Ten Years in the Tub by Nick Hornby Read Free Book Online

condition. So most books on the subject tend to make me feel alienated, resentful, cynical, or simply baffled. Granted, pretty much any book on any subject seems to make me feel this way, but I reckon that in this case, my personal experience of the subject means I’m entitled to feel anything I want.
    I read Charlotte Moore’s book because I agreed to write an introduction forit, and I agreed to write an introduction because, in a series of brilliant columns in the Guardian , she has managed not only to tell it like it is, but to do so with enormous good humour and wit— George and Sam (Moore has three sons, two of whom are autistic) is, believe it or not, the funniest book I’ve read this year. I’m not sure I would have found it as funny six or seven years ago, when Danny was first diagnosed, and autism wasn’t a topic that made me laugh much; but now that I’m used to glancing out of the window on cold wet November nights and suddenly seeing a ten-year-old boy bouncing naked and gleeful on a trampoline, I have come to relish the stories all parents of autistic kids have.
    The old cliché “You couldn’t make it up” is always dispiriting to anyone who writes fiction—if you couldn’t make it up, then it’s probably not worth talking or writing about anyway. But autism is worth writing about—not just because it affects an increasingly large number of people, but because of the light the condition shines down on the rest of us. And though you can predict that autistic kids are likely to behave in peculiar obsessive-compulsive ways, the details of these compulsions and obsessions are always completely unimaginable, and frequently charming in their strangeness. Sam, the younger of Moore’s two autistic boys, has an obsession with oasthouses—he once escaped from home in order to explore a particularly fine example a mile and a half away. “Its owner, taking an afternoon nap, was startled to be joined in bed by a small boy still wearing his Wellington boots.”
    George, meanwhile, is compelled to convince everyone that he doesn’t eat, even though he does. After his mum has made his breakfast she has to reassure him that it’s for Sam, and then turn her back until he’s eaten it. (Food has to be smuggled into school, hidden inside his swimming things.) Sam loves white goods, especially washing machines, so during a two-week stay in London he was taken to a different launderette each day, and nearly combusted with excitement; he also likes to look at bottles of lavatory cleaner through frosted glass. George parrots lines he’s learned from videotapes: “The Government has let me down,” he told his trampoline teacher recently. (For some reason, trampolines are a big part of our lives.) “This would make Ken Russell spit with envy,” he remarked enigmatically on another occasion. Oasthouses, washing machines, pretending not to eat when really you do… see? You really couldn’t make it up.
    I don’t want to give the impression that living with an autistic child is all fun. If you have a child of the common or garden-variety, I wouldn’t recommend, on balance, that you swap him in (most autistic kids are boys) for a child with a hilarious obsession. Hopefully I need hardly add that there’s some stuff that… well, that, to understate the case, isn’t quite as hilarious. I am merely pointing out, as Moore is doing, that if you are remotely interested in the strangeness and variety and beauty of humankind, then there is a lot in the condition to marvel at. This is the first book about autism I’ve read that I’d recommend to people who want to know what it is like; it’s sensible about education, diet, possible causes, just about everything that affects the quotidian lives of those dealing with the condition. It also made this parent feel better about the compromises one has to make: