Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's

John Robison had always wanted to interact with people, but by the time he was a teenager, his strange behaviors—such as his propensity to break radios, avoid eye contact, blurt out nonsequiturs, and dig five-foot holes (in which he would later bury his younger brother)—had earned him the reputation of "social deviant." Neither his father, who spent hours pickling himself in sherry, nor his mother, who spoke to light fixtures, could offer him any advice. It was understandable why he was drawn to machines since they could be relied upon.

His extraordinary ability to picture electrical circuits led to a job with KISS, for whom he built their renowned fire-breathing guitars, after he fled his parents and dropped out of high school. He eventually strayed into a "real" career as an engineer for a major toy business. However, Robison had to act more and more like a "normal" employee as he was unable to speak with others at higher levels of the organization. The salary was not worth it.

He wasn't informed that he had Asperger's syndrome, a kind of autism, until he was forty years old by a perceptive therapist. Robison's perspective on himself and the world was completely changed by that realization.

The poignant, darkly humorous tale of growing up with Asperger's syndrome at a period when the diagnosis was even recognized is told in Look Me in the Eye. A born storyteller, Robison takes you inside the head of a boy whom teachers and other adults regarded as “defective,” who could not avail himself of KISS’s endless supply of groupies, and who still has a peculiar aversion to using people’s given names (he calls his wife “Unit Two”). In addition, he offers an intriguing inverse perspective on the younger brother he abandoned to the whims of his eccentric parents—the youngster who would go on to adopt the name Augusten Burroughs and write the best-selling autobiography Running with Scissors.

This is ultimately the narrative of Robison's transition from his world to ours, as well as his new life as a successful small company owner, husband, and father who fixes his prized luxury cars. It's an odd, cunning, unforgettable story that is both profoundly human and sometimes extraterrestrial.