A Mind Apart: Travels in a Neurodiverse World

WHAT I APPRECIATE MOST about Susanne Antonetta's prose is the multiplicity of her voice. Here's a prose writer who appreciates more than one kind of music. Antonetta's work is aptly described as a mosaic hybrid, because of the ways she mingles the confessional, the mental, the lyric and also the scholarly and journalistic report. The music of this writer's literary intelligence is in the impact of montage, the shock of hybrid collision. In Antonetta's A Mind Apart, bodies, minds and reports from the world collide. A Pacific Northwest community gathers to view a dead whale on the beach. A teenager kills a neighbor boy as a kind of science experiment. The husband of the narrator's cousin has a seeming-sorority of female characters living the mosaic of his multiple personalities, all of whom send her email. The intellectual pleasures of this work occur in the questions it asks about how a culture defines "normal" and what we might lose if genetic engineering succeeds in clarifying the borderline of acceptable human brain process. The literary pleasures of this work alight out of the layering of many aspects and approaches, the content coming to the page through the voice of a poet, diarist, essayist and reporter who has told us from the start that her skin is too thin to enable her to stave off much of what she finds urgently stacked up in the world. Antonetta is a writer to whose work I am particularly attuned, because of the ways her narrator is relatively unmasked, her structures metaphorical and lyrically innovative, her interests multiple and surprisingly connected, her aims to layer her own life with that of the larger questions of the world palpable and original. I can't think of many writers who hit all those notes. I've long told students that my understanding of the "writer's voice" is as a kind of blueprint of the writer's body and mind, translated into language. For the lyric sensibility, the body with too few shields, the mind that experiences the atmosphere of life as stacked and layered and splintered and broken, while at the same time hears human existence as a mad and varied song, may have little choice but to write in such forms. This beautiful book is to my ear is an essential contribution to creative nonfiction form. Barrie Jean Borich author of My Lesbian Husband

I am 54 years old, and have thought about evolution and those of us with different ways of thinking for several years; I was amazed that others think about these things, much more deeply than I ever did. A joy to read.

As a fellow bi-polar, it was easy to identify with Ms. Antonetta. As a book lover in general I was pleasantly propelled into the varied world of the "neurodiverse". I found myself drawn to the characters and the different ways they live life. I will definately check out the rest of her work.