be because of that.
Bailey Lang:Right? So books have always been a source of both pleasure and information, and that's that's just always been the case. I read constantly. And that that has also informed my journey of autistic self discovery. So one of the books that we'll be talking about today, The Heart Principle, was actually the book that kicked all of that off for me.
Bailey Lang:I I finished reading that book, which is a delightful romance novel. It's beautiful. It's a lot of fun. And I finished it and realized I was crying and had that moment of like, this isn't usually what I'm doing when I finish reading a romance novel. Right?
Bailey Lang:It's usually like it's happy or it's sexy. So I was like, what's what's going on here? And the the author of that book includes at the end a number of references to other books about autism that she used in her journey of self discovery and diagnosis and in the process of writing the trilogy of which The Heart Principle is the third. And so that just kinda started the rabbit hole for me. I grabbed one of those books and was kinda off to the races from there.
Bailey Lang:So that was that was the very, very start of that process for me, and that is ongoing. Right? I'm still always seeking out books that have interesting representation that are representative of kind of the cutting edge of of understanding neurodivergence currently. So that's, yeah, that's very much part of my my understanding of myself at this point comes a lot from books.
Amelia Hruby:Oh, what a just beautiful reflection on how reading could change our lives and how it has changed your life. And it definitely resonates with my own experience of reading as well. I mean, I think books are one of the first places I discovered my queerness. They're one of the first places I ever was able to make sense of some of the more toxic relationships that I was in, the different power dynamics that I couldn't explain or name, and then I'd see somebody in a book go through it and them figure it out in fiction and be like, oh, that is what's happening here. Interesting.
Amelia Hruby:Yes. Yeah.
Bailey Lang:It's it's amazing. It yeah. I mean, it's stories are how we make sense of ourselves in the world. They're they're really, really important.
Amelia Hruby:And I think that just to name this before we go into the books on this list, like, something that has was really interesting for me in reading many of these books to prepare for this episode with you is that, you know, I don't know if I believe neurotypicality actually exists more than it is, like, a social norm. But, like, on the spectrum of neurotypicality or neurodivergence, I do think that my brain works in a perhaps, like, more neurotypical way and works with a lot of the systems set up in the world to my privilege and benefit. And so when I read a lot of these books, I what I love and what I hope I think will come out in our conversation is I'm hearing you say, like, you recognized yourself in these characters and, like, could feel that. And for me, as I was reading, sometimes I was like, why is this character doing this? I this makes no sense to me, which also was, like, really good for me to be like, oh.
Amelia Hruby:Mhmm. All of literature is perhaps written for brains like how my brain works, and things that may make sense to me in certain books won't make sense to anyone else, those motivations or actions. And it also just reminded me of the the ways that reading fiction can both help us, like, find ourselves in these characters' experiences and also get windows into experiences that we don't share and will never have and can learn to, like, appreciate and empathize with and and see for the first time, perhaps. So I'm really excited, particularly for one of these books where actually, two of them where I was like,
Bailey Lang:Oh, I can't wait. I can't wait to get into it. Yes.
Amelia Hruby:Yes. Okay. So let's move into talking about the books. We're gonna have two sections to this conversation. There are four books total, two in each section.
Amelia Hruby:And the first books we're gonna talk about are gonna be explicit representation of neurodivergence. So this just means that the author names on page that the character or multiple characters in the book are neurodivergent in some way. So we may have an autistic character or an ADHD character. Like we have that explicitly named representation. And then in the second category, we will have implicit representation.
Amelia Hruby:So this is where a character's behavior or social experience or internal monologue may suggest that they're neurodivergent in some way, but it's not named. So we are interpreting that from what happens in the book. And I really appreciated that you actually, like, separated this out when you sent me this list, because I do think it's important as readers that we are actively reading and making these interpretations, but also recognizing when, like, when is this something I'm interpreting from what's happening, and when is this something that I am, like, told is the case? And I think that it can also map onto our own personal experiences of diagnosis or self understanding as well. So we'll begin with explicit representation, and we're gonna talk about two books here.
Amelia Hruby:We're gonna talk about The HEART Principle by Helen Hoang and Cassandra in Reverse by Holly Smale. So, Bailey, can I pass it to you to tell us about the heart principle, which you've already queued up has been a really important book for you in your life?
Bailey Lang:Yes. So the heart principle, like I mentioned, it's the third book in a trilogy. So the trilogy is called the kiss quotient series. They're all really delightful. They're all very good.
Bailey Lang:And each of the couples in those three romance novels, one of the partners is autistic. And so in this third one, the the woman who is autistic, her name is Anna Sun, and she has recently kind of gone viral on YouTube for a violin performance that she gave. And she is really struggling to maintain her career after that. She's she's finding that she's really, like, creatively stuck. She's really burned out.
Bailey Lang:She's in this kind of toxic relationship with this guy, and he decides he wants an open relationship. Her her dad is really ill. And so she she decides she's going to go have a one night stand. Right? If her if her boyfriend can go be a jerk, like, she's gonna go sleep with somebody else too.
Bailey Lang:And in the middle of all of this, her therapist suggests to her, have you considered that you might be autistic? Right? And that happens relatively early in the book, so it's not a it's not a big spoiler. You know it's coming if you're reading this series. And so that really, like, a lot of puzzle pieces start to not to use a a metaphor that many people in the autistic community dislike, but a lot of puzzle pieces about her experience fall into place.
Bailey Lang:Right? Her life starts to make sense to her in a way that it hasn't before. And so, of course, you know, relationship issues ensue, growth occurs, you get the happy ending. It is a delightful, lovely, wonderful, and well written, very steamy book. So lots lots of fun to be had with that one.
Amelia Hruby:I picked up The Heart Principle because I liked the cover. Anna is on the cover, like, with these sunglasses on. There's, like, a heart and a motorcycle in the background. Like, it just looks like a good time. And it may have been the first book I read that really centered neurodivergence in this way and that share this sort of, like, parallel journey of self discovery, like, of a autistic self discovery alongside this, like, healthy relationship self discovery and, like, what that can look and feel like.
Amelia Hruby:And also, I remember just thinking, oh, this is a great romance about, like, falling in love and learning to accept yourself and how someone else accepts you and can teach you to accept yourself. And I think that it can just be read on so many levels, and it's just a good time.
Bailey Lang:Yes. Yes. All of the above. Yeah. It I think it came very much kind of at the the start of the wave of increasing awareness and, like, pop culture conversations about neurodivergence specifically as a term, but also just kinda better awareness of of what that is and what that looks like.
Bailey Lang:I think it's these books are are very much part of an early vanguard of that. And and, yeah, I mean, it is also just, you know, how how can you be in a relationship fully if you don't accept yourself fully first. Right? And that's that's a core question of pretty much every romance novel. And in this one, one of the components of that just happens to be autism.
Bailey Lang:Right? So it it does a lot of a lot of interesting things on a lot of levels really, really well.
Amelia Hruby:Yeah. I would agree. I have not read the other books in the series. Have you? And are they as good as this one?
Bailey Lang:Yes. They are all really, really good. So the first one in the series is also about a woman who is autistic, and she is, like, having troubles with relationships. She's under a lot of pressure from her parents to kinda settle down, and so she decides to hire an escort. It's kind of a reverse pretty woman situation.
Bailey Lang:It's delightful. And in the second one, the male character whose name I cannot remember is the character with autism in that couple. And he is the cousin of the main male character in the Hart Principle. So there's, like, you get those nice interconnections through the whole series. They can all be read as stand alones, but they are really fun as a set.
Amelia Hruby:Okay. Amazing. All of those will be linked in the show notes. Bailey's actually made us a whole list of books that you'll find there. But for now, let's move into our next book.
Amelia Hruby:So the next book on our list of explicit representation is Cassandra in Reverse by Holly Smale. And this was one I had never heard of until you sent it to me. So I'd love to hear, like, how did you discover this book and what's it about?
Bailey Lang:It is a Reese's book club book, and I do get those newsletters. And I'm pretty sure I found it through that. And, you know, I remember, like, looking at the cover and being like, oh, that's, you know, interesting cover. I like time travel stuff. What's going on here?
Bailey Lang:And then kind of getting into the description of it and reading that the main character is an undiagnosed autistic woman, I was like, well, I have to read this. And it was one where I don't usually do a lot of audiobooks. I have aphantasia, so I get no mental images. So it's really hard for me to focus on an audiobook. But this was one where I was like, I'm not gonna wait, you know, six months or whatever for the library hold to come in.
Bailey Lang:So I got the audiobook. I made the effort, and I loved it. And then I went out and bought it anyway. So, yeah, that's that was how I found this one and just was instantly in love with this book, with this character. It's so much fun.
Amelia Hruby:Yeah. So tell us more about Cassandra and who she is and what she discovers about herself in the very beginning of this book that is actually not about neurodivergence, but maybe about her magical abilities. Right.
Bailey Lang:Right. And then so it's so fun. So where the heart principle is very much grounded in reality, Cassandra in reverse, we get a little bit of not quite, but very similar to a Groundhog Day situation where Cassandra, who has been dumped and fired and had a public meltdown, discovers that she can travel back in time, and she can reset her timeline. She can only go back to to a certain point, but apart from that, at any point, she can just decide to, like, reset the day. And so she goes back in time to try to save her relationship and her job and and kinda fix her life.
Bailey Lang:And, yeah, all all sorts of chaos emerges from from her meddling with the timeline. It's really, really fun.
Amelia Hruby:I also love a time travel book. So I was immediately like, okay, this will be interesting. And I appreciated the ways that it's mentioned more than once in the book where it's like, okay, Cassandra's learned that she can travel through time and change things that have happened. So she just uses that to, like, fix these kind of minutiae and some larger problems in her personal life. Like, she just goes back over and over again to reexperience the same interpersonal interactions with people.
Amelia Hruby:And more than one character in the book points out, like, you're not trying to use this to, like, you know, save the world or, like, win the lottery. And she's like, no. I'm just trying to, like, figure out why this person broke up with me and maybe make that not happen or get my job back or figure out, like, how to make this client like me when they are obviously hated me just for telling the truth. And I really think that reading Cassandra, like, relive and experiment with these social situations, taught me a lot about how much is just, like, normalized and intuited and how we're supposed to interact with other people, but never articulated, named, or taught. And often in a book, you might encounter a situation where someone, you know, does the quote, unquote wrong thing, but it, like, moves on.
Amelia Hruby:And I think what was unique about this book is we got to do it with Cassandra, like, over and over again as she kept trying to figure out the quote, unquote right way to handle the situation.
Bailey Lang:Yeah. I have I marked a quote. I have my copy that I think really, really captures this. So at one point, she's just interacted again with that client that doesn't like her. And she says, I think I might actually understand what's going on around me for the first time in my entire life.
Bailey Lang:It's not an entirely unpleasant sensation. Maybe this is how other people feel all the time. Some of us just need a dress rehearsal first.
Amelia Hruby:Mhmm.
Bailey Lang:Like, there are a couple moments in this book where I read it and I was just like, yeah. The idea of, like, getting a do over on an interaction that you know you have botched in some way but don't quite understand how, I feel like it's such a uniquely autistic fantasy of, like, if I could just go back and try that again, right, I would I know I would say the right thing this time. I know I would figure out how to navigate this situation with all of these confusing signals in a way that got me where I wanted to be. And it doesn't. Right?
Bailey Lang:Like, that's the that's any time travel book will tell you it's not gonna fix your problems, but it is such a such a fantasy. Rehearsing is such a deeply ingrained habit for for many autistic people, practicing conversations before you have them, trying to anticipate what people are gonna say. You know? What do I need to do with my face? How should my body be?
Bailey Lang:All of these things that she talks about on the page, like, those are all part of my day to day. You know? It's that's that is how I move through the world is with that constant extra level of awareness and that constant wish of, like, boy, it would be nice. Let me just reset the last five minutes and see if I can do that better.
Amelia Hruby:Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. I feel like it's so important to name. And I really appreciate both in how you're talking about these two books and in, like, just, I guess, about the authors who wrote them. Like, these are both own voices stories.
Amelia Hruby:So both Helen Hoang and Holly Smale are autistic, and both in different ways, like, experienced late diagnosis or, like, weren't diagnosed as children. So, like, their characters experience that as well. And then you're sharing how you were able to experience that through their work and, like, what a beautiful gift and lineage of these, you know, on the surface, romance or time travel
Bailey Lang:books. Right. They're very fun books. And, also, yeah, there are several moments in Cassandra in Reverse where I I've marked passages that I just I feel such full body recognition of what she's experiencing or what she's describing. And it's it's so validating to feel so held by a book in that way, to be like, here is your experience on the page, right, in a way that you've never ever seen it before.
Bailey Lang:It's really, really cool.
Amelia Hruby:Amazing. Let's move to our implicit representation. So we have these first two books where I just sort of named that. We have different main characters who go on a journey of self discovery and get or embrace their diagnosis by the end of the book. But now we'll move into more implicit representation.
Amelia Hruby:So stories where the characters are not named or diagnosed as autistic on page or neurodivergent more broadly on page. And I guess before we talk about these specific books, the question I have for you is just a little bit about implicit representation. Like, how do you go about sort of interpreting a character as neurodivergent even if they're never named as neurodivergent? And how do we think about that as readers? I've seen some people be like, well, that's not right.
Amelia Hruby:You should never assume that about a person. But then also, sometimes I think that is very much what the author is intending us to figure out as a reader. Like, reading doesn't have to exclusively be literal. So I'm just curious how you approach that when you're reading and you're thinking about neurodivergence.
Bailey Lang:Yeah. I think some of it comes from many, many, many autistic people that I know and that I've interacted with online. Like, we are hungry for representation. Right? We will look for the tiniest scrap of something that looks like neurodivergence in a character and be like, one of us.
Bailey Lang:You know? So there's there is
Amelia Hruby:a
Bailey Lang:real impulse to read that into behaviors, mannerisms, experiences that feel familiar. I you know, that can be overinterpreted. Sure. That's that's always, always possible. At the end of the day too, if reading a character that you identify with, you know, if that interpretation feels right to you, if that brings you comfort in some way, it's not harming anyone for you to say, like, I'm pretty sure this character is, you know, neurodivergent.
Bailey Lang:Right? Mhmm. Mhmm. I would never put that diagnostic label on another person. You know?
Bailey Lang:Like, I'm not qualified to say that. But when it comes to a fictional character, I think we can we can safely say, like, these are the behavioral characteristics that we're seeing here. A reasonable conclusion to draw would be that this character is intended or not. They're they seem pretty neurodivergent. So a lot of it just comes from, first, you know, the the amount of nonfiction reading that I've done about neurodivergence and autism specifically.
Bailey Lang:I'm very well versed in both the conventional pathologizing diagnostic criteria and kind of the more affirming approaches to to diagnosis and self understanding. There's a huge range of behaviors and types of self expression and things that that kinda fit under that umbrella. So I bring to my reading all of that knowledge, all of that personal experience, which makes me pretty comfortable in reading stuff to say, like, these are all things that fit. Right? The this this reading seems appropriate based on that knowledge and experience.
Amelia Hruby:And I feel like, you know, as a former English major myself, like, if we take seriously that the purpose of reading is to interpret what is happening on the page, is to bring our own lens to the stories, in a certain extent, is to, like, project ourselves onto these characters and see what we find out when we kind of live in their lives for a little while. Like, I really appreciate the distinction you're making between we have space in our reading practice and in fiction to try these things out, to make an interpretation, to make a claim about a book that, like, maybe the author wouldn't make, but, like, I can make as a reader. And that that is different than, like, looking at another human being and putting a label on them, or, like, quote, unquote, armchair diagnosing somebody else. Like, just because we are interpreting things in our reading doesn't mean that's the same thing as diagnosing other people without their consent or without the expertise to do so. So I really appreciate that distinction.
Amelia Hruby:Let's talk about our two books with implicit representation. So these are gonna be All Systems Red by Martha Wells, and then actually not a book, a short story called Vaster Than Empires and More Slow by Ursula k Le Guin. So could you kick us off by telling us about All Systems Red by Martha Wells?
Bailey Lang:Yes. So All Systems Red is the first book. It's the first in another series. It is called the Murderbot Diaries, and it is about a character named Murderbot who is a human bot construct hybrid security guard.
Amelia Hruby:Seems right. Yeah.
Bailey Lang:Right? And at the start of the book, Murderbot is on an alien planet with this group of scientists, and it has disconnected what is called its governor module, this thing that that will control its behavior, potentially kill it if it misbehaves. And all it wants to do is to be left alone to watch media and and, you know, not have to interact with people. And then, of course, things on this planet start going awry, and Murderbot has to begin interacting more and more with with its clients, its humans. And so the relationships get more and more interesting and complicated as the as the story goes on.
Amelia Hruby:I had heard people rave about this book, and I felt really silly when I picked it up and, like, got 20 pages in. And I was like, oh, the main character's a robot. Like, I obviously are, like, not told from the point of view of a robot. I was like, oh. So tell me, like, what do you see in this novel that you're like, this is implicit neurodivergent representation?
Bailey Lang:Oh, gosh. So many things. So at the outset, I wanna kinda caveat the figure of a robot as autistic representation can be touchy for some autistic people. Right? Because there are caricatures of autistic people as robots.
Bailey Lang:Right? We're often told you are robotic. You lack empathy. You're emotionless. All of these horrible stereotypes.
Bailey Lang:So I wanna make space for that. Not everybody may love thinking of Murderbot as an autistic character. But I think that the project of this book of of kind of the first few books in this series and the the series as a whole, you know, who and what do we consider a person? What is what is personhood? Right?
Bailey Lang:And Martha Wells, whether or not she intends Murderbot to be autistic representation, is clearly aware of the stereotypes that she is subverting with this character. So I I think it is done in a way that showcases those harmful stereotypes for what they are. It does not reinforce them. So you have like, Murderbot is very aware that in the media, you know, a a sec unit, which is its official title, is portrayed as this, like, emotionless potential mass murderer, right, that could snap at any moment and and has no empathy. Murderbot itself is a deeply empathetic character.
Bailey Lang:Right? It cares very, very deeply. It just doesn't always show that in a way that's legible to the people around it, which is very, very much an autistic experience. Murderbot does not want to make eye contact with anyone ever. Murderbot wants to keep its helmet on with its faceplate, and it wants to watch the room through its drones and security cameras, which is another, like, autistic fantasy that I didn't know I had until I read these books.
Bailey Lang:If I could watch the world through a little drone and not through my my human eyeballs, a % would do that all the time. So those like, those really, really jump out at me. Murderbot has all of its media collection. Right? I think media is to Murderbot what books are to me.
Bailey Lang:That is it's that's its zone of passion. Right? What you might call it special interest. That is where it goes to make sense of the world, make sense of itself, learn how to understand people, have feelings in a way that feels safe and controllable in a way that emotions in real life are often uncontrollable and uncomfortable. All of that feels very, very familiar.
Bailey Lang:There are some of this gets developed more in in later books in the series, but Murderbot deals with a lot of, like, sensory inputs. So it will be watching something with its eyes and through a camera, and it has data streams. It's, like, managing all of this information. And sometimes that gets to be too much, and it starts dropping inputs. Right?
Bailey Lang:It will lose track of of some information. And that feels very, very parallel to the kind of sensory processing issues that that can be really common for autistic people. So I'll use myself as an example. I am hypersensitive to light and noise and sound and smell. I will pick up on the sound of a breeze moving through the woods long before any of the people who are with me know that anything is coming.
Bailey Lang:If, you know, if we're in a crowded environment and there are multiple people talking and sounds around us and there's crosstalk and noise from music and fans and the kitchen and, you know, whatever is happening, I will lose the ability to process language. People's words stop making sense to me. I cannot understand what's being said anymore. You know? So there are all of these things that that murder bot is experiencing through its inputs.
Bailey Lang:I mean, like, it's murder bot is much more technologically advanced than than I could ever hope to be, but those experiences feel so familiar. Right? Murderbot has shutdowns. Literally, it shuts down, right, if it is too damaged or too emotionally overwhelmed. Shutdowns are a literal autistic experience.
Bailey Lang:Right? Many people know autistic meltdowns. Those are the ones that people will video and put online to be cruel about. That is an outward expression of of unbearable stress. Right?
Bailey Lang:A shutdown is all internal. I experience shutdowns. You essentially become catatonic. Right? You can't talk.
Bailey Lang:You can't move. You really cannot do very much at all in a shutdown. Unlike Murderbot, I do not have a performance reliability indicator that will drop when I start to get upset that warns me that's imminent, that would be really nice. But so all of those those kinds of, like, physical experiences, it's emotional experiences, all of these things track so closely with what it is like to be autistic in a world that is not made for an autistic brain and body. It all it all feels so very familiar.
Amelia Hruby:Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing all of that and laying it out in that way. I was really excited to talk to you about this book and implicit neurodivergent or autistic representation here, because I would agree with you. Like, I think it's a very simplistic reading to be like, well, Murderbot is just a robot in this book. I feel like what Martha Wells is trying to do throughout the book, and I've only read the first book in the series, but is really start to probe us with these questions of, like, Murderbot's personhood.
Amelia Hruby:And, also, I think to move us beyond a sort of, like, human, nonhuman binary and to really begin to consider that if there are so many ways of being human, being murder bot might be one of them. And also, it doesn't even have to be about being human at all. It can be about these, like, different experiences of consciousness and what that means. And there are on the page, like, explicit conversations between characters in this book about whether Murderbot should be considered, like, an equal consciousness or person as the other members of this crew, and I found that really interesting. And, also, one of my favorite things about this book is just how snarky Murderbot is.
Amelia Hruby:Like, this book has a very sarcastic tone. Like, Murderbot is over here, like, literally pulling people out of monsters' mouths and also being like, I just want to watch reality TV. Leave me alone, which I I love. That was so good.
Bailey Lang:Yes. Yeah. Murderbot is such a delight. It is it's they're just so fun and funny to read. Murderbot is over everybody's crap, but is also gonna make sure that you don't wander into a pit and kill yourself.
Bailey Lang:So
Amelia Hruby:And does have respect for, like, the one leader of the crew who is also we learn, like well, maybe that's a spoiler. I won't say that. Which I also appreciated. Right? Like, ways that Murderbot both, like, sets itself apart, but then does find commonality and, like, respect for other ways that people in the book think through things or feel things even if murder bot is like, that's ridiculous.
Amelia Hruby:Stop doing that.
Bailey Lang:Yeah. And the the crew does the same for murder bot, which is one of my favorite parts of the book. Right? You see just these small ways that they start accommodating it. So there's a conversation that it has with with doctor Mensa where she just, like, looks a different direction while they're talking, and she's not trying to force it to to make eye contact with her.
Bailey Lang:She's not trying to force it to fit this model for her own comfort. There are all of those little moments where these characters imperfectly sometimes navigate what that's like, but they make the effort. Right? And it it's just kind of how they interact with each other, this underlying basic respect for each other's personhood, even if it looks different, I think is is really, really powerful. I love those books so very much.
Amelia Hruby:Yeah. Amazing. Okay. Let's move to our final implicit representation work story, long short story. That's what it feels like.
Amelia Hruby:And this is what I have not read, so I'm gonna invite you to share it with us. Like, tell us about Vaster Than Empires and More Slow by Ursula k Le Guin.
Bailey Lang:Yes. So this is a story that I am a little bit obsessed with. I would say it kind of straddles implicit and explicit representation in some ways. So the premise of this story is this crew of and this is explicit in in the book. This crew of insane people is being sent to determine whether or not this newly discovered planet is habitable.
Bailey Lang:And they are chosen because they are insane and therefore disposable. Right? So that kind of ableist setup is inherent to the world that Le Guin is creating here. So it tells you a lot, right, about what's what's kind of happening with these characters. And I don't want this anything that I say to come across as, like, trying to posthumously cancel Ursula k Le Guin.
Bailey Lang:That's not my intent. But it is, like, it is an inherently ableist framework for the story. So one of the main characters is he is set up as being an autistic man who has been cured of his autism. And so, again, you have this kind of, like, medical disease model of autism as something that is and should be curable, right, which we know now and new in some areas then is not the case. Right?
Bailey Lang:It's a developmental difference. It's not a disease. There is no cure. You know? All of that stuff.
Bailey Lang:So you you have to go into it knowing this comes out of a very particular moment in history and a very particular understanding of what autism is, And it's fascinating to me for those reasons. Because in creating this character, her understanding of autism, very common at the time, is that it's like an extreme inwardness. Right? Just constant inward focus, inability to empathize, to connect with others, to to have relational experiences with other human beings. And so the character who is cured of his autism is a hyper empath.
Bailey Lang:Right? He is he's unable to turn off his receptivity to the emotions of those around him. And so she basically takes the stereotypes of what autism was imagined to be from external observation and inverts them. And in doing so, she creates a character who, if you read this now, you go, this guy is super autistic. He's still just an autistic person.
Bailey Lang:It's just all of his characteristics are, like, the opposite extreme. It is I like, it just this story lives rent free in my head. I think about it all the time because it you could read it and go, this is extremely problematic on, like, basically every level, and it is in a lot of ways. But it's also it's a it's one of the foremost science fiction authors of that century. Right?
Bailey Lang:Really grappling seriously with what would it mean for someone we regard as incapable of empathy to be incapable of not experiencing empathy. Right? To pick up on every emotion of every person around him and then to project that back out to them. What would that be like? And then you put all of these people on a planet.
Bailey Lang:What happens? Right? It's it's just really, really fascinating. It's one of those that, like, burrowed into my brain and will never ever leave.
Amelia Hruby:Yeah. I really appreciate the way you're describing this and also how just obviously a close and careful reader you are, and I think that we can all be invited into in our reading practices. I also appreciated how you premise this being like, you're not trying to cancel anybody. I think that so often it's challenging to know when you read something from the past that is embedded with the stereotypes and problematic beliefs of its era. Which of those things are we going to discard and which are we going to embrace for the time they were from, and how do we make those decisions?
Amelia Hruby:And sometimes, like, when I don't know what to do, especially if I'm reading something that is not about or is about, like, an identity or an experience I don't have. I mean, honestly, what I do is I just look to the people who are reading it, who lived those experiences or live with them now, and I'm like, okay. What do you think about this? Like, does it feel true or like it's getting to something that we are still grappling with in its own way? Or does it just feel like blatantly discriminatory, prejudiced, problematic?
Amelia Hruby:Like, we can just toss that out. And so I appreciate the way you're grappling with us and sharing that with us.
Bailey Lang:Yeah. Yeah. Because it it does it would be easy to be like, well, this this, you know, rested on problematic assumptions from jump. Therefore, it's it's just worthless and bad. But she's really she's taking what was understood of the autistic experience seriously.
Bailey Lang:And there's so there's an idea. It's called the intense world theory, which is a a concept for understanding the autistic experience, which is part of why some people are nonspeaking or noncommunicative verbally is because just the experience of being in the world is so overwhelmingly intense that they they're protecting themselves. Right? It's a it's a self protective stance. The world is just very, very intense all of the time.
Bailey Lang:And I think that's kind of the example that we see in this character. Right? We don't see him before he is supposedly cured, but we're led to understand that he, you know, was nonspeaking all of this stuff, and now he's like an exposed nerve. Right? And it's it's as if what was within him is now his entire experience, and everyone has to see it, and he's gonna make sure they know it.
Bailey Lang:Like, this is not a pleasant character. It's it's just it's so, so fascinating. And I think there's so much there that that gives us room to think about, you know, how do you represent an experience in in fiction, right, if it's not an experience that you have? And what are what stories are we telling right now, you know, that we will look back on it in fifty, sixty years and be like, we we were just at the start of our understanding of this thing at that point. So it's yeah.
Bailey Lang:I mean, it's one of those stories that I read regularly because it it opens so many pathways to other ideas for me. And in that, I think it's still really, really valuable.
Amelia Hruby:Yeah. Beautiful. Well, Bailey, thank you for joining me, for being our first guest on Pleasure Reading, for bringing us this list of amazing books. Listeners, there are links to the books we talked about today in the show notes, as well as a direct link to read the short story from Ursula K Le Guin. And Bailey has also curated a much longer list of neurodivergence related books, fiction and nonfiction, that she recommends.
Amelia Hruby:So you can check all of that out in the show notes. If you make purchases through those links, Bailey will receive a little tip as a thank you for learning about the books through this conversation. And, Bailey, is there anything else you wanna say about books or neurodivergence or autism before we sign off today?
Bailey Lang:Oh, I mean, we could be here all day.
Amelia Hruby:Of course.
Bailey Lang:No worries. This was this was wonderful. It's so nice to talk about about these books and how they they show us paths to what ultimately is our shared humanity, even if even if we experience it sometimes very differently from one another. So it's it's always such a pleasure to talk about those books, to share them with people, to introduce, hopefully, someone's next favorite read to them. So thank you for this.
Bailey Lang:This was really, really fun.
Amelia Hruby:Absolutely. Thank you for joining us. And if folks wanna connect with you, they can find you on your website for the writing desk and learn more about your services as a writer and editor. And I think that's it for today. So friends, check out all the books, check out Bailey's work, and until next time, here's to your next best book.