I have spoken about my book 'Did You Whisper Back? previously. The main character, Amanda, is actually schizophrenic but there are many similarities between the two conditions. Bleuler, who coined the name 'schizophrenia' also coined 'autism' in Nazi occupied Austria. "Bleuler had only meant it to be coined as a temporary symptom of schizophrenia. It was only under Nazi rule, in the work of Hans Asperger in the 1930s and 1940s, that those who came to be called autistic were singled out as having a unique way of being..." (Empire of Normality by Robert Chapman).
I wonder if Amanda was presenting with the same symptoms today whether she would be diagnosed with autism instead.
But when I first started penning the book in the late 1970s I didn't know about the commonalities.
Amanda withdraws into her fantasy world to make sense of the confusing world around her. She has difficulties in social relationships, and likes to spend time in her own. But she leaves Liverpool and goes off to work in a Devon hotel in search of her 'imaginary twin sister'. While at the hotel she tries to mask and fit in with the other hotel staff but the finds it more and more difficult. I now interpret this as the exhaustion of masking. She feels as if the characters are being superimposed on her and feels an amalgamation of them all. Like they're holding a mirror to her and she's reflecting them.
When she returns home after the season has finished, her mother is pressing her to get a job. We see Amanda's thoughts and how she is struggling under the weight of the demands:
"Nag, nag. Situations Vacant, clean the bathroom sink, clean the whole bathroom, men are coming to repair the central heating. Make them a cup of tea, white two sugars, talk to them. Each separate message pounds out with increasing tempo – this way, no this way, anniversaries that way, signing on over there, job applications here, Social Security, tidy the room, feed the cat, answer the phone, the phone, shampoo's running low, we have visitors, visitors, smile and be polite and help bring in the plates. As soon as some jobs are safely cleared away, a whole new cluster rears its ugly head. What would a flat be like with rent and bills and the rest of it? She lives an endless list as it is."
Then there is the fear of the telephone and it's incessant ringing. As I've said in a previously blog, in those days there were no answerphones, you had to answer them or wait until the stopped. There was no caller display to know who was calling. No mobiles. Even autistics today struggle with the demands mobile phones bring. All that sensory overload, all that pinging. But at least we have a choice to put them on silent. It's that whole thing about talking, having to think what to say. Thinking on our feet. Then again we have that choice of communication. We can use voice notes. We can answer in our own time to a certain extent. We can message or text or email.
But there is a quote from the book where Amanda is having a breakdown and the phone looms large in her life:
"What? Still no end to the bur-burr noise, ringing with rekindled fury from the vaults of somewhere? She runs upstairs in terror to her bedroom, blocks her ears, buries her head beneath copious padding, turns her radio up full blast but nothing will dam the current of ringing. They congregate again, bending over her like weeping reeds. Does it puzzle them to think a telephone has been deliberately taunting her with its rhyming echo for twenty-four hours or a week? Perhaps half a lifetime?"
I will be returning to this as I have written a spin-off to the main story.
Many thanks.
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