Autistic Reader Interview: Andi C. Buchanan
Everything Is True
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Andi C. Buchanan lives and writes just outside Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. Winner of Sir Julius Vogel Awards for From a Shadow Grave (Paper Road Press, 2019) and their short story “Girls Who Do Not Drown” (Apex, 2018), their fiction is also published in Fireside, Mermaids Monthly, Cossmass Infinities, and more. Their novel Sanctuary (Robot Dinosaur Press, 2022) tells the story of a queer, neurodivergent found-family who live in a haunted house. They also write urban / contemporary fantasy as Andi R. Christopher. You can find their various online presences at https://linktr.ee/andiwrites.
Tell me a little bit about yourself. Is there anything you've written or made recently that you'd like other readers to know about? Other than what's in your bio, is there anything about your connection to autism, books, and reading that you'd like to share?
Thanks for interviewing me here! The bio covers most of it but I’ll add that I’m autistic and dyspraxic and also that my day job is in Easy Read translation. Simply put, that means I rework information into a simplified words and pictures format aimed at people with learning (intellectual) disability - I also train others and review their work.
My most recent publications are an interactive fiction piece called Sidetrack in which the reader explores a fantastical railway system (ah, trains, that classic autistic interest!) and a novella called Tides of Magic under my Andi R. Christopher pen name. Tides of Magic is the first in a series about a young woman and sea magic. The protagonist has ADHD but is not autistic, and it’s been a really interesting experience both drawing on feelings about unrecognised neurodivergence, but also creating a character who is very different from myself.
What are you reading right now? What are you looking forward to reading soon?
I’m currently halfway through Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift which is a big sprawling family (or families) saga set in what is currently called Zambia. I understand it has some science fiction elements, though I’m not there yet. It crosses two of my current reading challenges - a book from every country, and the Clarke award winners.
I’m otherwise reading through the Nebula Award shortlist - I didn’t read many new books last year, so most of them are new to me. I loved (and this is on topic!) Maya MacGregor’s The Many Half-lived Lives of Sam Sylvester, about an autistic teenager who collects stories of people who died young. It’s part ghost story, part murder mystery, but really an ode to family and acceptance, and it resonated in so many ways.
I picked up Babel by RF Kuang from the local bookshop this weekend and think that’s going to be next on my list - I’ve heard excellent things about it and the cover looks suitably foreboding.
What are some of the characters in fiction that you find most relatable? Some autistic readers love autistic representation, and others prefer aliens, robots, or characters who they relate to in a subtler way; do you notice any patterns in the kinds of characters that resonate for you?
I love both, but since you brought up aliens and robots, I’m particularly interested in how autistic characters relate to and find connection with non-human people. I explored this a bit in a very short story, “Even the Clearest Water” (Fireside, 2021) about a water fae or spirit who saves autistic people from drowning. There are of course reasons the idea of being an alien, or a mythic being, resonates for so many autistic people but I want to think about that in ways that also allow us to retain our humanity. There’s an idea called the double empathy problem - in short, rather than autistic people having a deficit in understanding people, autistic people understand autistic people best and non-autistic people understand non-autistic people best. What if we also understand the fae best because we’re closer to them than non-autistic people are.
And I also want to acknowledge that a lot of these ideas also intersect with oppression and with adjusting abuse, especially the changeling mythology and to not ignore that side of it. I’m working on writing a thing…
I’m also really interested in the ways autistic people are presumed to relate to characters versus why we actually do. “Autistic people like (or are like) Spock because he’s logic rather than emotion driven” is not without truth, but I find Spock most relatable (as an autistic person) because of the ways Vulcans are expected to repress their emotions and other visible signs of what is going on internally. More recently ST: Discovery did some very interesting things with an overtly neuro-divergent Spock
Are there any tropes you really, especially hate?
I hate when characters will do anything to not be disabled any more. There’s absolutely space for characters - like people - who have a range of attitudes to being disabled, including those who are searching for treatment or cure. But when a character will go against everything - all their own values, their family, everything they love - that becomes more than a goal or preference. It implies being disabled is not just intolerable but a sort of non-existence. One of my favourite serieses did this a number of books back, and I’m still annoyed about it.
I’m also not a fan of when a perfectly good autistic character gets a traumatic backstory to explain why they are “like this”. Autistic people have usually experienced some level of trauma, and obviously that has an effect on who you become and how you act. But in these cases the traumatic backstory simultaneously erases and pathologises the autism. Honestly, we don’t need an explanation! We exist!
Have you ever had a special interest in a fiction series or genre of fiction? What makes a work of fiction special-interest-worthy for you - or do the interests seem to descend at random?
This is a slightly-sideways answer to the question, but I grew up loving books about people who were obsessed with one particular interest or artform. I had a lot of dance stories - Noel Streatfeild’s in particular - and I was deep into not so much the specifics of the dancing, but the laws around being a child performer, the structure of auditions, every detail. My copy of Ballet Shoes had a reproduction of a child’s stage licence as an insert and I’ve never been more excited about an additional feature of a book as I was when I found that.
I am dyspraxic as hell and basically got kicked out of ballet classes. While I enjoy watching a ballet now and again, that’s never been a huge interest. But the detail of making a career in dance, and all the associated rules and bureaucracy and processes? Big nerd interest.
Obviously lots of children liked those books, so I’m not going to suggest it’s specifically an autistic thing. But I do think there’s a way I recognised myself not just in autistic or even autistic coded characters, but in characters who had a singular passion and focus, and were supported to indulge in it, if not by the adults around them than at least by the author.
This month at Everything Is True, we’re interviewing a wide variety of autistic readers with questions like these! You can find a schedule with the rest of the interviews here.