Not Even Wrong: Adventures in Autism

When Paul Collins’s son Morgan was two years old, he could read, spell, and perform multiplication tables in his head…but not answer to his own name. A casual conversation-or any social interaction that the rest of us take for granted-will, for Morgan, always be a cryptogram that must be painstakingly decoded. He lives in a world of his own: an autistic world. In Not Even Wrong , Paul Collins melds a memoir of his son’s autism with a journey into this realm of permanent outsiders. Examining forgotten geniuses and obscure medical archives, Collins’s travels take him from an English churchyard to the Seattle labs of Microsoft, and from a Wisconsin prison cell block to the streets of Vienna. It is a story that reaches from a lonely clearing in the Black Forest into the London palace of King George I, from Defoe and Swift to the discovery of evolution, from the modern dawn of the computer revolution to, in the end, the author’s own household. Not Even Wrong is a haunting journey into the borderlands of neurology – a meditation on what “normal” is, and how human genius comes to us in strange and wondrous forms.