Your Bigotry Is A Lie
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
Sometimes I struggle to explain why I'm so interested in autistic representation in the genres I read, because I'm not sure I vibe with everyone else's reasons. The prevailing story is about how lonely people feel when they don't see people like themselves in the stories they read, and how validated they feel when they finally do. I can empathize with this - people should definitely be able to feel validated rather than lonely! I've even had moments of validation like that, myself, and enjoyed them. But deep down I don't think that a desire for validation (mine or others') is what drives me in this work.
Lately, I've been thinking that what really drives me is an autistic desire for truth.
Autistic people are famously prone to being motivated by abstract concepts like justice or truth. And what bothers me most about bad autism books is that, as Dr. Evianna Talirr would put it, they are lies.
In talking about this, I need to distinguish lies from pretend. Fiction is all about playing pretend. When a book says something that is not true, and we know it is not true, and agree to suspend our disbelief - that there are artificially intelligent Gods ruling the galaxy in the 28th century, for example - we are playing pretend. I deal in pretend play for a living; I have no issue with that.
But when a book says something that is not true, and people believe it - that autistic people don't have empathy, for instance - then the book is lying.
Lying is not okay.
This is what motivates me.
Viewing my work on autistic representation through this lens explains a lot about what I do and don't emphasize, what gets me angry - and, conversely, what gets a shrug out of me even when other autistic people are righteously raging.
If you write a character who fits a stereotype (say, a white, cis male, tech nerd who is autistic), that's not necessarily a lie. There are people in the real world who fit that description. If you write a character who fits the stereotype and he has only the stereotypical traits, and there's nothing else to him as a character, then you're lying a bit, because that's not how people are in real life. And when almost every piece of media shows only characters who fit the stereotype, then the media landscape as a whole tells a subtler lie - that only the stereotypical characters exist, or that the other kinds of autistic people are rarer than they really are, or are not worth thinking about. That kind of lie isn't necessarily any one piece of media's fault, but it makes the truths that counter it - and the media that does dare to tell those truths - all the more precious.
I like #ownvoices books, because an #ownvoices author is likely to know and tell truths that most other authors don't. I enjoy seeing these truths in the books I read, sometimes even truths I didn't know before. But I simply can't get on board with any exclusive focus on #ownvoices - with the kind of people who claim that only #ownvoices authors should tell autistic stories, or that neurotypical authors are inherently appropriative, taking away something that "belongs" only to us, when they write stories about autistic people. Partly it's because this puts closeted and questining autistic authors in a very bad position, but it's also something more fundamental. When I write about this stuff, I am not thinking about what belongs to whom - I am thinking about truth. And truth can't be owned. Anybody can tell it.
I'm okay with characters being villains, because I trust most readers will already understand that it's not a good idea to go around murdering people or whatever, but I'm much less okay with characters being bigots without pushback, because bigotry is a lie people do believe.
I am comfortable with complexity, even with the kind of complexity that feels potentially harmful - like really raw stories that deal with traumatic topics, or with autistic people being "messy" and behaving badly. I enjoy that kind of thing, actually, as long as the complexity feels true. Life is complex, and life contains harmful things sometimes - for marginalized people even more so than others! - and I think it's ok to talk about those, even if we end up ruffling a few feathers or needing a content warning. I get wary of people who try to censor dark or messy content, because these, too, are truths that sometimes need to be told. Suppressing the truth does its own kind of harm.
But there is a special rage in my heart when I see potentially harmful lies. When people try to write that autistic people don't have feelings (and therefore won't care if you hurt them), or that it's ok to abuse us "for our own good," etc, etc - those are lies that get people hurt in real life, and I hate them!
So I think that's where I am with this. For me, it's not really about feeling valid or recognized, even though I like those feelings. At the bottom line, I just want the truth to get out.
What do you think?
Meanwhile, here’s some news from the past couple of weeks:
“Ursus,” one of the concluding poems from MILLION-YEAR ELEGIES, is one of Charles Payseur’s recommended readings from April, over on X Marks the Story
THE FALLEN is available to request on NetGalley.