A Friend Like Henry (Nuala Gardner)****

Stories about autism can be really annoying. Not so much that people get it wrong – and Nuala Gardner doesn’t – but it’s just that books like these are often a neuro-typical (i.e. non-autistic person)’s only source of knowledge about autism. It really annoys me when people make assumptions about me based on a book about someone else. How would you feel if someone did it to you? This book may be helpful and inspiring; it’s undeniably informative; it probably will help a parent with an autistic child to know they’re not alone – and it’s a great read. But it only tells you about Nuala Gardner’s children, Dale and Amy. It doesn’t tell you anything about me, and not a great deal about autistics in general. This isn’t a criticism – I’m just saying no-one should read this book and expect to have the same experiences with any autistics they might meet. (I’ve met soooo many people who expect me to be a carbon copy of the boy in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.)

Gardner isn’t really setting out to educate us about the complete autistic spectrum. She acknowledges the spectrum, but she’s writing about her children. So she quite rightly tells us about their autism and how she experienced it. I think it’s important to realise that not every autistic person will achieve what Dale does, and also that not every parent will be as successful as Nuala. Everyone is different: autistic or not. Everyone’s lives are different. Nuala helped her children successfully partly because she’s a lovely, warm, and amazing person, but also because she happened to be the right person to help Dale and Amy, and because she happened to be in a position where she was able to give that help. Some parents might not be able to achieve what Nuala has, but it mostly won’t be because they’re bad people. It’s possible that some parents might unknowingly treat their children in a way that affects them negatively – but that’s not really treating them badly. Like Nuala and like all other parents, all they can do is their best according to their own knowledge about the world - as autistic people do every day.

This book does seem to support the view that being autistic is like living in a glass box and being unable to get out. As an autistic person myself, I can say it is not like that for me. I spend most of my life partly or fully in Sophieworld because I love it there, and if you’ve got yourself an imaginary friend or two, you’ll never be alone, and you’ll rarely be bored. I don’t think I really live in my Sophiebox. It’s more like I’ve got a little box full of imaginary friends and I can get them out and play with them anytime I want to. If someone upsets me, these friends can give me a hug straight away. They know what’s wrong because they were there the whole time. And they’re much easier to be around than most real people.

Autistics don’t have an imagination? Well, I’ve got one. (My psychology teacher said I don’t really have an imagination, I only think I do. But she also said my exam started at 2.30, and she was wrong about that. It was at 2.) Just because an autistic person doesn’t appear to be playing imaginatively, it doesn’t mean there isn’t a whole world in their head.

A Friend Like Henry might have annoyed me if it had been badly written – a lot of people are commissioned to write about their experiences simply because a publisher’s heard of them from somewhere, like maybe they’re famous for something else; maybe they’ve appeared on TV or been featured in a magazine or newspaper. When this happens, writing ability doesn’t seem to be much of a concern. But Gardner is a fantastic writer. I don’t know if she realised it at the time, but she wasn’t only letting people into Dale’s world. She was also, to some extent, letting me into the world of being a neuro-typical person. Gardner always makes her points clearly and well – which must be a huge help for Dale and Amy. Everything is described so vividly; so lovingly. Even though a lot of the things she said were negative, I could tell she loves her children.

The people she writes about are really well-described. The horrible people in the health department are probably not people I’ve met, as the book is set in Scotland, but I’ve met people like them. Dale and Amy seem like a really lovely children. I always love finding characters I identify with, and they were people I identified with strongly. He loves trains! She loves horses! It was fun reading the book and finding all these things I do or used to do, although Dale, Amy and I are very different in most respects.

The ‘Henry’ in the title is a dog, named after Dale’s favourite train from Thomas the Tank Engine. He certainly is a wonderful dog, who has helped Dale and his whole family a great deal. Henry is great with autistic people, and also great with people who are generally scared of dogs. But a lot of the credit for Dale and Amy’s positive experiences should go to Nuala and her husband Jamie.

It did upset me when Nuala said ‘what did I do to deserve an autistic child’. It made me feel very guilty and a bit suicidal. But I’d like to look at it another way. Yes, autistic people are an awful lot of trouble (I can be a proper nightmare) but if autistic children have to be born into the world, is it better for them to go to someone as lovely and kind and sweet as Nuala (and my parents aren’t all that bad either) - or to someone who doesn’t understand at all?

This is a great book which I enjoyed very much, and it’s really good that people like Gardner are able to share their experiences, and provide help and encouragement to others.