In the first essay in this series, I argued that gender functions as a kind of cognitive shortcut that sacrifices accuracy for efficiency. I showed that the qualities assigned to each sex have shifted over time—sometimes flipping entirely. The lesson was simple: what we take to be natural expressions of male and female nature often turn out to be contingent arrangements.

Yet an inevitable objection follows. Perhaps gender feels unstable today because modern life has distorted it. Maybe the system made more sense in the past—before modern institutions, before feminism, before liberal gender ideology.

This is the intuition behind some of today’s tradlife nostalgia. The story goes something like this: in more harmonious times, men worked outside the home, women stayed inside it, and together with their children they formed the basic unit that, according to a Daily Wire piece, is the “very foundation of human civilization itself.” And today’s inversion of that model, where women not only work but even helm institutions, “poses a threat to civilization” according to Helen Andrews.

This essay examines these assumptions. When we look closely at how households actually functioned before industrialization, the familiar story begins to unravel.

A brief note on scope. This essay focuses primarily on Europe, especially England, and later the United States. That is partly practical, given my own language constraint. But this focus also fits the argument. The tradlife nostalgia circulating today overwhelmingly draws on images of Western history, particularly the 19th and 20th centuries.

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Before industrialization: fluid families, household enterprises

The concept that a man ventures forth outside the home and a woman stays within would have been unrecognizable to preindustrial Europeans. For them, all life and work centered in the house (or haus, maison, casa, or huis), which meant not just the building but the social and economic enterprise within it. The household included its head — usually male, but could be a widow — and any spouse, children, servants, apprentices, and laborers.

In English, the word family came later in the 14th century and roughly meant the same as household. In the 1600s, when a diarist wrote about “the first that marryed out of my family” he was talking not about his son or daughter but a female servant.1

The household was the center of everything; this was true from the poorest cottager up to the king or queen. The household of Henry VIII at times expanded to 1,200 people. These weren’t just domestic servants and courtesans; they included an army of clerks, stewards, scribes, and specialists. When you were monarch, your household was the administrative state.

A family’s enterprise determined its composition. Households on large farms needed laborers; crafting households included apprentices. In the household of an eighteenth-century shopkeeper, “at least eleven different individuals […] came and went in the course of eleven years.” Each was acknowledged as a member of his “‘family,’ including his wife, child, siblings, nephews, mother-in-law, and several non-related persons.”2

Today’s concept of the commute didn’t exist. Generally, you slept in the same place you worked. In Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale, the merchant’s counting-house — where records and cash were kept — sat above his bedroom, so that upon waking he went “up” to work.

In short, as scholar Jeremy Goldberg has written, “gender was not an especially significant factor in the organization and use of space” in medieval England.3

Children did not always live in the households of their parents. “Binding out” meant placing a child — boy or girl — into service with another household. Children as young as 7 were bound out, and they stayed with their new family until they came of age. This could be voluntary on the parents’ part or forced: under Poor Laws, local officials had the power to take children from poor households and contract them out. Apprenticeships worked similarly except they were limited to boys, and generally the boy’s family was well-resourced. The purpose was to attain valuable skills.

At the moment, I’m re-reading Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. I lingered over the telling of Rafe Sadler’s apprenticeship, which began around 1515 in both fact and fiction. “Somewhere in his maze of obligations and duties,” Mantel writes, Thomas Cromwell “met Henry Sadler, and agreed to take his son into his household.”

He arranged to collect Rafe on his way back from business in his part of the country, but he picked a bad day for it: mud and drenching rain, clouds chasing in from the coast. […]

Mistress Sadler glanced fearfully outside, and down at her child: from whom she must now part, trusting him, at the age of seven, to the weather and the roads.

As Rafe reaches adolescence, Mantel depicts his relationship with his apprentice master as something between a son and an employee in a family business. And that’s exactly what these households were: family businesses. In historical fact, Rafe Sadler remained loyal to his master long after Thomas Cromwell’s political fall and execution, defending Cromwell’s legacy just as he took the Holbein portrait into protective custody, preserving it from destruction.

As we’ve seen, family composition was malleable as children, servants, apprentices, and extended kin came and went. Although gender roles existed — partly determined according to practical considerations: driving plough teams, felling timber, and shearing sheep demanded the strongest hands on offer to keep pace and avoid injury — how strictly they were kept varied.

On farms, women pitched in during labor-intensive periods, helping to ensure both figuratively and literally that the family would “make hay while the sun shines.” The work cared not for who was around to perform it, but simply that it got done.

More officially, a woman’s role was to produce; she turned raw materials into consumable goods. The late medieval Book of Husbandry (1523) described women’s responsibility for marketing butter, cheese, poultry, ale, and other produced goods, as well as taking grain to the mill. Peasant gardens were tended by women, who peddled their surplus produce in baskets carried through villages and town centers.4

But don’t mistake me; women’s work counted as physical labor, too. Brewing, harvesting grain, laundering heavy linens, tending livestock, and hauling fuel were all punishing tasks — and all of it was women’s work. By the way, brewing presents one of those stark gender flips I wrote about in my first essay. It used to be almost entirely women’s work, part of the larger pattern where men produced the raw material and women refined it into consumable goods. Now, brewing is heavily associated with male culture.5

Just as women shared in economic production, men shared in domestic work. In many households the father instructed children in reading, arithmetic, and catechism. Apprentices — almost always boys — swept floors, scrubbed pots, hauled chamber waste, rocked infants, and slept in the same crowded rooms as the family whose trade they were learning.

When a husband died, his wife often took over as head of the family business. This was particularly true of crafting households. Guilds generally excluded women but made exceptions for widows, who could inherit and operate their husbands’ shops. Women-headed households were normal in the Middle Ages, not aberrational. Again we see that gender roles were contingent rather than absolute: the kind of work you did depended on who else was around. It’s not that women were strictly excluded from commercial activity, it’s that priority went to men. Medievalist Eileen Power said in the early 20th century that women enjoyed a “rough-and-ready” equality with men, and though some scholars say this overstates it, I take “ready” to mean this: when an authority gap opened, women were eager to fill it.6

But these were not egalitarian times. Yes, women had a degree of agency and autonomy, but it was bounded by a cliff’s edge. In the 14th century women monopolized brewing because it was seen as low status; as commercial brewing developed (a precursor to industrialization), it became higher status and thus the domain of men. In 16th century Essex parish records, widows who lived alone and engaged in small-scale commercial activity were disproportionately accused of witchcraft. In Germany, women who controlled small property or earned income from midwifery and healing — practices outside male control — were especially vulnerable. As too were widows embroiled in inheritance disputes with male relatives. Conveniently, if a widow were convicted of witchcraft, she was disqualified from inheriting.

In the centuries preceding the formal beginning of industrialization, and as centralized production sprang in pockets of industry, laws were already starting to change in a way that reduced women’s property and political rights and narrowed their scope to domestic affairs.

Industrialization pushes the sexes into “separate spheres”

Then: industrialization. When production moved from disparate household enterprises to centralized factories, taking off in large scale around the 1790s, collaboration among householders gave way to individual wage competition. Jobs were finite, and employment was zero-sum. The personal cost to you of a neighbor obtaining one of those factory jobs couldn’t be ignored. Society shifted from a community mindset to a more individualistic one.

Family members no longer offset their costs by contributing to the household’s enterprise. When in-home production vanished in lieu of outside wage-earning, additional dependents became net drains on resources. So, households shrank. By 1850, the average white woman in the US had about five children, half as much as her great-grandmother.7

As the household’s centrality evaporated, the term family shifted to how we use it today: a unit of parents and their dependent children. Stripped of economic and productive significance, the family became sentimentalized. This is when the conceptually distinct spheres of public commercial activity on the one hand, and private domesticity on the other, took hold.

Industrialization did more than reorganize labor; it reorganized imagination. The industrious, commercially-active women of preindustrial times became the delicate middle-class flowers of Victorianism, too feeble in body and intellect to participate in the roughness of the market.

In The Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century, a seminal text from 1919 and one of the earliest academic treatises written by a woman, Alice Clark investigated the shift in women’s roles. Writing of her own “modern” day, domestic work now fell entirely on mothers, who “remain in a state of dependence and subordination — an order of things which would have greatly astonished our ancestors.”

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Initially, women were not discouraged from participating in the new manufacturing economy. Early industry in the United States and England relied heavily on female labor. The first textile mill owners hired entire families to work in factories together.8 But formerly independent farmers did not adapt well as a group to factory discipline. Pivoting, mill owners targeted the unmarried daughters of New England farmers for recruitment, whose household labor was no longer as vital given technological improvements and shrinking household operations.

As competition intensified, mill owners cut wages and worsened conditions, provoking strikes. One such strike was spurred by a factory owner’s decision to cut wages by fifteen percent. A worker who tried to organize a protest was fired, which incited the very protest the owner had sought to suppress. As reported by the Boston Transcript, nearly 800 female workers

marched about the town, to the amusement of a mob of idlers and boys, and we are sorry to add, not altogether to the credit of Yankee girls.

The strike failed, as did others, such as one demanding (only) a 10-hour workday.9

Thinking of these overworked women marching for fair and equal treatment as onlookers jeered, my insides twist. How can you hope to battle political power when you can’t even vote?

For their part, mill owners defended the low wages because women did not have dependents to support. But the premise wasn’t true. Women had children, husbands, parents, and siblings who needed support. Instead, the mill owners were making a normative argument. Women shouldn’t be supporting families, and so we won’t pay them enough to do so. Because of this wage discrimination, women couldn’t support dependents — which was then used to argue that women were incapable of providing.

As women became ever more overworked and underpaid, those who could leave the workforce, did. They left in droves, providing more fuel for the “separate sphere” ideology. It’s important to remember that these women weren’t leaving jobs that were neutrally available to either gender on the basis of merit. They were leaving inhumane, low-paid jobs specifically structured for women.

But women never fully left the paid workforce, especially immigrants and unmarried mothers. Factory owners benefited from paying these women one-third to one-half of the prevailing male wage. This created a trap where women were hired on the cheap, and then socially stigmatized for working such demeaning jobs.10 Working for wages ultimately became an emblem of low status for women.

A man’s ability to keep his wife at home became a signal of his own success and contributed to his sense of self-worth. The corollary is that a working wife threatened these things.

It wasn’t just the factory owners and their well-heeled allies who closed rank against women workers. Male workers and their trade unions saw them as competition. Unions excluded women and demanded in labor negotiations that women be banned from factories. They championed the concept of a “family wage,” a wage high enough for a man to support a non-working wife and children. Despite its name, the family wage was available only to men who supported families, not women — more aptly, they were organizing for a “men’s wage.” Direct gender conflict had existed in preindustrial times, but in more episodic settings: inheritance disputes, marital laws. Now, the pitting of men against women was a pervasive condition of the new wage economy.

Reinforcing these battles playing out on factory floors, a new gender ideology defined women through the virtues of social cooperation and submission: gentleness, sensitivity, altruism, empathy, and tenderness. These purposefully contrasted with the new masculine virtues that were steeped in competition: ambition, authority, power, vigor, and calculation.

During the industrial era, in 1865, John Ruskin wrote sentimentally about man’s “rough work” in the “open world” and woman’s gentle place “within his house,” where she was protected from “the anxieties of the outer life.”

In the same vein, The Angel in the House is a 19th-century narrative poem by Coventry Patmore that fictionalizes his wife as the “ideal” woman and offers rich evidence of the new Victorian paradigm. A woman’s role was to be subservient to her husband, to soothe him and boost him so that he could better compete in the wage-earning world outside: “Man must be pleased; but him to please / Is woman’s pleasure…” The wife existed to absorb, uncomplainingly, her husband’s stress.

I look over at our dog, curled up like a donut. I’m not as regular with her walks as I should be. And when at last I take her, she doesn’t complain. Bygones are bygones; she is simply delighted about the walk ahead. The wife in The Angel in the House is expected to show a similar disposition:

While she, too gentle even to force
His penitence by kind replies,
Waits by, expecting his remorse,
With pardon in her pitying eyes.

Some object to our modern term “emotional labor,” but this is something very much like it in verse form. The wife is meant to absorb the psychological damage produced by the competitive male public sphere.

On wings of love uplifted free,
And by her gentleness made great,
I’ll teach how noble man should be
To match with such a lovely mate.

Here is classic Victorian feminine morality. The woman’s virtue elevates the man. She doesn’t act in the public sphere; she inspires the man who does. As for her life’s goal, her “wish” is “to be desired” — nothing more.

Reflecting later on how society’s expectations interfered with her writing, Virginia Woolf lectured about her own Angel in the House, an internalized version of Patmore’s:

She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. … She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it — in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. … In those days — the last of Queen Victoria — every house had its Angel.11

Woolf, born in 1882, grew up when Patmore’s Angel was the culturally dominant model of femininity. Her parents were among the first generations fully formed under this Victorian public-private divide, and they followed its strictures to a T. But for Woolf, the inner Angel of her upbringing chafed: “It was she who […] so tormented me that at last I killed her.” Woolf’s generation was the first to revolt publicly against that model, even as many middle- and upper-class women continued to embrace it.

Pause for a moment to consider the order in which this all happened. It wasn’t that the identification of women with genteel domesticity came first, and because of that, only scattered and demeaning work was offered. Instead:

• The shift from household production to wage-earning spurred individual competition.

• Men saw women as direct economic competitors, prompting them to demand women’s labor exclusion and wage suppression — which factory owners supported.

• As women’s working conditions worsened, they fled the workplace if they could, hardening the nascent “separate spheres” and making paid work a sign of low female status.

• For married women who worked, that low status reflected back on husbands, who competed even more fiercely for jobs that paid enough to support non-working wives.

Competition and dog-eat-dog status contests largely made society what it was then, and what it continues to be today.

When you see how the dominoes fell, you also see that it didn’t have to be that way. None of these outcomes resulted because women are intrinsically incompetent, too delicate to work hard, or more “naturally” suited to sweeping and caring for children. Women had worked competently and vigorously for centuries — on farms, in workshops, in taverns, managing household logistics and organizing servants’ workstreams — where they balanced competing demands, thought both strategically and pragmatically, and made constant calculations on what to prioritize and how to problem-solve.

From the time industrialization took root, it only needed a short doubling back into the past, a brief retracing of steps, to reenter a time when everywhere men were found, women were too, working alongside them.

The 20th-century womanly identity: creative homemaker, moral exemplar

The shift away from women’s traditional role as economic co-producers gave rise to a new ideology, one that recast women’s shrunken domestic role as an expression of their nature. By the mid 19th century, middle-class women were cast as the “moral guardians of civilization,” even though, as revealed in my last essay, traditionally women were believed to have worse morals than men.

Pundits cited women’s “delicate sensibilities,” lack of physical stamina, and even “small brain[s]” to argue they were unfit for the public sphere.12 This reached its peak in the 1950s, when women were heavily pressured to find “complete pervading contentment” in motherhood and “creative homemaking.”13 Women who could not adjust to these domestic roles, or who sought independence or abortions, were pathologized as “unnatural,” “neurotic, perverted, or schizophrenic,” and some were even subjected to institutionalization or electric shock treatments.14

In practice, this new womanly ideal was reserved for white, native-born, middle-class women. For every middle-class woman protected within her “separate sphere,” there was an Irish or German girl scrubbing another woman’s floors, a black woman doing another family’s laundry, and Italian or Jewish daughters working in sweatshops to sew another family’s clothes. These women were not thought to be too delicate to work outside the home; apparently, class and race were higher-order categories that stamped out natural feminine delicacy. What’s inarguable is that these women’s suppressed wages and poor working conditions facilitated the higher quality of life that other families enjoyed, and that many look back on today as a lost paradise.

In the first half of the 20th century, there were periods when native-born and middle-class white women returned in large numbers to the paid workforce.

During the Depression, more married women sought employment as their husbands were laid off. And as it had during the early days of factory work, the scarcity of jobs meant that women’s labor participation was again met with concerted, institutional pushback. In the 1930s, federal laws and business policies discouraged the hiring of married women and mandated that they be first fired in cutbacks. Twenty-six states passed laws prohibiting their employment.

And then the resulting state of affairs was seen as evidence of women’s inherent inferiority. Women cannot support families, so they must be inferior. Women can only work menial and low-paying jobs, so they must be inferior. If women are so inferior, then why are laws and other structural oppositions against women’s work needed in the first place? Surely their inferiority would — on its own — ensure they received only low wages and were relegated only to menial work. Right?

But rhetoric and policy outcomes were different when jobs weren’t scarce. During World War II, women returned to the workforce in droves, and for the first time, they weren’t confined to undesirable jobs. Governments enacted policies that actually supported women in the workforce. For instance, the U.S. federal government also financed daycare centers for working mothers. At their height, these centers supported 1.5 million children. This experience of working in high-impact, desirable roles “gave thousands of women who had already been working their first experience of occupational mobility and the rewards of challenging, well-paid work.”15

But when the men came back, women were cut loose. They were laid off or reassigned to less desirable jobs, despite polls showing that the majority wanted to continue working.

Here’s what gets lost in today’s tradlife nostalgia: the day-to-day reality beneath the 1950s ideal. There was discontent.

In Blue-Collar Marriage published in 1964, most housewives polled believed that women had it harder than men in marriage, with responses including: “She is more tied down”; “She is practically in jail.”16 One-third of the housewives of blue-collar workers who participated in research expressed a “strong desire” to work, “often simply ‘to get out of the house,’” though earning their own wages was also seen as a strategy to have more say in household decisions.

To cope with feeling “trapped” and miserable, many women turned to substance abuse. The consumption of tranquilizers (known as “mother’s little helper” pills) soared by hundreds of thousands of pounds in the late 1950s to treat “housewife’s syndrome,” and observers noted a sharp increase in women’s drinking.17

As we’ve seen, the denial of fair wages and the availability of only undesirable jobs resulted in middle-class women fleeing paid work for the home. But this “separate sphere” wasn’t a sustainable solution, either. Women’s profound isolation and reduction of necessary household tasks pushed them back into the workforce in massive numbers — a shift that was well under way before the feminist movement reemerged. By the end of the 1950s, and before the second wave of feminism in the 1960s, 40 percent of women over sixteen held jobs, and increasingly, their stated motivation was “self-esteem and personal fulfillment as well as for economic needs.”18

As these women sought self-determination and financial independence by earning their own money, they crashed into gender discrimination at every turn, including wage discrimination, sex-segregated jobs, and husbands who refused to share domestic labor. The feminist resurgence of the 1960s arose from women’s frustration with this inequality. It was not the original cause of women leaving their separate sphere.

Today’s tradlife nostalgia is the stuff of historical fiction

When you see people claim that the traditional place for women is at home, you can point out that this was the traditional place for everyone. For a thousand years or more, no one worked outside the home. The home is where you worked.

I am not saying that gender divisions didn’t exist; of course they did. But any belief that women are innately internal and domestic, and men are external and economic, rests on a misreading of history. As Alice Clark wrote in 1919, industrialism’s public-private, commercial-domestic gender divide is an “order of things which would have greatly astonished our ancestors.”

The nuclear family with its male breadwinner and female homemaker is not the foundation of civilization, no matter what the Daily Wire says. It was a societal adaptation to changing macroeconomic conditions and to the institutional structures that resulted.

If laws had prevented the power imbalances that left capitalists earning astronomical returns while everyday workers were paid pittances; if women had the right to vote such that their concerns about working conditions held political sway; if workplaces had been forced to accommodate childcare demands placed more squarely on both parents and not only on mothers… then industrial society, and our postindustrial world today, would look very different.

Ultimately, the 1950s nuclear family model “contained the seeds of its own destruction,” as historian Stephanie Coontz has put it. It was an inherently unstable arrangement that self-imploded because its success depended on female subordination, the exploitation of minorities, and the suppression of individual women’s true natures. “Natural,” it is not.

History’s greatest utility is to reveal that things we take as inevitable were anything but. Everything depends; everything hinges on something else.

This marks the close of my second essay in this series. But what if we go further back in time? Then surely we’ll get closer to how humans are naturally supposed to be, right? Before the pillars of the modern world cast their long shadows. Such notions of human nature — as inferred from pre-agricultural societies — is what I’ll be tackling in my next essay.

I brace myself when I see a Substack post on motherhood. Most end up arguing a personal view on how women should be. Because to talk about mothers, after all, means talking about gender.

Through my kids, I know what it is to have your heart go walking around outside your body. Even still, I don’t recognize myself in these posts. I never wanted to breastfeed. Too much touch feels overwhelming. I didn’t want a year of maternity leave; returning to work felt restorative. I’m not naturally suited to the daily work of childcare. I’m a lawyer, and my job is far easier than our nanny’s — at least to me.

But this essay isn’t about my personal perspective or contemporary debates. Instead, it steps back to ask a more basic historical and philosophical question: what work the category of gender has been asked to do, and why public discussions among women, about women, so often feel unsatisfying and incomplete.

The authors of these posts are incredibly different from each other; women are a varied bunch. By treating them as a singular group, they — and we — are making a category error.

The idea that being a woman means that, at some essential level, we feel, think, desire, and burn out in the same ways and in contrast with men collapses under the lightest scrutiny — just check reactions in the comments. Yet it remains the unspoken premise of our contemporary discourse.

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Organizing ourselves by gender is an ancient practice. Indeed, gender has not just survived over millennia, but flourished as our go-to model for explaining human behavior, despite forceful efforts by thinkers like Judith Butler and Simone de Beauvoir to dislodge it.

By gender, I mean the social category a person is placed in based on perceived biological sex. It is sex-based in origin but social in operation: a classification system that assigns expectations, roles, and meanings, expanding far beyond the reproductive imperatives of biological sex.

Once an individual is placed into such a system — and we all are — a reaction happens. The classification may fit well enough, producing a sense of ease or coherence. Or it may chafe, like wearing ill-fitting shoes. It is here, at the point of collision between person and category, that questions of identity arise. We may embrace the category we are assigned, resist it, reinterpret it, or orient ourselves toward another altogether.

Gender, in this sense, floats over sex like a balloon: tethered, but loosely.

Mapping opposite qualities onto man and woman goes back eons: Adam and Eve; yin and yang; mother earth and father sky. Their durability has lent gender distinctions an aura of inevitability and profundity, encouraging the sense that human nature is fundamentally gendered.

But this isn’t just a matter of cultural inheritance. Our attraction to such models reflects something deeper about how the human mind works.

As humans, we’re drawn to models that put people into categories: the simpler, the better.

We love compression models. Human cognition is optimized for speed and efficiency, not accuracy. Rather than evaluate each situation or person on the full set of available facts, we rely on cognitive shortcuts: rules of thumb that allow us to assess quickly and move on.

These shortcuts are all around us. Astrology, which is enjoying a resurgence, offers a colorful example. Faced with a difficult decision — take the job, start the business — you could carefully weigh every last variable. Or you could consult your horoscope.

Religion works similarly, supplying a preloaded decision tree. You obey your parents not because they are right in every instance, but because a commandment establishes the hierarchy. You oppose gay marriage not because you’ve examined the issue afresh, but because a religious authority instructed you to. There is deep comfort in outsourcing judgment, especially to models that promise clarity by dividing a complicated and fractious world into right and wrong, good and bad.

Other compression models operate without our knowing it. Decades of research on implicit bias show that we are primed to explain human behavior through categories like race. The actual causes of our decisions frequently remain opaque to us; the brain supplies post-hoc justifications that create the illusion of deliberate choice.

This has been the consistent finding of split-brain research, in which a command to do something (like laugh, or draw a banana) is given to just one side of the brain. The person complies, laughing or drawing a banana, and the brain’s other side is asked why they did it. Rather than answer “I don’t know” it creates an entirely fictitious reason for doing what the person did, believing it to be true: I laughed because you guys are so funny! Rather than admit we lack access to the reasons for our behavior, our brain convinces us we’re fully aware and in control.

We also cling to compression models long after their flaws are apparent. Across disciplines, this truth emerges. Psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky famously demonstrated that humans are not rational actors, but systematic users of biased heuristics. Cognitive neuroscience arrived at a parallel conclusion. Karl Friston and Andy Clark have shown that the brain functions as a prediction engine, seeking to minimize surprise by developing early, coarse-grained models that harden in place.

Most relevant to this essay is work in developmental psychology on essentialism bias. Susan A. Gelman has shown that humans instinctively treat certain categories as reflecting deep, underlying essences, and that we do not treat all categories equally. When explaining a person’s behavior, we privilege categories like gender and race over innumerable alternatives: profession, education, birth cohort, or personal history.

Jean-Paul Sartre once described a woman who claimed her dislike of Jewish people stemmed from a bad experience with Jewish furriers. Why was the lesson to distrust Jews, Sartre asked, rather than furriers? Gelman’s research helps explain why certain categories serve as explanatory magnets.

It also helps explain why Sartre — and the rest of us — often default to gender when referring to an unnamed individual. Rather than profession, nationality, age, or simply the neutral label “person,” we most readily identify people by gender. That’s the descriptor we consider most illuminating. In Sartre’s anecdote, it was specifically a “woman” who distrusted Jews.

Developmental research shows that this tendency arises early. As The Social Brain: A Developmental Perspective puts it:

A number of laboratories have found that for the category of gender, essentialism emerges early and in robust fashion across a range of societies, whereas for other categories, including race, ethnicity, nationality, socioeconomic status, or team membership, essentialism arises inconsistently, and often only at a later age if at all. It is notable that gender and race are treated differently from one another, given that both have visible correlates that children detect from an early age.

Essentialist stereotypes are easily acquired, the research indicates. But as Kahneman, Clark, and others have shown, once in place, they are dislodged only with great difficulty.

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It’s no surprise then, that gender, sitting at the top of our explanatory hierarchy, has accumulated more and more explanatory freight over time.

But you might be surprised by how, at various points in history, the strong gale of gender stereotyping has changed direction.

Take friendship. Aristotle believed that only men were capable of it. Women lacked the necessary rationality and individual agency to form friendships. This stereotype lived on through the Renaissance, when Michel de Montaigne wrote his famous essay “On Friendship.” Montaigne wanted his readers to know that none of the essay’s beautiful passages applied to women, because they were incapable of “this sacred bond.” It wasn’t until the 19th century that the stereotype began to reverse. Today, women are widely supposed to be better at friendship, based in turn on the stereotype that they are more socially and emotionally attuned (the reverse of what Aristotle and Montaigne believed). Men — heterosexual men, is the unstated qualifier — are thought to be relationally challenged and dependent on women (wives, girlfriends) for emotional connection. Aristotle and Montaigne would find our modern thinking incoherent.1

Or, take morality. Women used to be considered fundamentally immoral. Plato described earth as a moral proving ground for men and those who failed life’s morality test were punished by being sent back to earth as women. Women, under this view, were morally defective men. Today, women are more often cast as the moral spine of society — more ethical, more responsible, and more self-regulating than men.2

Relatedly: sexual urges. In Europe, the belief that women were more lustful and unfaithful than men persisted for centuries. Witchcraft manuals like Malleus Maleficarum claimed that women were more sexually driven: “All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable.” Society wrung its hands over the problem of women’s insatiable lust. Yet by the Victorian era, elite European societies increasingly believed the opposite. Women were accepted (and thus expected) to be naturally uninterested in sex. Men, by contrast, needed to “sow their wild oats.” Today, women are often considered more naturally monogamous, while men are excused as naturally wayward — a near inversion of the medieval view.

How about fashion? In early modern Europe — especially France — elite male fashion was far more elaborate than female fashion. That flipped in the late 18th and early 19th century in what historians call the “Great Male Renunciation,”3 after which ornament, color, and display were deemed to be frivolous and became coded as feminine, while sober apparel was coded masculine.

It’s thought today that wanting to wear a dress or skirt is an inherently feminine impulse, but there’s no logic to this. Pants are a recent convention. From the classical Greek and Roman perspective, pants were worn by tribal peoples (both men and women, particularly on horseback) and thus deemed barbaric. In western culture, pants as exclusively masculine attire didn’t harden until the late 18th and early 19th century.

It’s almost as though any human quality must be set up as a diametric and then divided by gender. If men are strong, then women must be weak. If women are nurturing, then men must be neglecting. If men are ambitious, then women must be unassuming. If men desire power, then women must desire subordination. The way the qualities are divided isn’t as important; the vital thing is that a divide is made.

Oddly, the two-party political system in the US works the same way. Once a cause is linked to a party, the anti-cause is linked to the other. This is such a well-grooved track that people worry that Republicans’ pro-natalism will produce anti-family positions on the left. We see how irrational this is, yet politicians and the politically-active fall in line. Habitual polarization is bad enough in politics; when used to define the nature and limits of individual lives, it’s destructive.

Anthropologists have documented this dynamic in other cultural contexts as well. In the 1930s, Gregory Bateson described how groups come to define themselves through opposition, amplifying differences that began as minor or contingent. Once contrast becomes identity, behavior follows. If a society organizes itself by gender, the performance of aggression by men may be countered with a performance of meekness by women — not because either is essential, but because each becomes defined against the other. Over time, the contrast hardens.

These examples offer a clear caution: don’t mistake society’s gender mappings for inherent truth. They are contingent constructions.

Once you begin to appreciate the inconstancy of gender conventions, this next assertion should not be surprising: There have always been people who did not conform to gendered expectations — and societies have always had to figure out what to do with them.

What’s interesting is how nonconformity has been handled at a structural level.

Three strategies recur: expanding the gender categories, moralizing deviation, and pathologizing difference. Together, they illuminate today’s gender wars, ranging from how families should be constituted and distribute labor, what forms of gender discrimination are acceptable, what kinds of relationships should be legally recognized, what we should tell our children about gender, and more.

Expanding the gender categories

A popular talking point is that there are only two genders, and that claims to the contrary represent a radical, hyper-modern break from tradition. That’s wrong. Across cultures and centuries, humans have repeatedly created additional gender categories for people who did not fit the man-woman binary.

In traditional Hawaiian and wider Polynesian societies, the māhū were people typically assigned male at birth who occupied a distinct social category associated with women’s roles, labor, and forms of social life. They were not simply treated as women, nor as men, but as something else — a recognized category with hybrid characteristics. What’s striking is how widespread this category was across Polynesian cultures.

Rather than arguing over whether a male-assigned person “really” counted as a man or a woman, these societies abandoned the strict binary itself. The binary remained useful, but it was not treated as exhaustive.

European observers who encountered the māhū in the late 18th century reacted with fascination and revulsion. A British naval officer writing of Tahiti noted:

They have a set of men called māhū. These men are in some respects like the eunuchs of India but they are not castrated. They never cohabit with women but live as they do. They pick their beards out and dress as women, dance and sing with them and are as effeminate in their voice. They are generally excellent hands at making and painting of cloth, making mats and every other woman’s employment.

Similar solutions appeared elsewhere: the hijras of South Asia, the Navajo nádleehi, and the Lakota winkte. In each case, societies explicitly made room for exceptions to the man-woman binary.

For these groups, the two-gender model functioned as a tool, not a dictate.

Moralizing deviation

Christian Europe took a different approach to gender nonconformity. Conformance with gender expectations was treated as a moral and religious matter. To enforce the moral and religious authority of Christian institutions, nonconformance would not be tolerated.

There were various tools for enforcing the two-gender binary and its dictates. Consider witchhunts. Witches were usually unmarried women who were economically independent, intellectually curious, and sexually irregular. They failed to conform with gender rules, and their failure to conform was the very evidence that condemned them.

Thus, unlike the cultures above, which defended the essential validity of gender categories by allowing them to bend and expand, European Christian societies demanded that people adhere to the man-woman model — or else.

Or so it appears. But look closer and you’ll see that Christian Europe also made room for exceptions. Not in terms of labeling, but by authorizing a non-conforming life path.

If a woman remained unmarried and childfree in medieval Europe, she was seen as socially suspect and morally unstable, a potential witch even… unless she married Christ. In that case, her childfree status became a sign of religious devotion.

Convents permitted women to be childfree without censure. They could also pursue education, create art, take leadership roles in their community, and engage in countless other activities that were discouraged or forbidden for secular women.

For men, religious orders offered an alternative to the masculine script of the era. Men were expected to marry, reproduce legitimately, defend land and honor through violence, and perform social obligation. For some men — especially elite younger sons — this included military service in Europe’s frequent wars. A man who had a nonviolent nature, did not desire marriage, or simply wanted a quiet life outside society, found refuge in a monastery.

Convent life was not paradise. But as paradoxically as this seems to us today, for many women and men, a convent afforded a measure of freedom and acceptance. They offered a gendered exit ramp.

This is not just a modern gloss on history; people actually made this calculus. Take Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

Born illegitimate to an indigenous woman and a European soldier in Mexico, then the colony of New Spain, she possessed a Leonardo-like hunger to master the world through understanding.

She knew that to live how she wanted, she’d need to game the rules. As a child, she even proposed dressing as a boy to attend university. Her mother laughed. But she honed her strategy. She saw that to pursue a life of study and creativity — free from the interruptions of family obligation — she must become a nun.

Inés de la Cruz is an extraordinary case. As a nun, she wrote poetry and plays that her supporters published across the ocean in Spain to great acclaim. Like Sappho before her, she became known as the “Tenth Muse.” Most of us are not an Inés de la Cruz, but it would be wrong to conclude that she was wholly unique. Other nuns were reading, writing, composing, and painting but in most cases their pursuits — like they themselves — remained cloistered behind walls.

Of course, religious orders weren’t free-for-alls. Nuns and monks traded the secular gender conventions for a different set of conventions. But something was gained. Taking orders unlocked a realm beyond the prevailing dictates of man and woman. They offered socially acceptable channels for gender nonconformity: a kind of life-path exemption.

Pathologizing difference

Though western societies gradually broke free from the church’s authority, they were still conditioned by its dictates. The gender binary, on which every aspect of society had been built, was not to be discarded. For medical, legal, and social authorities, its validity was taken for granted. But lacking the church’s prerogatives of faith, they needed a new rationale to defend traditional gender categories.

A solution emerged: treat deviations as defects of the individual. Pathologize them. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, females who did not desire motherhood were diagnosed as disordered. Males who desired men were classified as diseased. Female aggression was medicalized as hysteria.

Pathology replaced sin as the regulatory model, offering a secular mechanism for enforcing the same boundaries.

The new system works on multiple levels. First and most effectively, disease carries stigma. To avoid the shame of disease, you mask your “symptoms.” Men cross-dress in private. Women stifle anger under forced smiles. Before any explicit intervention, people fall in line through self-regulation.

Next, those who don’t suppress their difference are officially marginalized. Diagnoses are made, justifying all sorts of corrective measures: institutionalization, sterilization, forced therapies. The population is cut in two again: there’s the healthy, conforming majority, and the unhealthy, deviant margin.

Because no third category is permitted, ambiguity cannot be tolerated. The binary is enforced at our earliest moments, as when “intersex individuals are surgically transformed as infants to ‘fit’ into a single gender category.”

Though it claims to be based in science, the pathologizing strategy bypasses the threshold question of whether the binary model is valid. The engine is circular. If you don’t fit your conventional gender category, then by definition, you’re disordered. And if the people who don’t conform are all disordered, then conformance must be natural and right.

Under this third path, when exceptions to the binary model emerge, it’s not evidence that the model is flawed. It’s evidence that the individual is flawed. Though different in specifics from the moralizing path, it serves the same function: preserving the integrity of the two-gender model.

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My goal so far has been persuading you that gender nonconformity has long existed, and that’s because gender has long been used to compress human variation into overloaded social categories. Yet in today’s iteration of this ongoing tug-of-war, one aspect is unprecedented.

Society today is the collision of the three paths

Though methods for dealing with gender deviation have differed, past societies have more or less agreed within themselves on the method to use. Individual dissent must have been present, but there was broad agreement on the norms. This meant society didn’t get tripped up over questions of gender. It had a method for summarily dealing with them.

That’s not true of society today. In the present-day US, all three strategies co-exist, and they collide in law, society, and politics.

Debates over whether someone born as a “woman” can truly be a “man,” whether homosexual relationships should be ratified by the state, whether the unapologetic lifestyle of a gender nonconforming person is a danger to children, and so many others, can never be resolved so long as the debaters hold different views on what nonconformance means — whether it’s a natural and inevitable deviation from categories that are merely descriptive, whether it’s a sign of failure against a static moral code, or whether it’s a mark of individual disorder.

If you detach yourself from your instinctive path — expanding, moralizing, or pathologizing — and simply witness how these paths inevitably collide, you’ll be rightly pessimistic that our present debates are resolvable. So long as gender remains society’s central organizing category, and so long as we disagree over what nonconformity signifies and how it should be accommodated or dealt with, these debates will continue to intensify.

Final thoughts — for now

Nonconforming people have always existed. What has changed is how societies respond to this fact, and how much explanatory weight we ask gender to carry.

Today, we are trying to patch a model that was never equipped to explain who we are, why we do the things we do, and how we should be. We argue endlessly over the significance of gender and where to draw gender boundaries. It’s dialectical quicksand. The more we organize our thinking around gender, the more stuck we become.

My aim is to persuade you that our reliance on gender as an explanatory framework is the flaw upstream of the downstream debates.

At this point, a routine counterargument suggests itself.

Maybe the problem isn’t the use of gender itself; maybe the problem is modernity. We’ve overcomplicated these questions. If gender no longer works today as an organizing principle, perhaps it made more sense once — before modern excess, before abstraction, before everything became so overwrought.

That objection has intuitive appeal, and it’s the next thing that needs to be examined.

Looking further down the road, once that question is settled, a harder one follows: if gender was never the stable foundation we imagine, what kind of model would serve us better?

The next essay in this series examines whether gender divisions worked better in the past — and how nostalgia veils us from reality:

Before you go: If you liked what you read, please take a second to show it! Click like, comment, restack it (with a note!)—that breaks through the algorithm and helps people find my writing.

If you’ve read Passing from words to matter or The return of the Why mode of thinking, you’ll see echoes.

There was a moment, after writing this third essay, when I realized I was back in the same terrain as the first two. Is that boring? I wondered. Am I the essayist equivalent of a doddering fool, repeating myself? I’m publishing it anyway. I keep returning to the well—because each time I return, the water yields a new taste.

And for those craving a change: I’m working on something as far from these themes as I could imagine. Gender philosophy. (Groan, I know.) Stay tuned...

I heard a song recently. The melody is beautiful; the words seized me. It’s called “Disappearing.”

I’m disappearing again …

The clouds are collecting and moving back in

And I’m disappearing again

I began an essay last year that I never finished. Titled “A House with Many Rooms,” it was about my sense that I contain different personas. Not just different parts of my personality; but fully separate identities.

After diagnosis, I assumed that this long-held sense of containing different identities was connected to the concept of autistic masking. Masking is the idea that autistic people override their natural way of being to fit societal expectations and reduce the friction of interaction. But I found the concept didn’t map perfectly to my disparate identities. The notion of a mask implies falseness, while my various selves have felt both false and real at once. Neither fully one nor the other.

Depending on when and where you encountered me, you might have thought me charismatic, or cold and flat. Silly and loose; a performer of imitations and sayer of nonsense words. Or uncomfortable with spontaneous expression. I’ve been known to dance at a club until 5:30 a.m. and to feign sickness to avoid a close friend’s party. I’ve worn clothes designed to attract notice, and clothes designed to camouflage. These are not daily changes; they come in seasons. I’m a certain person for months, even years, and then I’m not.

Unsurprisingly, I’ve had a hard time maintaining relationships. I’ll meet someone and feel pulled to them. The way they are brings out a version of me that feels natural or enticing. But then the grid snaps and what felt natural suddenly feels foreign. The terms of the friendship no longer work for me, and I breach them. For a while, the loss of the friendship feels restorative, like being freed. At some point, though, I change again into a person who craves togetherness — and find I’m alone.

I’ve written before about cycling through special interests, but I see now there’s more to it. Just as I shift from one hobby to another, I also rotate through ways of being, shifting in how I relate to people. If I kept digging, I’d probably find other shifts too.

This past fall, when I lost the urge to write in favor of making things with my hands, I lost a lot of adjacent urges too. I stopped reading nonfiction, essays, and even text-based social media. No more browsing Substack Notes; I rarely opened the app, whereas before I opened it multiple times a day. Instead I scrolled makers’ accounts on Instagram.

One afternoon I spent hours laying a miniature brick floor: cutting rectangles from cork sheets, dabbing them with acrylic paint, gluing them down in offset rows, and grouting the seams with modeling paste. The hours passed like minutes. I felt a deep, wordless pleasure.

During this period I’d get comment pings on things I’d written here, and I’d ignore them. And I don’t know how to explain the sensation I felt other than to say: those pings were not for me.

Like a note from an old violin

Tapering off and reaching the end

They weren’t for me because I wasn’t the person who wrote the essays. This conviction took firm hold after a new reader discovered my Substack and left many generous comments. She said she’d just found my writing and was devouring it. The author of those essays would have been tripping over herself to engage. But she was off somewhere, unreachable.

Until suddenly, she reappeared. I can pinpoint the day. Over coffee, I opened The New Yorker app for the first time in ages, looking for an essay to read.

That’s how I know: seeing what I do during free moments tells which me I am. The shift happens without intention, and I only noticed it because I was surprised. I even tested myself — looked through some textile projects I’d been planning. Not even a spark of attraction. My mind turned away.

Drifting away like a leaf in the wind

And I’m disappearing again

All of the things that had unwound in the fall — the loss of the writing itch, the cessation of reading, the abandonment of Substack Notes and subscriptions — rewound themselves. I’m reading biography and philosophy and ideas for essays are appearing once more.

And there was old business to attend to. I responded to that generous commenter, because I was the author of the essays once more.

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Logically, of course, there’s only been one person here all along. I can narrate the changes from summer to fall to winter; a throughline of experience persists.

It seems my mind orients around one center of gravity at a time, and when that center shifts, my self — the I who speaks – reorganizes with it.

And yet. I have the sense, still, that the I who’s talking to you now is not the one from December.

The “house with many rooms” metaphor can go further: a House with Many Wings. One day I’m in one part of the house, and then I look around and the setting has changed. A familiar place, but disconnected. There’s no hallway that connects the wings, no path I can take to get back. It’s like a video game and I’m a sim who’s been picked up and dropped somewhere. In the new space I feel both at home, and yet cornered.

For now I’m back in the Wing of Words. The furnishings feel stiff but they’ll soften with use. The Wing of Making is shut up for the season. The Wing of the Social Butterfly has been closed so long, I’m not sure if it’ll ever reopen.

Maybe I’ll come back around …

Maybe I’ll be here tomorrow

…

In this House of Many Wings there’s one thing I haven’t figured out. When I’m moved to a new wing, who issued the order?

This essay rounds out a loose trilogy, alongside Passing from words to matter and The return of the Why mode of thinking. If it resonated, I’d love to hear what shape your own “house” takes — or how you’ve experienced your creative shifts.

Stay curious,

Laura

Is it back?

It’s the morning after a sleepless night in Miami in a hotel room with a broken air conditioner. I’m there to celebrate a friend’s milestone birthday, and now everyone is traveling back. Over a luxuriously solitary breakfast, I notice that I want to write.

It’s not a desire to write per se. It’s that small, persistent ideas keep pushing into my awareness, elbowing for attention. Questions and possible answers. I open a Google Doc on my phone to channel some of the flurry. What I want is to record what I’m puzzling in my mind.

Like, this question: Why do I like novels that cultivate ambiguity? I finished the first half of How to Be Both by Ali Smith, a diptych novel that surfaces countless questions about the characters, hints at different answers, then leaves them unresolved. Forever. Since unlike in the natural world, where things don’t end but only change, a definitive curtain closes at the end of a novel, leaving an infinitude of uncertainty.

A theory: Perhaps because I’m uncomfortable with uncertainty in real life, the forced ambiguity of a novel is thrilling. It’s a relinquishment of control, a safe kind of danger. Like skydiving — except the diver remains suspended over the patchwork earth, anticipating the queasy thrill of freefall that never comes. In a novel like How to Be Both, mysteries surface, possible explanations shimmer, and I brace for the warming flush of resolution that spreads like the first sips of liquor — but it never comes. I’m left in a half-space, suspended, expectant. I can return to that state for days, even months after reading the final page — take the feeling out of the drawer and wear it again, just by remembering the characters and their questions. The sensuality of an ambiguous novel lingers. A novel that ties up its loose ends rarely has such an afterlife.

I tapped these ideas into my phone over breakfast.

Late that night, after hours of flight delays, I arrived home. I brought my bags up, changed into PJs, and got into bed. Our house, as I always notice after being away, smells bad. Like a linen closet sealed for years. That simile is the best I can do, and it’s imperfect. I can also simply say it smells musty, but that’s too blunt. It wants specificity.1

So, a question: Why is it so hard to describe a smell? Beyond broad metaphors that tip easily into cliche — a smell is metallic, or floral, or oniony, or sulphurous — why aren’t there better tools?

A theory: In the end all description is metaphor, and describing smells is harder than describing, say, visuals because we have fewer comparators. We can say that a person is shaped like a pear and a pear is shaped like a bell and a bell is shaped like a snowdrop. Or all of that in reverse or in combination, as when Steinbeck writes:

These too are of a burning color — not orange, not gold, but if pure gold were liquid and could raise a cream, that golden cream might be like the color of the poppies.

The tools for visual description feel more refined because there are simply more of them, even though there is still no word denoting the fundamental pear-ness of a shape, or the essential golden creaminess of a color.

But wait: a counter-theory. I can say that a pear is like a bell, but I can also say that a pear has a smaller section comprising a semicircle that grades into a larger semicircle. And, there are certain colors that exist as atomic units of description. Blue and orange aren’t just metaphors (though they can be used that way); they are metaphysical concepts in themselves. Yet we don’t have words for the indivisible building blocks of olfactory experience that I can use to describe my house smell. Do we? So the inadequacy of smell descriptions compared to visual descriptions isn’t just one of degree, but of kind, too.

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Last year when I was writing, this is how my mind used to work all the time. An observation cracks open a question, which invites a theory, which provokes a counterpoint. This kind of recursive noticing and theorizing is the stuff of my writing.

And then when September came around: silence. At most, there were only fleeting theories that I had no compulsion to record. The looping questions and answers that played through my mind yesterday marked the return of a prior way of being. Something fundamental has changed.

I consider how I’ve been occupying myself in recent months when I am free to choose: I’ve been working with physical materials, figuring out technique, using my hands and body, turning one thing into another thing.

The change I noticed yesterday — one that came on all of a sudden — seems to be a mode shift. When I stopped writing, it’s not that I stopped creative problem-solving. It’s that the problems changed. They became ones that couldn’t be worked out through language but only through physical action, by bringing about state changes in the material world around me. The problems were how to create something useful or visually pleasing or having certain qualities from material that — as yet — didn’t have those qualities.

Which prompts another question: Why did the problems change back again?

Maybe I’ve gotten my fill of material problems. Their solutions are definitive. Either the fabric creates a three-dimensional shape when sewn a certain way, or it doesn’t. Either the object balances upright, or it doesn’t. Either certain colors and patterns ineffably “work” when thrown together — a question of personal taste, to be sure, but one that is knowable — or they don’t.

By contrast, problems that are worked out through language alone are more like the ambiguity of a novel. They linger and we can take them back out and work them again. We’ll never know for sure and maybe that’s the thing that draws us in sometimes and sometimes repels us.

Another way to explain the change: I’ve gone from How? back to Why?

How is the space of method, technique, material, action. How is solved by doing.

Why is the space of theory, metaphor, pattern. Why is solved by conceiving.

So, a final theory: Maybe the Why and the How can be a framework for understanding how our minds are oriented. Whether as a matter of tendency (philosophical v. mechanistic minds) or of a transient mood or phase.

Perhaps we misdiagnose periods of silence as creative depletion, when really they’re mode saturation.

Maybe we need to be both, at different times. The person who makes the thing, and the person who asks why we’ve made it.

Stay curious,

Laura

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Looking for more to read? Check out these past posts:

The essay is titled, “Nonfiction Isn’t False, but Who Says It’s True?” If you check it out, I’d love to hear what you think.

I cold-pitched the idea on July 24, when I was in the thick of a writing compulsion that started in March and left in September without so much as a by-your-leave.

The editing and publication timeline is such that the seed I planted in July is only being harvested now. I enjoyed the process of working with the editor over the past month to find and hone the truest kernels of the essay. And I’d often think that the me of this summer would have found that process extraordinarily motivational. I would’ve leveraged my “forthcoming Electric Literature publication” in other pitches to editors. But that was the old me, not the current me, and I haven’t made any pitches since the summer.

What happened? Well, my mode of expression changed, from words to materials.

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Here are the facts: the continual ideas and insights that used to interrupt my every waking moment vanished. The flowing spigot went bone dry. At the same time, I ended a voracious reading spell that saw me devouring out-of-print works of criticism, multiple biographies of the same person, essay collections, philosophy. It wasn’t a conscious choice to stop. My desire just evaporated.

In its place: I started handsewing. First, squares for a simple quilt. Then, tiny stuffed animals for my kids. Next cardboard became my medium, constructing critter houses. Which needed furnishing, so I got sticks of bass wood and balsa, wood glue and mitre shears. I hauled my old fabric stash out of the attic (a relic of 2021’s apparel-making obsession) to make tiny pillows and upholstered furniture. I ordered new fabric in micro prints, the right scale for the miniature world I was creating.

I talked about it with my kids. My daughter put in an order for a lamb queen with a blue cape, silver crown, and red-and-blue dress, which I’m working on for her birthday later this month. With the twins last night, I constructed cardboard sailboats for their tiny critters and they cradled their sailboats while we read Ahoy! at bedtime.

Some things I make are objectively cool looking, but most of it’s what you’d euphemistically call “naive.” Unlovable except to its maker — and her kids. The little critters I gave them are nothing special, but they adore them. Same with the messy cardboard structures I’ve made.

The other day I discussed all this with my daughter. I said: Remember how before I was always reading, and I was working on that book? Now, instead, I’m crafting. My interests change. I don’t really have a choice. There will come a day where my interests change again. But for now, this is what I’m interested in.

It was a chance to tell her something real about me, the me who is not just her mom. She took that in, then said: I won’t let your interest change! I’ll make you do projects forever!

The version of me that makes tiny chairs is far more exciting to my kids than the one that reads theories of the novel.

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As an observer to myself, what I see is this: most of the year I was driven toward intellectual pursuits. Ideas and concepts expressed through a single medium: words. Reading and writing, thinking and expressing, all in words.

Word overload, perhaps.

It’s like I’m enacting a personal version of Kant’s dialectics, where yesterday’s thesis of verbal reflectivity was pushed out by today’s antithesis of nonverbal doing.

It’s as if I became burned out on language itself and reached for its opposite.

Crafting. Materiality. Mind, hands, body, matter combine to create something that wasn’t there before. Thinking without words. The use of tacit knowledge that exists somewhere inside (where?) to bring a new physical object into being.

Anthropologist Tim Ingold writes in The Textility of Making that material creation is “an ongoing, generative movement that is at once itinerant, improvisatory and rhythmic.”

He continues:

It is about becoming rather than being. You cannot be a mountain, or a buzzard soaring in the sky, or a tree in the forest. But you can become one, by aligning your own movements and gestures with those of the thing you wish to draw.

In Ways of the Hand, pianist David Sudnow writes about learning jazz improvisation. The keyboard is a terrain, a landscape, and the pianist has trekked it over and over. He’s come to know countless paths through the landscape, all the ways to get from one place-note to another place-note. Making music is a matter of traversing physical locations by means of hands and arms.

So already, the expert pianist is a bodily, physical thinker. And on top of that, Sudnow explains — in words — that learning jazz improvisation isn’t something that can be taught in words. Much to his frustration, while trying to learn improv from his teacher:

I would spot him going over what I saw was a course. He would go many places where the courseness in this sense could not be detected, involving intricacies that seemed puzzling, but I figured they were constituted as all the rest, and within his play many Iittle spates of orderly passage couId nonetheless be spotted. I would ask ‘what was that?’ He would say ‘what was what?’ … I would say, ‘that little thing you just did on the G minor chord,’ and he would have a hard time finding what he had ‘just done.’ He would at times frankly say, ‘I’m not following rules so I don’t really know what I just did’ (and on other occasions admit, ‘I just improvise, I really cannot tell you how, you have to have a feel for it’).

You have to have a feel for it. That applies to so much we do with our hands, including sewing. A feel of bunchiness in the hand; a sense of place in a sea of stitches. We know what to do based on the imperceptible communion of our senses (touch, sight, proprioception) and physical material.

All happening at the level of nonverbal thought. Perhaps with no thought at all. You might call it “processing,” but that makes us sound like computers. I’m tired of the computing analogy. When you’re sewing a hem, you’re not accomplishing it through programmatic, rote thinking. I am sewing a hem. A hem is a bound edge of a garment. A hem requires that the fabric be folded in on itself and stitched fast. Something else entirely is happening, and not strictly in the mind.

As my old friend Wittgenstein said – in a different context I’ll shamelessly appropriate – “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Some things cannot be expressed in words.

I’ve tried a few times to merge this new state of existence with my established writing practice here. I started drafting two earlier pieces on similar themes, and true to my old habits, read some books in the same neighborhood: as well as the Sudnow book mentioned above, there’s The Craftsman, by Richard Sennett. Both excellent, both remain unfinished.

My old intellectual curiosity still smolders. Why am I now drawn to handcrafting? What happens in our minds when we use our hands? How is it that I’m figuring things out in my brain without verbal thought? What kind of thinking is that, and how does it work? But I’m no longer able to see these threads through to completed pieces.

And so I didn’t publish anything here in all this time. I’ve been measuring my present efforts against my old standards, the ones that led to fully realized pieces like this one, and my current efforts keep falling short.

Today, on the day of my first “real” publication, I decided to just get something out. Don’t overthink, don’t be too self-critical. Because I do want to keep one foot in the writer’s world; I’ll even settle for a mere toe. The writing itch will come back one day, and I don’t want to lose all that I built in the season that’s just ended.

While crafting, I like to put on YouTube videos. Often, they’re long walks through the English countryside (the rainier the day, the better). The sounds of birds, running water, visions of lichen and moss and irregular stone walls. Or, it might be craft technique videos, since learning through seeing is really the only way, aside from trial and error. You can’t learn to sew or expertly use materials from a book.

Recently I stumbled on Jane Lindsey’s channel. She’s a Scottish textile crafter who talks about changing curiosities, creativity, and handcrafting – all things that speak to me right now.

In one video, Jane mentions a concern from a member of her crafting community. Sue’s creative spark had left her; she had made nothing for the whole month of October. Sue was worried the spark would never return. Jane used Sue’s experience to muse about the seasonality of creative inspiration, and the fallow periods that lie between intense phases. I saw parallels to my own changing interests. My intellectual season came and went. Now I’m in a material season, a hands-on season, a season that produces physical artifacts.

Toward the end of the video, Jane offers an analogy. Creative inspiration, she says, is like surfing. Sometimes you’re on the crest of a wave, but a lot of times you’re just paddling, waiting. You can’t control when the wave comes, nor what form it takes. When it does arrive, you have a choice: ride it, or sit it out.

Just as I can’t control the ocean, I’m helpless to control where my interests turn. That’s honest wisdom I’ve earned by age 40. All I can control is whether to seize the wave, or to shun it. To ride it, harness it, or turn my back on it. And so here I am, sewing, gluing, constructing, painting. And curious to see where this wave – and the next, and the next – take me.

If any of this resonates with you, I’d love to hear it.

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Stay curious,

Laura

I don’t normally watch The Late Show, but I caught it one night a few months ago. They had a skit that was a parody TV commercial advertising a new phone, whose sole use was to take videos at concerts.

“We all know the best part of experiencing live music is filming the whole thing on your phone,” the voiceover went.

It cut to a shot from within the audience looking up at the stage. There was a sea of phones held aloft on arms, hundreds of tiny screens taking the same video.

Then came the kicker: “And when the concert’s over, just dump it in the trash! Let’s face it — you were never going to watch it anyway.”

It’s funny because it’s true. I used to see a lot of live music. Once, my phone storage ran out and a bunch of concert videos were the culprits. Videos I’d filmed and, of course, never watched again. Who wants to hear tinny phone-recorded music? During those concerts, I had to resist the urge to whip out my phone when the band performed my favorite songs, and I didn’t always succeed. There’s a strange fear of loss in the moment, as you see screens out around you. Wait, I don’t want to lose this moment forever!

And so you record, with a screen between you and the world.

We laugh at the absurdity of filming concerts we’ll never watch. Yet so many of us do it. Where does this urge come from? I found myself thinking about Vivian Maier, a woman who spent her life taking photographs. Like the phone you dump in the trash after the concert, she took more than one thousand rolls of film that she never developed. The film stayed spooled in its canisters, shielded from the light.

Vivian Maier, who was born in 1926 in New York City, earned a living as a nanny. She took photographs in her spare time, or on outings with the kids in her care. She almost never showed them to anyone. She was private, a loner, and had no intimates.

It’s only chance that we know about her. In old age she kept her photos, negatives, and undeveloped rolls in a storage unit. She missed payments and in 2007, the unit’s contents were seized and auctioned, dispersed among several buyers. Gradually, those buyers realized they had stumbled on something significant, and word spread online. Since then, over 150,000 photographs have been identified, spanning 1949 to the mid-1980s.

People who lived near the elderly Maier and were interviewed after she died had no sense of her extraordinary existence. In old age, she would sit on a park bench near her apartment for hours on end. “We knew her as a homeless woman,” one neighbor said, unaware that Maier had an apartment nearby, “who seemed, in many ways, neglected by the world.” Another neighbor remarked: “I was struck that she was sitting in a very public place, yet didn’t wish to talk to people.”

Yet Maier’s photographs reveal an intimacy with her subjects that verged on intrusive. She captured people sleeping on park benches. She photographed their trash. Earlier, when she spent time in France, her intrepid photography roused suspicion. “Because of her constant photographing,” biographer Pamela Bannos writes in Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife, “some people thought that she was a spy. A policeman once questioned Maier extensively about her activity.”

Reconstructing Maier’s French itinerary from her photographs and other evidence, Bannos found that she maintained an exacting pace, stopping only long enough to take photos before trudging on. She experienced her surroundings through the viewfinder.

It was in France that many of Maier’s lifelong themes first emerged: documenting other families’ celebrations and rituals, babies in their mothers’ arms, cemeteries and burials. She was not a landscape or nature photographer. People were her subjects.

This paradox is one reason Maier has captured so much attention. In her personal relations, she was distant and aloof. In her photography, she was up close and probing.

The undeveloped film strikes me as a major clue to all this. One thousand rolls is an extraordinary number. Based on the cameras she used, they contained somewhere between 12,000 and 36,000 images that were captured and never seen again.

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Why do we take photos?

The “very activity of taking pictures is soothing, and assuages general feelings of disorientation,” Susan Sontag wrote in On Photography. The camera offers the photographer a barrier “between themselves and whatever […] they encounter.”

Perhaps Maier was drawn to capture humanity because she was deprived of it early on. Her father abandoned her, and her mother was emotionally unstable and unavailable. She never experienced the warmth that is the high point of family life, and from contemporaneous accounts, she was guarded and reclusive in adulthood. But in her photography, she was drawn ineluctably to people.

In the mid-twentieth century, Maier’s prominent box camera with its thick strap offered both a shield and a key. It set her apart as an observer rather than a participant, and it gave her a kind of access pass to examine people up close. Perhaps she felt more comfortable being around others with a camera, seeing them through a viewfinder.

Which is not to say that her photographs were merely documentary. Critics note her keen eye for detail and her expert deployment of the right technique for the circumstances. There are two main purposes of photography: creative expression, and documentation.

Perhaps these aims are more twined than we think.

The earliest representational depictions (that is, of specific things rather than curlicues and zigzags) were made 40,000 to 45,000 years ago. In Indonesia, the Leang Bulu’ Sipong cave shows creatures hunting with spears and ropes. In Borneo, the Lubang Jeriji Saléh cave features paintings of cattle-like animals.

These cave paintings represent finely-honed techniques and required substantial human collaboration. They’re found in areas without natural light, requiring painters to have used lamps. Pigments were mixed elsewhere and applied using chewed twigs, feathers, and animal hair. Wads of moss served as primitive paint pads for stippling and spreading pigment.

In other words, they went to a lot of trouble to make these paintings. What impelled them to do it? These weren’t isolated efforts. Cave paintings have been found across Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Americas. They survived because they were protected from the elements. There must have been many more that were lost, scoured by wind and time.

For these painters, the cave removed them from direct experience. All that time they spent preparing the materials, scaling the rock walls, and painting by artificial light was time they didn’t spend “living in the moment,” to use an anachronistic phrase. Rather than gaze upon nature, they were holed up inside, recreating it. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

“The impulse to capture — to fix in language or in a photograph — life’s more elusive experiences as well as compulsive, can be transcendent,” writes Jayne Marshall in her quietly experimental memoir, A Line Drawn Or Printed: Six Routes Through Madrid. The urge that Marshall describes in 2025 is the same urge these early humans felt: to reproduce a scene, an experience. It’s an ancient impulse, one that must be etched in our biology.

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A core belief of mine is that we aren’t very different from our predecessors thousands of years ago. The patterns of our behavior today can overlay ancient ones to provide clues to our deepest human design. Under this view, our changing tools — that is, technology — have evolved to let us more fully give way to our underlying compulsions.

Overreliance on our phones fits with this theory. It’s not that we are less motivated today to “live in the moment.” It’s that this concept barely made sense for most of our history. With rare exceptions, there was no alternative to living in the moment, so there was no need to ponder it. The demands of survival consumed much of our mental and physical energy. And the environment and people immediately in front of us provided our entertainment and intellectual stimulation.

Modern technology has turned this upside down. Now, the option to ignore the material world for virtual versions is present at every waking moment.

There’s a thread that extends from those first representational cave paintings to the images we capture but never return to. To me, it’s all evidence of an ingrained instinct to pin down what we see. To make the impermanent, permanent. An instinct that lies beyond the domains of reason and rationality.

When it emerged in our evolutionary past, this instinct didn’t need to be calibrated. There was no risk that it would overtake other aspects of our lives. That has changed, of course. The immense planning needed to represent bulls and hunting scenes in caves has been replaced with the instantaneous ability to capture what we see.

Now, those of us seeded with a greater instinct to document have no external buffer against it. It’s no wonder technology has overtaken our lives. The discourse around our digital overuse condemns modern humans as mindless, superficial, passive, and self-gratifying. Yet I wonder, are we all that different from our ancestors? If those cave painters were born today, would they spend their vacations behind a camera lens, anxious to record all they see?

Maybe it’s not technology, or modern values, that disconnect us from the world of experience. Maybe it’s how we’re built, and our current state is inevitable. We were always going to perfect the technology that allows us to indulge our compulsions without limit.

There’s a concept in ethology called stereotype behavior. These are repetitive behaviors with no obvious goal or function, though they may be relics of normal behavior that became maladaptive in changed settings. It’s like the big cats who pace back and forth in their zoo habitats, their roaming instincts having been diverted into pointless walking.

As Sherry Turkle explores in Alone Together, we can begin to feel overwhelmed and depleted by the lives technology makes possible. “Technology is seductive when what it offers meets our human vulnerabilities,” she writes. Though I would expand that notion not just to cover our vulnerabilities, but our predispositions, too.

If we decide that we don’t want to live with a screen between our eyes and the world, recognizing the underlying urge as ancient might offer both clarity and compassion. We are programmed to preserve what we see. But we weren’t programmed alongside today’s tools.

Maier lived much of her life behind a lens. Some concertgoers live behind their phones. The cave painter worked in semi-darkness. Each, in their own way, made a record of the world while holding that world at a distance. The risk today is that the ability to record is so omnipresent that it subsumes the state of experiencing. There’s no separation between the two. The cave painters saw, and then recorded. Now, we can do both at once.

We can overcome that programming — we do this in other areas — but it takes real effort.

Or, we can decide we don’t want to overcome it. Maier was a compulsive photographer; she experienced the world through a viewfinder. Who’s to say that was a better or worse way of being than any other? So long as we’re not harming anyone, the question isn’t what society approves. It’s what kind of life we want — and whether our impulses bring us nearer to living it.

Looking around, it’s clear that the urge to document varies from person to person. What’s your relationship with photography — do you feel compelled to capture everything, or are you unfettered by such urges? For me, the urge comes and goes according to an unknown rhythm. I’m curious to hear your experience.

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Stay curious,

Laura

A decade ago, I was walking near Union Station in Washington, DC with a friend and we passed a bronze statue of a woman holding a torch, looking determinedly ahead. Her circular plinth was inscribed: To the more than one hundred million victims of communism and to those who love liberty.

“That’s strange,” I said. “An economic philosophy didn’t kill those people. Totalitarian regimes did.” C’est moi, ever the literalist.

My friend turned on me swiftly. “Yes, it did. Communism is evil.” We argued: was the problem communism itself, or the way power had been abused under its banner? I didn’t think much about communism or capitalism then — I was just that boorish type (great at parties) who demands precision, and my only objection was to the plinth’s sloppy phrasing.

What I see now, with the benefit of an emerging interest in philosophy, is that most of us have been misled about Marx and communism. When Marx was writing in the mid-19th century, he was reacting to what he saw as the evils of another economic philosophy: capitalism. And if you read him closely, the problems he identified in capital-based economies echo our modern complaints with surprising force.

Case in point: The recent viral post “The death of the corporate job,” which argues that much of modern white-collar work is meaningless performance — meetings about meetings, strategies for strategies, and a whole “Great Pretending” in which no one believes in their role but everyone keeps playing it. The author, Alex, contrasts this emptiness with a growing trend of workers using corporate jobs as financial scaffolding while pursuing side projects that feel like real work.

The frustrations Alex describes aren’t new. Marx was describing them in the 1800s. His writings link capitalism directly to this kind of hollowness that Alex depicts. Which suggests it’s worth taking a second look at Marx, and what he diagnosed as the root of the frustrations that we still feel today.

In his essay, Alex shares a friend’s account of his typical day at a London bank:

He arrives at 8am, leaves at 8pm, and when I asked what he actually did in those twelve hours, he couldn’t point to a single tangible thing.

Instead, the work day is a cascade of intangibles. After endless meetings and plans, Alex writes: “Months later, something might happen. Usually, it's a minor adjustment that could have been made in an afternoon by anyone with common sense.”

Everyone knows much of corporate work is theater, he says. And the pandemic could’ve been a turning point for reinventing how we approach work, but we let that opportunity slip by. Instead, we’re back in offices, pretending again. This time, though, the pretense feels different: more conscious, more exhausting.

Alex’s complaints resonate with Marx’s writings on alienation, which Marx says is the condition of labor under capitalism. That alienation is the result of four conditions: separation from the product of one’s labor; from the act of production itself; from other people, who are treated as means to an end; and from our own human nature, which includes the drive for community and for self-directed creative work.

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Alex’s essay resounds with the existential hollowness of corporate work today. That hollowness is what Marx was diagnosing, too. Capitalism’s treatment of labor as just another input among many dehumanizes us and deprives us of the ability to create holistically, leaving a sense of futility and ineffectualness in its place.

Or as one London banker put it:

“I enable decision-making,” he said, then caught himself. “Whatever that means.”

The hyperspecialization of today’s corporate milieu is the biggest contributor to this disconnection. Each worker has a tiny role and no clear impact — to the extent that another of Alex’s friends couldn’t even describe in practical terms what her job was.

Alex paints a picture of:

back-to-back meetings where nothing gets decided. They’re managing projects that exist primarily to justify the existence of project managers. They’re creating strategies for strategies, optimising things that didn't need optimising, disrupting things that were working fine.

That last notion is central to the scheme: improving things that are working fine. As Marx pointed out, capitalism is excellent at achieving its extremely narrow goal: producing things in greater numbers and more cheaply. Even if we don’t need another version — slimmer, bigger, 2.0, 3.0, ad nauseam — we’re getting it, because in the end, we’ll buy it, using the money we earned as labor.

If a single person builds a bicycle start to finish, it might take twenty hours of labor. But if hundreds of workers each specialize in a single detail — one shapes the gears, another attaches spokes, another threads chains — a factory can turn out hundreds of bicycles in the same time. The product is cheaper and more abundant, and capitalism produces incentives that drive ineluctably toward this kind of specialization.

But for the worker who spends their days stamping the same gear or threading the same chain, what pride or connection is there to the finished bicycle?

Marx believed that work is a human need, a means of self-realization — but not the kind of work where your input is so divorced from any recognizable output that you see yourself in nothing. That severed condition of work (depicted satirically in Severance) is widespread in today’s economy and is, per Marx:

external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself.

On Substack, a growing chorus blames feminism for the alienation that some women feel in the workforce. They say that feminism sold women out when it encouraged us to join the men at their own game. Some women are leaving the workforce and explicitly tying that decision to ideas of femininity and traditional gender roles. (Though the scientist and writer Elena Bridgers, whose article was part of the chorus and whose work I respect, has pointed out that actually, as gatherers women were the main providers of calories in hunter-gatherer societies, disproving the idea that only men were traditional providers.)

But it’s not just women who are dissatisfied with work. Men are, too — as noted by Marx generations ago and given modern framing in Alex’s essay. I think the alienation that Marx described may be at the root of some women’s workplace dissatisfaction, which is being miscast as gender mismatch. In reality, this is a problem that crosses gender lines.

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Companies talk about the “flywheel” strategy of corporate profits, where each step propels the next in self-sustaining momentum.

Capitalism itself is a flywheel. As companies grow more profitable, they buy political influence to keep themselves that way — and to grow richer still. Perhaps the US perfected this with Citizens United, which declared the First Amendment rights of corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money on influencing elections and policy. Corporations have more money than any of us and far narrower goals. So we end up with politicians advancing paradoxical ideas — like for-profit companies being more trustworthy than the government we elect to run prisons — or auctioning off national forests to strip them bare. Meanwhile, the little guy cheers, convinced that private companies’ uncapped profits are a public good.

Alex describes “ecosystems of mutual nonsense,” and he’s right. Nonsense flywheels are everywhere: automated products, automated incentives, automated thinking. Companies build things we don’t need, then spend fortunes marketing them back to us. And those multimillion marketing budgets? They’re not funded by venture capitalists — they’re funded by us, every time we buy what we’ve been persuaded to want.

The problem with capitalism is that there’s never a moment in the flywheel to stop and ask: what is this all for? The supreme principle is to acquire more capital. Today, companies hunt for profit opportunities in gradations of difference — the tiniest marginal improvements to efficiency. More, more, more. “Record profits” are celebrated as triumphs.

But what if profits weren’t the only, or even primary, incentive? What if we rewarded employee wellbeing, positive community and environmental impact, innovations that reduced suffering or improved health not because they could be commodified but simply because they mattered?

We’ve been in capitalism’s grasp so long that we’ve been trained to think these things are impossible. But why should they be?

One reason we don’t entertain other possibilities is that many of us are complicit in preserving the status quo. As Alex writes,

It's like a corporate version of the emperor’s new clothes, except everyone can see the emperor is naked, everyone knows everyone can see it, but we’ve all agreed to keep complimenting his outfit because our mortgages depend on it.

Capitalism is entrenched in every layer of our lives — our society, culture, politics, laws, and most urgently, our livelihoods. That entrenchment creates an enormous sunk cost, and in this case there’s no fallacy in viewing it that way. To upend what sits at the root of everything would mean pain and havoc, not just for those at the top but for everyone.

Think of a ship that capsizes and sinks, littering the ocean floor with synthetic debris that slowly leaches toxins. Over decades, a local ecosystem forms around the wreckage. Ideally, you’d remove the contamination — but to do so would mean destroying the life that has grown to depend on it.

Capitalism’s focus on profits above all is a kind of wreckage: a capsized ship leaking poison. Yet ecosystems of life have built up around it. To clear it away would mean tearing apart what survives there. That’s the dilemma — the wreck is poisoning the water, but it has also become the structure that sustains life as we currently live it.

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There’s a saying that capitalism is the worst economic system, except for all the others. This reflects common acknowledgement that capitalism does have problems, but there’s no better option.

A simultaneous benefit and curse of capitalism is that the profit motive optimizes output. Taken to a point, that’s positive, insofar as it makes consumer goods more accessible to more people. But it quickly leads to a state where we accumulate heaps of stuff. We throw out that stuff when it gets unfashionable, worn, or broken, in the process rendering extinct the repair professionals who once made a living through the satisfaction of making the unworkable work again.

What is the true bargain behind our cheap goods? It’s greater material comfort in exchange for unfulfilling jobs, keeping-up-with-the-Joneses anxiety, consumer mindsets that are nearly impossible to break, and relentless abuse to natural environments. Did we ever agree to that bargain? Do we agree today?

Though if we don’t agree, what’s the replacement? The current system is engraved into everything. And even if it weren’t, the key problem I see is this: there are certain jobs that need to get done but no one would choose them if they had meaningful alternatives.

How could we ever create a fair system that supports people in doing work that’s fulfilling but also ensures that we have waste management workers, meatpacking workers, and other roles that are at the bottom of the preference ladder?

I’m offering more questions than answers. Because I want to emphasize that my point here is not to suggest that replacing our current system would be easy. It wouldn’t be — and in fact, I’m personally quite comfortable under capitalism. There are downsides and tradeoffs to every approach. But it’s clear that the current system is failing us as a society. And I have to believe that there’s a better option out there.

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Capitalism’s durability is complicated. Just as communism became associated with evil in the 20th century such that we have statues memorializing its victims, capitalism became a metonym for freedom, democracy, and liberal values. What a trick, right? I have to wonder whether we’d be so deeply ensnared if Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot hadn’t worked such horrors while railing against capitalism. As the saying goes, my enemy’s enemy is my friend.

There’s no easy solution but first we need to agree there’s a problem. If we can collectively get out from under the haze of profits = good, then maybe we’ll get somewhere. And as we look ahead to the future, we might as well look to the past and see that we’re not the first to think about these issues.

If Marx could see us now, nearly 200 years on, would he recognize our frustrations? Undoubtedly. The better question is: do we recognize that the root of many of our frustrations with work is our capital-based economy?

Whew! I did not intend to write about capitalism (or communism) this week but the spirit — really, Alex’s essay + my philosophical readings — moved me. I’d love to hear your reaction to all this.

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Stay curious,

Laura

Where I’ve been

This August, we went to Iceland for two weeks where my husband is from. It was our first flying trip with all three kids, not to mention our first family trip over an ocean and timezones, and it was… challenging. Next to my anxious nature and desire for control, my husband is a go-with-the-flow type. And even he struggled with all the absences: of daily routines, of our paid caregiver, of carefully placed baby gates that hem in the all-out torrent that are twin toddlers. (It will be a dark day when they realize you need to pull the handle up before you slide it sideways).

On my side of the equation, I knew this trip would be personally difficult. Routines and calm are my moat against disintegration. So, even though I took those weeks off work, I negotiated time on weekday mornings to myself, when my husband and mother-in-law would mind the kids.

Each morning, around 9:30, I waited for the Reykjavik Number 12 bus to take me downtown, where I’d plunk down at a coffee shop chosen precisely because it offered filterkaffi (no espresso for me, takk).

My plan for this solo time was to write.

Specifically, I was focused on external pieces. Having actual bylines will make my nonfiction book proposal more attractive to literary agents. Also, I’m finding essay writing so stimulating that I’d love to make it a real part of my life. “Real” in a subjective sense; for me, this means trying to publish beyond my own newsletter.1

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Getting back to Alys’s question: Initially, I started newsletter-writing to channel the furious storm of research and writing that my autism diagnosis unleashed. It’s been about six months since that diagnosis, and I started this Substack not long after.

It was a productive decision, in a literal sense. Researching with a goal in mind creates a virtuous cycle where instead of idly wandering, you’re advancing with a critical eye.2 And then the satisfaction of having a testament to your work spurs you to create more.

Because I was so fascinated with autism at the start, that was my focal point. Though, knowing I dislike being constrained, I intentionally made my mission more capacious: I would write about the strangeness of the mind, a boundless topic, with a bias toward neurodivergence and neuroscience.

Best laid plans and all. At the beginning I barely sensed the constraint but now I keep bumping against it. During those filterkaffi mornings, none of my work was within the original bounds of this newsletter. Instead, my interests now sprawl across philosophy, literature, and criticism. Neurodivergent frames are still close at hand, but they’re not center stage.

Where I am

What’s happening, I realize, is the waning of one special interest and the rising of another. I had tricked myself into thinking it was all the same because it’s still writing, but now I’m flinging my own words back at myself: “writer: one word, too many referents, all tenuously grouped together.”

You see the shift in the reading I’m consuming these days. Here’s the story of my past month told through books purchased or borrowed:

• Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology by Michel Foucault

• The Rhetoric of Fiction by Wayne C. Booth

• Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism by Lauren Fournier

• Frantumaglia by Elena Ferrante

• Feel Free by Zadie Smith

• The artful edit: on the practice of editing yourself by Susan Bell

• Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen by Mary Norris

• The Western Canon by Harold Bloom

• The White Man’s Guide to White Male Writers of the Western Canon by Dana Schwartz3

Previously, I connected my special interest cycling to this very newsletter, wondering if writing about autism would crash just as other interests have. But something was different, I noted then: my new awareness that this cycling

isn’t just idiosyncrasy; it’s part of a neurotype. Maybe I can learn to harness this special interest cycling with intention and avoid the prior pattern.

And avoiding that prior pattern might be what’s happening? I’m not yet at the burnout stage where the interest turns distasteful, like the sight of leftover birthday cake after you’ve had three slices. I’m just not freely turning toward my old go-to topics.

On Thursday, wondering what the hell I was going to publish this week, I perused my drafts inventory. I count 20 pieces in various states. Those are the graduates from my idea stable, where I dump post ideas so I don’t forget. That document has 84 ideas!

Many of them relate to autism or how minds work, the stuff of this newsletter. Going through them, I didn’t feel revulsion—but I didn’t immediately open a doc and start working either, which used to be the reflex.

Instead, I started writing this post.

My autism interest isn’t fully exhausted, but I think it would be soon if I forced myself to keep writing about it. Maybe I just need some time apart, some breathing room, to let my interest recharge. Because I do want to keep the spark alive for the kind of research and writing that first prompted Strange Clarity.

Where I’m going

What I’m circling is this question: do I let this newsletter follow my interests? Or, do I obey the chorus of platform-building advice, which is: have a clear niche, a delineated focus, so that readers interested in your topic can find you and once found, they get what they came for.

I do have a data point. The newsletter I published during my trip—on the god trick, mansplaining, other stuff—was more aligned with my current interests in literature and philosophy. A few readers commented and liked it, and it even prompted the first external response by the always fascinating Overweening Generalist. (His response is a work of art.) But the interest was muted compared with my posts on autism and neuroscience/pyschology.

Which is fine by me, so long as I’m not alienating readers who were drawn here on the promise of something else. Am I?

To return to Alys’s question, why am I on Substack? Why do I post this newsletter? The path out of my haze lies in the answer to that question.

But the answer is manifold; multiple reasons are competing with each other. I write this newsletter to connect with people who think like me (and people who don’t), to be an autism advocate in my own way, to develop my writing muscle, to provide a channel for my research and curiosity, to create an archive of my work (because I’ll forget otherwise), and to share my ideas with readers. In isolation, each of those goals would suggest a discrete path. Taken together, the compass needle lurches unsteadily from one point to another.

Feeling pulled in different directions is not new. I have been so many different people across my lifetime, often at the same time. Who I was depended on who I was with. Such that, if people from different milieus assembled, I wasn’t sure how to be. That sounds disordered, and I suppose it is, but I don’t view it entirely—or even mostly—negatively. Because it wasn’t people pleasing, not in the typical sense of doing something just for someone to like you. It’s more that I’ve never been able to pin myself down. I’m not one person. I can flit in and out of different personas and somehow, there’s a kernel of truth to all of them, even if the personas are exaggerated. The conventional advice when you’re diagnosed with autism is to unmask, but what if your real self is split across those masks?

Which makes the present quandary—attempting to write a newsletter as one person—both familiar and difficult to sort out.

Is this newsletter the place where I let my different intellectual selves coexist? Or is it the playground of just one?

That’s the lingering question.

So, Reader: Why do you read this newsletter? Your answer will help me think through this quandary. And if you write or create for others, how do you decide whether to follow your changing interests or hold fast to one focus?

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Read on…

I used to abandon my judgment too quickly. If a pronouncement wore the right costume—confident tone, institutional sheen, vocal adherents—I let it tell me what was true, even about things that were plainly arguable. That mantle of authority can be hypnotic: it invites you to put down your skepticism and pick up someone else’s certainty.

I would tell myself, I can trust this person—even more than myself. The gap between what I thought and what the author declared became proof that my instincts were flawed. I learned to treat my internal compass as unreliable because it diverged from what arrived in sleek official formats.

But for a variety of reasons, as I’ve grown older, I’ve started to distrust that mantle of authority and to recognize that my instincts have value.

Writing here on Substack is part of this emergent recognition. I still hesitate to offer pieces that are strictly matters of opinion, because who should care about my opinion? Yet I feel with each piece I’m growing more confident, less tentative.

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A byproduct of this newfound confidence to push back on the intellectual authorities is that I have a lot of catching up to do. Allowing myself freedom to challenge entrenched ideas means I'm seeing things to challenge everywhere, mostly in the past.

The world has moved on yet I'm knocking on the door saying, I heard there’s a party here. Meanwhile the place has changed tenants three times. I’m arguing with ghosts.

Often, while reading texts, I feel a sharp reaction to that brand of self-assured certainty I described above. I bristle at pronouncements on genuinely debatable matters that proceed as though no justification is necessary. I get irritated, because I know how stifling that posture is for people (like me; like women; like people with mental “disorders”) who are made to justify their views by society.

Barthes’s influential essay “The Death of the Author”

Here’s a ghost I’ve been arguing with recently: Roland Barthes’s 1967 essay “The Death of the Author.” For decades it’s been taught and admired because it seemed to free readers from the obligation to consider what the author of a text intended the text to mean.

Barthes’s claim in the essay is simple and sweeping: the modern cult of the author has trained us to hunt for a single, authorized meaning—whatever the author supposedly intended—and to treat all other readings as mistakes.

There is a kernel of a useful corrective there. But Barthes goes much farther than offering a corrective in his essay. He enacts a law.

I not only disagree with most of Barthes’s assertions in the essay, which I’ll write about elsewhere, but I’m repelled by his manner of asserting them.

He never uses “I think,” but only “we know,” indicating there is only one possible view. His assertions are unequivocal; there is no nuance, just an all-or-nothing choice. A right way and a wrong way. This authoritative tone reaches its zenith in the concluding sentence:

We are no longer so willing to be the dupes of such antiphrases, by which a society proudly recriminates in favor of precisely what it discards, ignores, muffies, or destroys; we know that in order to restore writing to its future, we must reverse the myth: the birth of the reader must be requited by the death of the Author.

This sentence universalizes a personal stance—Barthes’s—as a mandate.

The god trick and situated knowledge

My instinctual aversion to this kind of writing was reflected back to me when I encountered Donna Haraway’s brilliant 1988 essay, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.”

Haraway, a founder of Science and Technology Studies, names in this essay the rhetorical posture I’ve been reacting to. She calls it the god trick: speaking from nowhere while claiming to see everywhere. A disembodied voice, belonging to a person who feels no pressure to situate themselves as a specific person. No impetus to acknowledge their subjectivity, because authority is their natural and proper state.

This pretense of an all-knowing, all-seeing perspective—a universal view—is a trick.

She asks us to consider the metaphor of glossy space photos presented as reality. Here is the Milky Way, a magazine says, gesturing toward an image.

But there’s no neutral view: even in the realm of photography, an image is not an unassailable depiction of reality. Each image is the product of particular instruments, choices, and positions. These are all mediations—things that come between Reality or Truth as it’s being presented and us, the viewers. The trick occurs when a speaker pretends that these mediations don’t exist.

Although an authority figure may claim to show us the Milky Way—equivalent to Barthes’s action in declaring that the Author-God must be killed to properly interpret texts—in truth, an authority figure can offer only a specific lens. A reality bounded to a single perspective.

Claims that arrive shorn of context—no method, no standpoint, no “here’s how I got there”—ask us to treat a partial view as universal. And that’s where trouble lies.

Haraway’s point isn’t “nothing is real.” It’s this: if you want to claim objectivity, you must show your work. Tell us where you’re standing, what tools you used, what you left out.

As she puts it:

There is no unmediated photograph or passive camera obscura in scientific accounts of bodies and machines; there are only highly specific visual possibilities, each with a wonderfully detailed, active, partial way of organizing worlds.

Haraway’s key insight is that “only partial perspective promises objective vision.”

Partial perspective is an accountable vision—one you can call to account because you’re engaging not with a vague voice with no point of origin (with which discourse is, of course, impossible), but with a specific voice coming from a specific location.

Haraway calls this situated knowledge.

Applying the god trick to literature and lit criticism

Although Haraway’s particular focus is scientific discourse, I believe the same god-trick framework can apply to literary discourse, which was Barthes’s terrain.

While some fiction presents itself as simple entertainment, many authors claim a deeper purpose: to reveal the truth about our present reality.

Consider Joseph Conrad’s argument that the fiction writer aims, like the scientist, to reveal “what is enduring and essential” about the world:

A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line. And art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect. It is an attempt to find in its forms, in its colours, in its light, in its shadows, in the aspects of matter and in the facts of life what of each is fundamental, what is enduring and essential—their one illuminating and convincing quality—the very truth of their existence. The artist, then, like the thinker or the scientist, seeks the truth and makes his appeal.

I find Conrad’s description of the novelist’s project to be valid. Novels do circulate as social knowledge; they shape what readers take to be plausible or typical about people and places and causal relationships.

If we follow Barthes and kill the author, then, contrary to his argument that we’re killing a “God,” we’re actually performing an apotheosis. We’re pretending that the view the text provides is a universal one—the Milky Way—as opposed to a specific vision of the world tied to a specific author’s lens.

The god trick, then, lends a conceptual counterargument both to the way Barthes expresses his views in “The Death of the Author,” and to the views themselves.

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The god trick as a feminist philosophy

Haraway, an influential feminist who transformed the philosophy and history of science, tackled all this from a feminist viewpoint. The god-trick had led certain voices to be marginalized and excluded in scientific discourse, including voices of women.

But what I love about her essay is that she doesn’t do the thing that Barthes does in his. He replaced one myth with another by toppling the author and enthroning the reader. Haraway’s handling of her issue is far more nuanced.

To be sure, Haraway offers a qualified argument that marginalized viewpoints should be privileged. But this is not as a matter of reparation, or vengeance, or some sort of ascendancy of the downtrodden.

Her argument is based on reason. We should prefer perspectives from “below” (that is, from the position of subjugated, marginalized people), she says, because they’re less likely to perform artificial objectivity. Less likely to buy into the god trick and perpetuate it. They’re not more likely to be right, but they’re less likely to deceive us into believing they’re right. And thus, they more effectively advance discourse.

Consistent with this careful take, she warns against romanticizing marginalized viewpoints.

“The standpoints of the subjugated are not ‘innocent’ positions,” she writes. They are authoritative only when they stay answerable—open to critique, method, and mediation—rather than claiming a disembodied right to speak for all and without challenge.

Thus, her god-trick warning cuts in both directions: against the powerful who pretend to speak from nowhere, and against any of us who might smuggle in a new kind of untouchable authority under a banner of marginalization.

Extending Haraway’s argument outward to everyday discourse

Haraway’s theory helps me understand why the no-excuses, no-questions-asked authoritative tone taken by Barthes and others grates on me so much.

It also, I think, points to why women and other marginalized people are more likely to notice and be distracted by such tones of voice, even to the point, as in my case, of irritation.

In Western culture, the performers of the god trick have been traditionally white men. Let me be careful here: Not all white men communicate this way, but of the people who do, they have been more likely to be white men.

Other categories of people may internalize that this style of discourse is unavailable to them. I certainly did. Women start emails more often by saying “I’m sorry,” or are more likely to qualify their views with “I think” and “I believe.”

Society has traditionally seen this manner of speaking as a negative tic that should be fixed. But there’s another way to see it. I think these qualifiers support Haraway’s argument that marginalized people, such as women, are less likely to perform the god trick. Which is a good thing.

I also see a link to the concept of “mansplaining”—that presumptuous, superior way of explaining things. Men do this to each other all the time (I’ve observed it with interest), but it rolls off other men like water off a raincoat. For those of us not used to wielding that kind of conversational authority, it soaks in and weighs us down.

A counterpoint to Barthes: the partial perspective of Wayne C. Booth

While working on this essay, I happened to be reading The Rhetoric of Fiction by Wayne C. Booth, a foundational literary criticism text that examines how authors communicate their views to readers.

Booth, like Barthes, was highly influential in the field of literary criticism. They were contemporaries; The Rhetoric of Fiction was published in 1961, six years before Barthes’s essay.

While reading, I noticed how Booth’s style avoids the godlike stance of Barthes’s, and how nourishing that feels to me as a reader.

For instance, Booth wrote in the book’s Preface:

The fun will come in testing what I say, not against any given theory you have learned, but rather against your own experience of Boccaccio’s “The Falcon,” of Porter’s “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” of Joyce’s Portrait, of Austen’s Emma—of whatever story you have recently enjoyed and would like to recommend to me.

Here, Booth is acknowledging his partial perspective, one that the reader can “test” themselves. And he’s going further. He’s admitting that the canonical works he uses to illustrate his theories are not authoritative. The reader can not only disagree with Booth’s views, but also with the selection of stories that supply the testing material. He demonstrates his openness by acknowledging that the reader has the authority to recommend their own examples to him.

I like it when someone converses with me in this way. They are meeting me more truthfully, more directly, with less pretense. Yes, it turns out being more verbose (by inserting “I think” and “I believe,” by devoting a Preface to the limitations of your book’s analysis) can amount to being more direct, because you’re making explicit what’s not always implicit. These are thoughts and beliefs that I have, and I recognize that others may not share them.

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So here’s the essential point: To reverse the harm wrought by the god trick, we should keep the makers and the making of text in view. We shouldn’t pretend that text speaks from nowhere.

If the god trick is the seduction of placeless certainty, then the antidote is modest, locatable confidence: here is where I’m standing; here are the methods I used; here is what I can and can’t see.

Otherwise, all we have are voices shouting into the air, untethered and unaccountable.

To take a highly unscientific poll, I’m curious—do you notice and react when a writer uses the god trick? Alternatively, do you notice but not mind, or perhaps not notice at all? And of course, I’d love to hear your other thoughts and reactions to these topics.

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Laura

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When we slot something into a category, our mind tells itself: That’s sorted! Onto the next. We cross it off the mental checklist.

Which can lead us to maintain those categories past their shelf life.

Consider, for instance, the fact that fish don’t exist.

In 1758, Carl Linnaeus divided the animal kingdom into six categories: vermes (globby things like worms and jellyfish), insects, fish, amphibians, birds, and mammals.

His method for classifying was based mostly on the organism’s appearance, structure, and environment. He had an extraordinarily keen eye which helped him classify, seeing things others missed.

But he also overrelied on that keen eye. He shunned microscopes and other advanced instruments. Which led his wildly influential classification system to resort mostly to surface-level comparison and contrast.

Sometimes, the durability of an idea testifies to its essential rightness. Other times, it’s a sign of our unconscious orientation toward brain efficiency: once we think we’ve figured something out, even if it’s wrong, we tend to leave it untouched.

Until someone who relies less on prior knowledge and more on sorting things out themselves, someone who takes a fresh look at our mess, comes along to shake us out of our stupor and tell us: This is not right.

Linnaeus, who predated Darwin, believed as most everyone did that God created each species with intention.

Darwin upended that idea in 1859 with his On the Origin of Species. And yet, Linnaean classification persisted with minor alterations.

Until the cladists came along. When I encountered them in Lulu Miller’s excellent book Why Fish Don’t Exist, I imagined a nihilist group of black-clad revolutionaries fit to inhabit the pages of Philip K. Dick or Asimov’s Foundation series.

Well, not quite. They’re proponents of cladistics, which is a rival approach to biological classification. Their tenet is this: organisms should be grouped according to their most recent common ancestor.

It’s an evolutionary approach, grouping species together roughly like genealogical family trees. Think about it like this: your family of origin uses your parents as the most recent common ancestors; if you extend to your grandparents, then your aunts, uncles, and cousins will form part of the group as well; if you extend to your great-grandparents, then the group enlarges with your great-aunts, great-uncles, and second cousins, etc.

The rule is that however high up you go, the group must include all descendants.

From a biological sorting perspective, this is the sounder approach. Because as we know, species can evolve parallel adaptations independently. Consider the snow hare and the polar bear. They both have white fur, but each is more closely related to other rabbits and bears than to each other.

When you take the cladistic view of relationships, surprising things emerge. Crocodiles are more closely related to birds than to turtles. An ostrich is more closely related to a hummingbird than a penguin.

And a tuna is more closely related to you than to a shark. Tuna are bony fish, and so are we (so to speak). Sharks are cartilaginous fish, a separate branch.

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I’ve illustrated this! My first Strange Clarity illustrations.

These graphics are not scientifically accurate (as you’ll see) but they approximate 1. evolutionary branching, 2. Linnaean “fish,” and 3. cladistic “fish?”

Legend: The top of the images show the organism that evolved furthest back in time. Beneath them are the organisms who evolved from them, and so on. The curlicues are stand ins for unspecified organisms. (Again, not scientific).

Image 1: Suspend your disbelief and pretend this is a real evolutionary tree. Read it as the legend above instructs. Note that “shark” on the right is included to represent an organism who didn’t descend from the topmost “fishy thing” in the graphic. If this depiction were comprehensive, there would be upper levels for that shark tracing back a different ancestral line. But that’s superfluous. The salient point is just that the shark doesn’t share the topmost “fishy thing” ancestor in this image.

Image 2: Now we overlay the Linnaean system of classification onto our extremely convincing evolutionary tree. See how a pinch of gerrymandering is needed to approximate the traditional category of “fish,” outlined in magenta?

Image 3: Now we overlay the cladistic system. Ahh, visual coherence as a reflection of logical coherence. Feels good, doesn’t it. (That purple shape should be symmetrical… so pretend it is).

And now we’ve come to the (first) point of this essay: the category “fish” we commonly think about either doesn’t exist (i.e., it’s invalid because it doesn’t include all organisms underneath the earliest shared ancestor; it’s got that gerrymandered aspect in Image 2), or… it includes humans (as shown in Image 3).

The reason for this dramatic reveal! has its roots with Linnaeus. He assumed that because fish live underwater and have fins, they form a distinct group. But that’s just coincidental. They all happen to live underwater, and a good way to move underwater is using fins.

It’s trippy. What helped me understand this false-fish notion is this: All life on earth began in water and remained there for 3.2 billion years!!!

So before anyone awkwardly lumbered onto land, there was massive evolution happening underwater. Distinct branches developed. When members of a given branch became landlubbers, they remained more closely related to fish within their branch than to other landlubbers sprung from other undersea branches. And vice versa: certain “fish” are more closely related to landlubbers in their evolutionary branch than to fellow swimmers.

What’s also trippy is that I didn’t know any of this until I read Miller’s book. That strikes me as wild. It’s like still thinking Pluto is a planet, but worse.

The fact that a salmon is more closely related to a cow than a shark, and a tuna to a human than a lamprey, may be academic for most of us. We’ll still talk of “fish” in the classic sense and everyone will know what we mean. Even my illustrations perpetuate that longstanding idea, since I talk of “fishy things” and mean it traditionally.

So, the fact that “fish” isn’t a distinct group is interesting but not, for most of us, life-changing.

Unless, perhaps, you’re a pescatarian.

Darwin introduced evolution to the world in 1859. Why did it take a century for an evolution-based approach to taxonomy, for cladistics, to emerge?

Maybe because we like to move on when we think we’ve figured something out, so as to use our energy elsewhere. We have a bias toward existing systems — sometimes called status quo bias, after a foundational paper from 1988 by William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser. Even when those systems are supported by weak evidence or have fairly apparent structural defects.

The authors of that 1988 paper plucked an epitaph from Samuel Johnson: “To do nothing is within the power of all men.”

At that, we excel.

But what, if anything, does this have to do with schizophrenia?

A woman named Mary developed symptoms in adulthood diagnosed as schizophrenia. Her daughters describe turbulent, unstable childhoods in their mother’s house. Mary would construct an elaborate barricade at their apartment door, so the girls had to allot extra time to get to school in the morning. She’d accuse her older daughter of poisoning her pizza. Their mother lived in a different reality. One to which they couldn’t build an emotional bridge, leaving them feeling, in some ways, motherless.

They’d sought professional help for her, and Mary was even institutionalized once. But she was part of the one-third of diagnosed schizophrenics for whom antipsychotics have no effect.

Then, as Rachel Aviv explained in her New Yorker piece telling this story, Mary was diagnosed with cancer and treated with chemotherapy and an immune suppressant, rituximab. Her daughters thought she was dying; they prepared themselves for her passing.

But Mary didn’t die. The cancer cells were eradicated. And something else: she began to speak more clearly, be more alert and present in conversations with her daughters. Just as the cancer cleared, so too did Mary’s schizophrenia symptoms.

She’s one of a number of people whose treatment-resistant schizophrenia disappeared after taking immunosuppressants.

Like the others we’ve discussed, the DSM is also a classification system: a taxonomy of “mental disorders.” It was built on a legacy of observing behaviors and shuffling them into categories of disorders, so it’s closer to Linnaean classification than to cladistics. Mostly, it’s concerned with what’s happening at a person’s surface. Their observable state.

Which is sort of like creating a group called “fish” based on scales and fins.

This approach can paper over important differences in origin or internal mechanisms leading to that observable state.

Anxiety illustrates this. Initially, the DSM treated anxiety as a singular disorder, called Anxiety reaction (and rooted it in a Freudian belief that it resulted from unconscious mental conflict). Subsequent editions began to distinguish different disorders that featured anxiety: Obsessive-compulsive disorder, Phobic disorders (like agoraphobia), Separation anxiety disorder, and Post-traumatic stress disorder.

Anxiety is a common feature of all, but these are vastly different disorders that were initially lumped together.

Not all disorders in the DSM have been permitted to branch in this way. Some are still stuck in monolithic, overbroad classifications.

In June, I wrote about research indicating that narcissistic personality disorder is an imprecise, or even invalid, category. From that research, I offered a caution:

What we currently label as a single disorder may turn out to be multiple, distinct conditions that never should have been grouped together in the first place.

Schizophrenia, it appears, suffers the same flaw. Like Anxiety reaction, the DSM classifications of Narcissistic personality disorder and Schizophrenia may depend on surface-level similarities that are merely coincidental, emerging from distinct conditions or origins.

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The fact that Mary’s symptoms cleared after taking immunosuppressants suggests that she was never schizophrenic in its traditional sense of a disorder with a genetic basis. Instead, she had an autoimmune disorder whose symptoms resembled schizophrenia.

Her case is not a one-off. There have been others, as reported by Aviv:

A 2017 study in Frontiers in Psychiatry described a woman with a twenty-five-year history of schizophrenia. She also had a skin disease, for which she was given drugs that reduced inflammation and suppressed her immune response. Her doctors noticed a pattern: when they treated her skin lesions, her psychosis went away. They hypothesized that the rash and the psychosis had been caused by a single autoimmune disorder, and were cured by the same drugs. Another paper in Frontiers in Psychiatry described a man with “treatment-resistant schizophrenia” who developed leukemia. After a bone-marrow transplant, which reconstituted his immune system, he startled his doctors by suddenly becoming sane. Eight years later, the authors wrote, “the patient is very well and there are no residual psychiatric symptoms.”

For the one-third of schizophrenia patients who don’t respond to traditional treatments: what if they don’t actually have schizophrenia?

It’s past time to hold the DSM’s approach at arms’ length. We can’t simply ignore it, since right now there’s no better alternative. But like Linnaean classification, it rests on a flawed methodological base. One developed in the early 1900s, innovative at the time but long since past its sell-by date.

The step-wise modifications made with each new edition of the DSM just aren’t enough to correct that flawed base. A cladistics-like transformation is needed.

Because all the while, people are suffering from being lumped in with diseases or disorders they don’t have. Think of all that lost time for Mary and her daughters.

The cladistics framework is based on biological evolution, which doesn’t map onto mental disorders.

So we need to ask: what’s the mental disorders version of cladistics? What’s a better approach? I don’t have the answer. But it’s a question we should pursue with relentless focus.

Fortunately, efforts are underway. In 2023, the Stavros Niarchos1 Foundation (S.N.F.) Center for Precision Psychiatry and Mental Health was founded at Columbia University through a $75 million grant. Its mission is to research “the biological causes and underpinnings of mental illness and discover treatments for alleviating suffering from conditions previously considered untreatable” — like the misdiagnosed schizophrenia of Mary and so many others.

As well, the S.N.F. is focused on “closing the gap between research and clinical practice.” Thank the lord. Clinicians still have misguided ideas of what autism is, leading to unscientific diagnostic decisions. And the DSM, that clinician bible, still focuses on only two umbrella traits of autism, when researchers have long understood that our traits are far more sweeping and complex.

To conclude: both concepts — “fish” and “schizophrenia” — provide cautionary tales.

What do we miss when we rely on old frameworks? It’s difficult, even impossible, to tell while working inside them.

Which makes it all the more important to hold firmly onto epistemological humility — a fancy way of saying, being humble about our ways of knowing — and lightly onto everything else, including what we think we know for sure. And to listen to people who offer tough, but good-faith, criticism of conventional wisdom.

And also: for the love of all that’s holy, can we please do something about the DSM?

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P.S. Yesterday, I read with delight a new reader comment by Shannon Barrera of Build With Care, knowing this post would come out today. Shannon anticipated today’s themes when she wrote:

But more importantly, I think the whole framework used to define autism as a disorder of “deficits in social communication” and “restricted, repetitive behaviors” is sort of comically inaccurate. It’s like describing the shadow of something and thinking you’re describing the thing. It reduces autism to the traits that can be observed from the outside, while completely ignoring the internal experience of being autistic.

That’s beautifully put: “describing the shadow of something and thinking you’re describing the thing.” Thank you, Shannon!

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Read on…

Diagnosis changed my life because it changed how I see myself.

Formerly, I saw myself as a broken human. Now, I see myself as a different human—a critical distinction.

I have unusual social instincts and needs and reactions, and now I can trace them to specific autistic traits.

Autism doesn’t relate to everything about me, but it relates to a lot. Diagnosis helped me realize my deck is stacked a certain way. I don’t need to beat myself up over it. It’s just the way I am.

But it was only through diagnosis that I came to this self-acceptance. I didn’t earn it through a meditative journey or deep journaling; it didn’t come from the five years of therapy I did in my early thirties. It was the flip of a switch, a post-intermission Act 3, a reopening after change in ownership.

This makes my shift to self-acceptance seem binary: no, and then yes. It’s not quite that simple, but it’s close. About as close to simple as the messy headspace of self-regard can get.

If diagnosis allowed me to accept myself, what would denial of diagnosis have done? I fear it would have deepened my feeling of defectiveness. That I couldn’t even fit with the misfits.

That’s the problem when self-acceptance rests on an external trigger. The person with the authority to diagnose holds a lot of power.

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Within the autism community, there’s significant backlash to the idea that “everyone is a little autistic.”

But I believed a version of that statement long before I seriously considered I might be (fully) autistic. I used those exact words, “a little autistic,” in self-deprecating jokes to my husband as I groaned over social obligation and became insensibly annoyed over minor transgressions by colleagues or neighbors.

It was only when I better understood what autism really is that I saw how much it fit me.

By the time I booked my assessment, I was convinced. In my case, the idea that you can be a “little autistic” was a stepping stone to self-realization.

As it happened, my psychologist agreed with me. But it could have gone differently.

Because in the end, the question of diagnosis is an examination of how autistic you are. Are you a little, or are you a lot? Only if you cross an impossibly slippery line—a line calibrated differently depending on the psychologist—will you receive a diagnosis.

Some people sail over that line. Others may tip just over it, or fall a hair short. The diagnostic assessment is a binary: yes, or no. Either you are or you aren’t.

Mine came back yes, and where exactly I landed on the other side of that line should be irrelevant. But I do wonder.

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Now that I’m a regular on the autism forums, I see adults, often women, post about being denied a diagnosis. A handful of examples:

“I’m crushed. The psych told me she can’t offer me a diagnosis because I am able to maintain relationships despite fulfilling literally every other requirement for a diagnosis. I told her throughout […] that maintaining relationships and making friends is and always has been difficult for me, but I’ve learned the steps and I know that relationships are important. I force myself to maintain relationships, it doesn’t come naturally. I’m just so frustrated.” (link)

And:

“No autism because I have friends? The lady [...] said she wouldn’t assume I have autism because I have friends and can feel empathy for my sister. [...] She also said that it doesn't really make sense to diagnose people ‘like me’ anyway, because it wouldn’t change anything for me. [...] I keep finding more symptoms in my research and I have scores in the clinical range on each of the tests that is available. [...] I don't think they are even open to other forms of autism other than the ‘classic’ picture or don’t have the capacity to diagnose everyone of their clients properly. I am so frustrated because I waited so long and then I didn’t feel I was being taken seriously.” (link)

And:

“It basically took me two years to find a psychiatrist whos even willing to write a referral to an ASD clinic and then another year on the waiting list and waiting for the results. This wednesday I finally got my results […] and they basically diagnosed me with everything under the sun except for autism. I knew this could happen so I was prepared to challenge them instantly on all the criterion/symptoms that can only be fully (and best) explained by an ASD diagnosis and they literally shrugged and said I was a highly sensitive person LOL. I am still processing since I cannot believe the ignorance and lack of information (and interest) in how autism presents in AFAB people. They even told me I cant be autistic because I can make eye contact. Are you clowns or doctors lol what is happening?” (link)

The reasons for denial concentrate around themes: you can’t be autistic if you have friends or a romantic relationship, if you graduated college, if you’re a teacher or nurse or other professional, if you’re smart. If you have empathy.

The official term for that is bullshit.

Although it’s true that self-diagnosis is accepted within the autistic community (as part of a general “no gatekeeping” principle, one of many reasons I have immense pride in and respect for this community), self-diagnosis and diagnosis are different things.

Autistic people generally have a low threshold for uncertainty. Gray areas and ambiguities are not just regrettable, they can cause distress. We’re also uncomfortable with things that feel like deception. We strive, compulsively, for truth.

So when I see responses to the forum posts above saying: just self-diagnose, that’s perfectly valid, I agree in theory, but I also see it as an imperfect solution.

Because even if people accept your self-diagnosis, you still remember the denial. And that creates a disconnect, an internal tension, that can grate at you and fester over time.

Perhaps, given that a professional denied you a diagnosis, calling yourself autistic makes you feel like a fraud. Like you’re pretending, or you don’t belong. Maybe not completely, but a little bit. Which is enough to reprise the lifelong cycle of self-rejection you’re trying to break free from.

Sometimes, the forum posters who were denied diagnosis are asked why they’re seeking a diagnosis in the first place, as if that sorts it out.

That question always confuses me. It’s my nature to want to know as much as possible, especially about myself. To resolve uncertainty. So why wouldn’t I seek a diagnosis from a professional if I thought I was autistic? Not all autistic people feel this way. But many of us do.

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To top it off, a vocal Autism Purity Army has emerged to complain that people like me are misdiagnosed. Their vitriol especially targets women who think they’re autistic but are not deemed to meet diagnostic criteria.

There’s one really offensive person calling herself the “Antifeminist Psychiatrist” (she’s apparently licensed!) who argues that adults seeking diagnosis are just narcissists who want to bypass accountability for their offensive behavior—and, horror of horrors—to celebrate their “quirks.”

I try not to give her airtime, but Substack keeps feeding me her “antifeminist,” pseudoscientific garbage. And rather than mute her, I’m magnetically pulled to the comments, where I correct misinformation as calmly as I can (calmly, so as not to fuel this narcissism fever dream).

I also comment for the women who wrote those forum posts, and the ones who could have. The ones who recognize their struggles as autistic but are denied the label, with the implicit message that no, you’re just bad at this.

If they see her post and the derisive comments piling on, I want them to also see my pushback.

I want to tell them: I see you. I know you’re struggling. You’re not broken.

You are the only expert on what it is to be you.

And you deserve the same permission and acceptance that diagnosis has given me. I hope more than anything that you find it.

If you have a diagnosis journey you’d like to share, or a question about diagnosis, please drop a comment or send me a DM. You’re very welcome here.

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Stay curious,

Laura

Read on…

Imagine if a simple story you wrote about a birthday party revealed the most personal, private things about you. Things you yourself might not even be aware of.

This premise isn’t a thought experiment. It’s reality.

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There are those who can detect things beneath the surface of awareness. Humans with visual impairment who use echolocation (making clicking sounds that bounce against surfaces) to navigate the physical world. Dogs who sniff cancer or explosives. Even my ability to recognize faces and voices across decades and contexts. At base, these are all forms of pattern recognition, drawing on our brains’ ability to sift through sensory inputs and find meaning in minute distinctions.

But these slightly magical abilities are beginning to seem superfluous. Because AI is built to recognize patterns at a supernatural scale, dwarfing anything we can do.

The potential applications are both grand and unnerving. This was brought home when I read a research paper published this month. The topic? Determining whether a person is autistic simply from what they’ve written.

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For years, researchers have studied how autistic and non-autistic writing is different.

In a 2021 Spanish study, a group of autistic and non-autistic adolescents wrote a story based on a visual prompt of a birthday party scene. Researchers hand-coded the stories and found that the autistic group produced shorter text, used a more limited mix of vocabulary and sentence types, and often skipped the resolution of the story’s central conflict.

Last year, in 2024, a Polish team ran hundreds of eighth-grade exam essays through software that detected emotional undertones and abstract linguistic elements. Autistic essays were again a bit shorter, used emotionally flatter language, employed fewer “mind” verbs like think or wonder, and packed together denser sentences with more advanced vocabulary.

In both studies, the researchers started out by measuring specific things: word choice, syntax, and narrative elements.

They had to decide upfront which aspects of the writing to measure and compare, which meant the findings were limited to differences that humans could detect.

Which takes us to the 2025 study I mentioned. This time, researchers unleashed large language models (LLMs) on writing samples from autistic and non-autistic people. First, they fed the LLMs the raw text of some of those essays, along with the labels “autistic” or “non-autistic.” This provided a training set.

After training on the labeled essays, the models were tested on new essays they hadn’t seen, to see if they could correctly predict whether the writer was autistic or not.

This time, the researchers didn’t set out to measure specific things like vocabulary, narrative coherence, or sentence complexity. Instead, they simply instructed the LLMs to make a binary classification: distinguish which samples were “autistic,” and which were not.

The researchers also enlisted a small group of human evaluators to serve as controls. They were psychologists experienced in autism diagnosis, and they reviewed the same writing samples as the LLMs.

The results?

The humans did about as well as a coinflip; their predictions were not much better than blind guessing.

Some of the LLMs, though, reached about 90% accuracy. Because of their black box nature, it’s not clear what differences they detected to yield such remarkable results. Whatever the process, they found significant variations that the human experts didn’t.

The researchers cautioned that there’s “still a long way to go before these types of models can be used for clinical purposes,” but declared their results “promising.”

My prediction: Clinicians will be using LLMs to screen writing samples for autism before too long.

The research paper focused on positive implications of the results: the development of a better screening tool.

And I agree, that’s positive. I have real concerns with our current system of diagnosis, which is too inconsistent and too subjective.

On the other hand…

Doesn’t this worry you a bit? If these researchers attained 90% accuracy in this early effort, people with less benign goals could presumably achieve something similar without much effort.

They could use the public writing of self-identified autistic people as a training tool, and then demand writing samples as a condition of employment, government benefits, and more. In the process, a dossier of your cognitive imprint could be compiled—without your knowledge, let alone consent.

And it doesn’t stop at autism.

What else can LLMs tell about us from our writing? A lot.

Researchers are using LLMs to detect other conditions and traits, including depression, suicidal ideation, general personality traits, and early Alzheimer’s disease.

To a limited extent, this is good! There are interventions that help with depression and suicidal ideation. I know people who wouldn’t be here today without them. I also knew people who didn’t receive them in time.

But it’s also scary that our writing can be used so invasively, to determine things about us that we may not know ourselves. This feels like the premise of a dystopian novel.

Ironically, might some of this be mitigated by our growing use of LLMs to write?

I can’t help thinking of the steady march of articles declaring the end of human writing. That students won’t ever learn how to write, since AI will do it for them.

In the future, how much public writing will truly be human-authored? If you can grab a sample of a person’s writing online, you may not be grabbing their writing. It may be an LLM’s.

And, as more writing is produced by LLMs, all writing, even human-produced, may converge toward a uniform style. Our writing is influenced by what we read. If we read mostly AI authorship, then perhaps that will come out in our writing.

If everyone’s writing starts to echo the same AI style, we may lose some of the subtleties those 2025 study results depended on.

In a dark twist, the spread of LLM tools could blunt their diagnostic edge.

Cold comfort, right?

But maybe that’s the strange bargain we’re entering: as AI tools detect more cognitive signals, they also start to retrain those signals in us—remodeling our writing to be generic.

Or maybe I’m underestimating their ability to see what we can’t.

So, what do you think? Does this worry you, excite you… both?

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Looking for more to read? Check out these past posts:

• Setting the scene: how visuals and memory intertwine in autism

• The root of storytelling is pattern

Research cited in this post:

• Inmaculada Baixauli, Belen Rosello, Carmen Berenguer, ​​Montserrat Téllez de Meneses, Ana Miranda. 2021. Reading and Writing Skills in Adolescents With Autism Spectrum Disorder Without Intellectual Disability. Sec. Educational Psychology. 12. Read online.

• Izabela Chojnicka & Aleksander Wawer. 2024. Analysis of Autistic Adolescents’ Essays Using Computer Techniques. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. 2024. Read online.

• Izabela Chojnicka & Aleksander Wawer. 2025. Predicting autism from written narratives using deep neural networks. Scientific Reports. 15:20661. Read online.

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Stay curious,

Laura

Is autism really exploding? It can feel that way—diagnoses have skyrocketed, social media brims with self-disclosures, and headlines warn of an autism epidemic. But the reality is that we’re getting better at seeing what’s always been here.

Continue reading for seven evidence-backed reasons why it feels like autism is everywhere.

When I was diagnosed with autism at 39 and told one of my oldest friends, she was underwhelmed. Why? She felt like autism was everywhere. The latest trend. Another one of her friends had recently shared that she suspected she was autistic, too.

It’s strange to feel like my neurodivergence is part of a trend, and my friend’s reaction has been at the back of my mind ever since.

After my diagnosis, I made it my mission to learn everything I can about autism. I’ve come to understand why it feels like autism is on the rise. Because diagnosis is more prevalent these days. Not because autism itself has increased, but because we’re seeing it more clearly.

Here are seven research-backed reasons why it feels like autism is more common. While I’ve sourced data from the United States, similar trends are happening worldwide.

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1: Autism has expanded beyond kids to include adults

It’s not that people today are different. It’s that the definition of autism has expanded to include more people.

When Leo Kanner published his first systematic description of autism in 1943, it was limited to children. He had glimpsed something real, but he was standing on the deck of a ship seeing only the tip of the iceberg.

Since then, research has revealed that autism extends deeper into human populations and is linked to a broader array of traits.

Most impactfully, autism is not just a childhood condition. Between 2011 and 2022, diagnoses among US adults aged 26-34 increased 450%. (Source: Harvard Medical School).

2: Diagnostic substitution reclassifies older labels

Many people diagnosed with autism today would have received diagnoses in the past—but for different conditions, such as intellectual disability (ID) or personality disorders. While you can have autism and ID or a personality disorder, in some cases these were misdiagnosed, and the reversal of that trend is called diagnostic substitution. (Source: Penn State University via Education Week).

As autism understanding evolved, many people who in years past would have been diagnosed as something else are now being diagnosed with autism.

Want proof?

Check out the diverging trendlines for autism versus ID diagnosis from 2000-2010:

3: Reduced gender bias reveals more women & non-binary people

For years, autism screening tools were based on male presentations and resulted in a 4:1 male-to-female diagnosis ratio. That meant non-male cases were being missed. Today, that gap is narrowing.

When screening tools in research settings are adjusted for gender bias, the male-to-female ratio approaches 1:1. (Source: University of Minnesota).

4: Improved detection in minority communities

Historically, minority children have been under-diagnosed relative to their white peers for a number of reasons. That disparity is starting to improve.

Between 2011 and 2022, the CDC reports that autism diagnosis increased at higher rates for minority children (defined as Black, Asian, American Indian or Alaska Native, and Hispanic children) compared with white children. This doesn’t mean the absolute numbers were higher, but it means the gap is beginning to close. (Source: JAMA Network).

The same trend was not seen for adults during the same period, however. A large disparity still exists for adults, suggesting that a large number of minority adults are under diagnosed.

5: Universal pediatric screening catches more cases, earlier

The American Academy of Pediatrics first recommended universal autism screening for children in 2007, and that recommendation is slowly being adopted. When you look for something more often, you find it more often. Not because it’s spreading, but because we’re paying better attention.

A recent randomized trial showed that pediatric offices with universal screening found more instances of autism and at younger ages than those offices without it. (Source: Drexel University).

6: Practical incentives drive more assessments

As more programs are created to support autistic people, there’s more reason to go through the trouble of getting a diagnosis. Studies have found that autism diagnoses tend to cluster in geographic regions where there’s available community support.

This makes sense, as in the US there’s a cost to getting a diagnosis, both in terms of out-of-pocket expense (free assessments are hard to access) and the time and disruption to already difficult daily lives. (Source: Academic Pedatrics journal).

7: Lower stigma encourages exploration

Many parents and adults were once reluctant to pursue diagnosis for fear of judgment or discrimination. That trend has reversed as increased openness and acceptance of neurodiversity has made it feel safer to seek answers without fear of ostracism.

While the situation is improving, stigma still remains a significant issue for autistic people. (Source: Frontiers in Psychiatry).

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• My autistic special interests: the fire that burns itself out

• What we know about genetics & autism

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Stay curious,

Laura

I’ll be honest: a push to finish my book proposal draft this week is leaving me depleted. Typically, I’d pull an idea from my running notebook and develop it into a full post. But right now, I don’t have the energy.

So I’m trying something different.

I have plenty of bubbling thoughts. Rather than skip this week, why not share a few informal ideas? Maybe you’re a little tired of the long slog too, and would welcome a few bite-size pieces in lieu of a full candy bar.

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What’s a “writer”?

When I was a kid, maybe eight or nine, I thought there were only a few kinds of writers: journalists, poets, and, mostly, book authors. My sense of the word leaned heavily toward that last category, because that’s what I consumed. Writer, to me, was just a more casual, breezy term for author, unless some qualifier indicated otherwise (eg, songwriter). So writer = author, which in my mind meant you wrote books: fiction, which I mostly read, or biography, which I sometimes read—or the more boring (to me then) and blurry category of nonfiction books.

Obviously, that was a child’s idea and not at all correct. But even now, I find myself puzzled by the label writer. As I grew up and realized writer could mean anything from advice columnist to film reviewer to cultural critic to creator of TV episodes, I felt… I don’t know, frustrated at the imprecision? Those jobs demand wildly different processes and skills. Why should the primary label we use be based on how their work is shared?

In a related sense, scientists are writers. Their findings don’t mean much if they aren’t written in papers and published. Philosophers are writers. Lawyers are writers. Legislators are writers. Judges are writers.

Recently, I saw someone complain that Substack is just made up of writers reading each others’ writing. Their point was that there isn’t a separate group of people consuming content, but I was more interested in their starting premise. We’re all writers here? I don’t think so. I see philosophers, marketers, historians, people summarizing complicated science. Am I a writer? I don’t consider myself one. I do writing, but I’m not a writer.

Maybe that person’s Substack experience is limited to literary types. Or, more likely, they think the mere act of producing writing makes you a writer. They’re not alone. And sure, in the strictest sense. But writing is just a medium for sharing ideas. Talking is another. Imagine Substack as an ancient forum, where in one corner someone’s critiquing the latest temple, in another someone’s spinning gossip, and in another someone’s sharing food preparation techniques. Would we call them all talkers?

But there’s no need to go back in time. Sticking with the present, should we group TV hosts, telemarketers, sports announcers, and therapists under the umbrella term talkers?

If I had to describe what I do here, it’s not primarily writing. That’s the mode but not the purpose. Mainly, I’m analyzing—and researching, collecting, connecting. I put thoughts into writing because that’s my preferred way of sharing them. But maybe calling myself an analyzer is no better than writer.

Last night I started watching River, an old BBC crime series. The main character, a detective played by Stellan Skarsgård, is grieving the death of his partner on the police force. He delivers this brief monologue before walking out on his therapist:

Therapist: Even if you were just colleagues, there was love…

Skarsgård’s character: In books and films and plays it’s always so compelling, so complex. There should be more than one word for love. I’ve seen love that kills, and I’ve seen love that redeems. I’ve seen love that believes in the guilty, and love that saves the bereaved. What we will do for love. Die for it even.

He’s right. There are so many kinds of love: parental love, romantic love, Platonic love, self love, neighborly love, divine love. For a concept so fundamental to our lives, why is there just one word—love—to which we affix adjectives, rather than different terms entirely?

The register is different, of course (though I’d be heartily amused to watch a therapeutic monologue on this topic), but I feel the same about writer: one word, too many referents, all tenuously grouped together.

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Autistic people researching autism

Something that’s consistently amused me since my diagnosis is this: there’s a kind of person, grouped under the label autism by virtue of certain shared traits, whose mind naturally turns toward deep, focused exploration.

And what do many of us point that focus toward? Autism itself.

So you end up with a community of people who are unusually motivated to research things as a hobby, working to understand the very cognition or “disorder” they’ve been told they have. It’s not just that autistic people know their experience; it’s that they are uniquely driven, by their mental orientation, to research and systematize it.

What’s the right analogy? I keep fumbling for one. People with unusual strength and a propensity to lift things, who happen to be born in a rocky landscape? No, that’s terrible. But you get the idea (maybe).

This is why I see autism-focused subreddits as invaluable data troves. Autistic people offering firsthand insights into their own experience, motivated by a drive to understand, reflect, and synthesize. It’s an extraordinary record. I’ve often wondered why researchers don’t scrape those archives as datasets, unleashing large language models to map connections and point to new focuses of research.

My intuition is that autistic people are on the frontlines of understanding their own condition, coalescing around traits that research hasn’t yet—but will eventually—confirm. That happened with monotropic focus, which was first theorized by autistic autism researcher Dinah Murray and others. I suspect it will happen, too, with concepts like social object permanence (which has also been identified in connection with ADHD, as Hanna Keiner pointed out to me; she also introduced me to Dinah Murray).

Just a few days ago, I came across a 2017 paper titled Whose Expertise Is It? Evidence for Autistic Adults as Critical Autism Experts. The authors argue that autistic people are more scientifically knowledgeable about autism than non-autistic people. That’s not exactly shocking, though maybe I overestimate how much people with other diagnoses know about those conditions.

Somewhat more interesting are other points: autistic adults were more likely to describe autism experientially, to frame it as a neutral difference, and to challenge the medical model. The paper concludes: “Autistic adults should be considered autism experts and involved as partners in autism research.”

I agree. But I come to that conclusion less from the somewhat obvious idea that autistic people will both understand and experience autism differently from non-autistic people, and more from this observation: autistic people are not only uniquely positioned to understand autism, they have a tendency to deeply research and synthesize autism as an intellectual hobby. That combination leads to novel insights.

I haven’t checked whether this argument has gained ground in research circles since the 2017 paper, though I know the idea of involving autistic people in study design is a repeat topic.

But I’m getting at something different. More a methodological point: don’t just study how autistic people behave in a controlled setting or what answers they give to itemized questionnaires. Study what they’re saying on their own time about their minds, their experiences, and their understandings of the world.

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Wittgenstein: the philosopher’s job

This one I’m really excited about. I hesitated to share it yet, though, because what I’m really saying at this stage is just: There’s this philosopher who argued something I find incredibly compelling.

I’m not a philosophy expert, not even an amateur. I’ve taken some college survey courses, but that’s it. I also have a terrible memory of my own experiences. So, appropriately discount the following statement: This is the only philosophical argument I’ve ever encountered where I immediately thought, yes, of course, absolutely.

Here’s the background. As a young student at Cambridge, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) took up the classic problems of philosophy. But later, his outlook radically shifted. So much that he posited the following: nearly all of philosophy, including his own earlier work, was based on false premises.

Questions like What is time? or What is the mind? were, he argued, flawed from the outset. The ordinary-language concepts of time and mind aren’t fixed, metaphysical objects. They’re manmade terms that evolved within specific social and linguistic contexts to help us communicate.

The problem, as he saw it, was that philosophers had been tricked by language into believing there were fundamental contradictions to resolve—like what’s the difference between the mind and the brain?

But imagine a language with only one word for both, say, brind. (It’s just clunky enough for Anglo-Saxon. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were already in Shakespeare.) In that language, you couldn’t even ask what the difference was between mind and brain. The question is impossible. This shows that these deep philosophical questions are contingent on human usage. They arise because of how we use language.

This was Wittgenstein’s revolutionary insight: there’s no universal, absolute principle philosophers can construct by pure intellect. All they can do is describe and compare.

To describe, philosophers must gather examples of how the relevant words are used in ordinary language. To compare, they must set those uses side by side. Only through that process does meaning emerge, and the meaning is bounded by that very exercise.

That’s critically important: the meaning illuminated through this process is limited to its context. So: you can’t study the word spice in ordinary usage and then apply that meaning to Frank Herbert’s Dune. Similarly, you can’t analyze the meaning of the bishop in chess by asking, What’s the religious significance of moving diagonally? But, Wittgenstein argued, philosophers had been falling into just such traps for millennia.

He did allow that certain shared human activities serve as anchors around which language develops. But those activities provide context, not universal truths.

And crucially, he wasn’t dismissing the role of science. Science deliberately defines terms—akin to the way bishop has a precise, rule-bound meaning in chess—to advance empirical investigation. Wittgenstein wouldn’t, for instance, argue that gravity is merely a language construct rather than a real phenomenon studied through observation and experiment.

Philosophy, in contrast with science, is abstract. It doesn’t produce empirical knowledge about the world but instead clarifies how we think and speak about it. His point is that philosophy can’t answer the question what is gravity? by deducing some metaphysical essence through reason and logic alone. Science escapes some of the traps Wittgenstein warned about (though not all) precisely because it formalizes language to serve specific investigative aims.

What excites me most about all this is, first, how intuitively right it feels. But second, I see echoes of it everywhere, beyond the philosophical context. That’s what I’m going to develop in the future.

“The problems are solved, not by coming up with new discoveries, but by assembling what we have long been familiar with,” Wittgenstein wrote. Yes.

(Bracing myself for people who actually know philosophy to tell me I’ve got it all wrong.)

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Stay curious,

Laura

Carl Linnaeus, Leonardo da Vinci, and Emily Dickinson are three eminently different historical figures, but they share a key trait: they were relentless systemizers.

Linnaeus, the father of taxonomy, famously created the classification system we still use today. Leonardo’s lifelong pursuit was to find a universal pattern that linked nature at every scale: from the proportions of the human body, to the heavenly bodies in the cosmos. Dickinson’s unique poetic grammar is well known; less understood is her use of rigid communication systems to maintain a highly active social life.

I’ve been examining their lives as part of my historical figures project. Toggling between their stories and modern autism research, I came across a concept I hadn’t encountered before: intolerance of uncertainty (IU).

As I sifted through the research, I started to suspect that the concept of uncertainty—and its opposite, certainty—may be a hidden key to autism.

And a way of seeing the systemizing tendencies of Linnaeus, Leonardo, and Dickinson in a fresh light.

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First, a brief history of the concept.

Intolerance of uncertainty first gained traction in the 1990s, primarily in research on generalized anxiety disorder. Psychologists Michel Dugas and Robert Ladouceur were instrumental in defining IU as a dispositional characteristic (i.e., a trait) resulting from a set of negative beliefs about uncertainty and its implications. They argued that people high in IU perceive uncertain situations as stressful and threatening, which leads to worry and avoidance behaviors.

As the concept proved robust in generalized anxiety disorder research, in the 2000s-2010s IU began to be investigated across a range of disorders, including OCD, social anxiety disorder, and depression.

In the 2010s, researchers began to study IU in autism. They found that autistic people often show:

• Elevated baseline IU scores (link to study)

• Correlations between IU and sensory sensitivity, after controlling for anxiety (link to study)

A key finding was that IU may mediate the relationship between autism and anxiety, meaning that the distress many autistic people experience in unpredictable environments might explain their high rates of anxiety.

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An episode from my past shows just how profoundly intolerance of uncertainty has shaped my behavior.

It was Thanksgiving, and I was visiting my then-partner’s family. We weren’t staying with them—we had a hotel room in a nearby city—and the day stretched into night. His siblings and their families trickled out. Still, we remained, sitting with his parents in what I experienced as awkward, trying small talk. I wanted to ask when we’d be leaving, but doing that in front of his parents would have been rude.

As the minutes passed, my unease mounted. It wasn’t just social fatigue; it was the not knowing. If I knew that I had to withstand 30 minutes, an hour, two hours more, I could mentally prepare. But not knowing how much longer I would be there, expending energy playing my social role, was agonizing. Even painful.

When his parents stepped out of the room and we had a brief private moment, I erupted. Why hadn’t he checked in with me about our plans? Why didn’t he tell me when we’d be leaving? I thought the lack of a definitive plan was inconsiderate. From his perspective, I was displaying my trademark inflexibility. Why couldn’t I just go with the flow?

In truth, we were caught between competing values. I prize clarity. I assume others do too, so I communicate timelines and expectations as a form of care. He prized flexibility, and assumed others could ride the moment just as easily as he could. Neither of us was trying to be inconsiderate, and we were frustrated by our inability to understand the other’s behavior.

Back then, I didn’t see any of this. I just knew I felt trapped at his parents’ house. My autism diagnosis and linked insights have given me the perspective I once lacked.

This episode mirrors what researchers have increasingly found: intolerance of uncertainty plays a major role in autistic anxiety.

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But I suspect IU reaches even deeper than that. I see potential links to a number of traits, including ones central to my own experience: compulsive curiosity and the drive to uncover patterns.

Autistic special interests are well-documented, often described as intense, absorbing, and detail-focused. In a previous post, I wrote about mine, and particularly how they burn hot and then fizzle out. As I returned to that post while writing this one, the comments took on new resonance:

• One reader wrote, “the challenge of the learning curve is what keeps me hooked, but once the curve flattens and it’s all about maintenance, the interest fades.”

• Another described the beginning of a special interest as “a rocket ship taking off,” but said once it “levels off […] the really good stuff is over.”

• A third noted, “if I ‘know’ how to do the whole thing perfectly, it’s as good as done, and I don’t need to struggle through the uncomfortable mess of actually doing it!”

Each was circling the same explanation: curiosity fueled by an intense phase of understanding, and disinterest once a certain level of knowledge was reached.

That’s when it hit me: Could IU be at play here too?

But “intolerance” of uncertainty feels like the wrong frame. What if what animates these special interests isn’t the discomfort of uncertainty, but the satisfaction of resolving it? A positive pull rather than an aversion.

Maybe what draws us to a special interest is the potential to dispel uncertainty. There’s a mystery to solve, a wilderness to tame.

Leonardo’s vanishing drive

Leonardo da Vinci first caught my attention because of his tendency to abandon works. It reminded me of my own cycle of intense but fleeting fascinations.

The pattern was clear: a burst of deep engagement, followed by disinterest. For instance, Adoration of the Magi—one of his most iconic works—was a study for a more complete painting that never materialized.

Often, what he turned to instead were intellectual pursuits driven by his own curiosity, not a patron’s commission. Leonardo’s voluminous notebooks, which we still have today, brim with ideas on patterns of waves and water, engineering and construction methods, reflections on shadows and human anatomy.

Let’s apply our reader-derived special interest theory to Leonardo: perhaps once he had mentally solved the core problems of a painting, its pull vanished. He’d resolved the uncertainty. The mystery was gone, and so too was his interest. In grabbing the Adoration image for this post, I was intrigued to see the Uffizi’s description of its unfinished state:

Leonardo took the development of the work to different stages: some of the characters are barely sketched out, while others, as if to grasp an idea, are more finished.

This was a recurring pattern for Leonardo; the historical record is dotted with complaining patrons trying to track him down. In a letter to a noblewoman inquiring about her long-overdue portrait, an acquaintance wrote: “He devotes much of his time to geometry, and has no fondness at all for the paintbrush.” After performing some initial work on her portrait, he had moved on—never to return.

To an outsider, it looked like flakiness. But if IU or its inverse—the desire to make the uncertain, certain—was a driver of his creative pursuits, then he may have left the work once he figured out how to solve its core problem. Knowing the solution was what mattered. Execution for its own sake, once the path was clearly mapped, was trivial.

There’s a direct correspondence between Leonardo’s pattern of rotating special interests and my own (not, of course, concerning their impact on the world…).

This certainty/uncertainty model offers interpretive lenses for other historical figures, too.

Carl Linnaeus: order above all

Carl Linnaeus, for all his avowed empiricism, sometimes sacrificed truth in service of a larger goal: preserving the coherence of his classification system. When empirical facts clashed with his framework, he was known to ignore them.

“Without the system,” he wrote, “chaos would reign.” For him, imposing order took precedence over sticking strictly to facts. What mattered in this framework was not that his system was empirically sacrosanct but that it imposed a close-ended order, without gaps.

He also treated dissent from his system as a kind of betrayal. Students who spread his method over Europe were his “disciples.” Those who questioned it were treated as traitors.

Is there an autistic resonance in Linnaeus’s thin-skinned reactivity? Perhaps. It’s tempting to invoke links to vulnerable narcissism or Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria.

But there may be something more elemental: a defense of the system not only because it’s “mine,” but because it’s the moat between order and chaos. Question the framework, and you reintroduce uncertainty. Depending on your tolerance for uncertainty, that can feel painful. A state to be avoided, even at the cost of social relations.

Emily Dickinson: controlled communication

Emily Dickinson’s poems weren’t just artistic expression; they were part of a tightly choreographed communication system. They were often sent with letters to her intimates, forming part of her overall message.

While she’s remembered as a recluse, she was in fact intensely social—just not in person. She built deep relationships entirely through letters, short notes, and poems, even with people who lived nearby.

Dickinson maintained regular and frequent social contact. For instance, she wrote to her brother’s family next door every day, sometimes several times a day.

If she desired social connection, why did she avoid face-to-face encounters? In one letter, she explained her preference this way: “A Pen has so many inflections and a Voice but one.”

Live conversation was uncontrollable and unpredictable. Limited as she was to a single “Voice,” she couldn’t play with different registers of delivery, and her communications could be painfully misconstrued. She would also have to extemporate, robbing her of the chance to be deliberate with her words. In-person communication was a blunt instrument. Writing allowed calibration, nuance, and control. Through it, she was able to impose rules on the chaos of social interaction.

I suspect that’s why many autistic people sometimes prefer asynchronous or text-based interaction, as well as one-on-one socializing over groups. I certainly do. In one-on-one settings, I can have more influence in how things go. Control allows prediction. Prediction reduces uncertainty.

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The more I reflect, the more this framework holds explanatory power for autism. For instance:

• We engage in ritual and routine not just to soothe, but to reduce unpredictability to a manageable level.

• We pursue interests not just out of passion, but for the satisfaction of rendering the uncertain, certain.

• We become stressed by sensory overload in part because we struggle to habituate (as I covered in a previous post), which means things become familiar to us less quickly.

• We teach ourselves things because only firsthand experience, rather than truths handed down by others, fully resolves our doubts.

• We find socializing difficult not just because we mask to fit in, but because it’s unpredictable, chaotic even.

What if a desire to create certainty, and an avoidance of the uncertain when we’re helpless to resolve it, is the hidden logic beneath many autistic traits?

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For a pattern seeker like myself, this hypothesis has the allure of something big, something fundamental. The idea that intolerance of uncertainty could link so many disparate traits into a coherent whole scratches an itch, in an immensely satisfying way.

Still, given the seductive power of elegant theories, a dose of caution is warranted. IU excites me because it promises to impose order on what can feel like a chaotic grab-bag of autistic traits. But perhaps that’s reason enough to be skeptical. Linnaeus, after all, reminds us how the drive to classify can sometimes sacrifice accuracy. (Though to his credit, his system did leave a lasting mark.)

Even so, my gut tells me there’s something here. I’m working now on developing this idea into a conceptual framework paper. My first attempt at writing for peer-reviewed publication! I’ll share a link once the preprint is live.

And because I can’t let go of the historical figures I’ve touched on here, I’m also exploring their stories more deeply for a nonfiction book on autism, pattern-seeking, and the minds history has misunderstood.

I’d love to hear—what role has uncertainty played in your life, in your patterns of behavior?

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Research cited in this post:

• Michel J. Dugas, Fabien Gagnon, Robert Ladouceur, Mark H. Freeston, Generalized anxiety disorder: a preliminary test of a conceptual model, Behaviour Research and Therapy, Volume 36, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 215-226, ISSN 0005-7967. Abstract link

• Keefer A, Singh V, Jang YS, Alon L, Surmacz M, Holingue C, Mostofsky SH, Vasa RA. Exploring the Symptom Profiles of Intolerance of Uncertainty in Autistic Children. J Autism Dev Disord. 2024 Jan;54(1):121-130. doi: 10.1007/s10803-022-05744-3. Epub 2022 Oct 13. PMID: 36227445; PMCID: PMC10097837. Full text link

• Neil L, Olsson NC, Pellicano E. The Relationship Between Intolerance of Uncertainty, Sensory Sensitivities, and Anxiety in Autistic and Typically Developing Children. J Autism Dev Disord. 2016 Jun;46(6):1962-1973. doi: 10.1007/s10803-016-2721-9. PMID: 26864157; PMCID: PMC4860201. Abstract link

• Jenkinson R, Milne E, Thompson A. The relationship between intolerance of uncertainty and anxiety in autism: A systematic literature review and meta-analysis. Autism. 2020 Nov;24(8):1933-1944. doi: 10.1177/1362361320932437. Epub 2020 Jun 22. PMID: 32564625; PMCID: PMC7539603. Full text link

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Stay curious,

Laura

In my last post, I described the feeling of “losing access” to parts of my life—of relying on others to fill in memory gaps, especially emotional and narrative ones. I now know these autobiographical memory deficits are common in autism.

But we haven’t talked about the reasons for it. Why do these life memory deficits exist?

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Since social processing is different in autism, you might theorize that we can’t remember life events because they’re expressions of the self—and more specifically, the social self.

Contrast your birthday celebration at age 9 with the fact that earth has four layers, which maybe you learned around the same time.

The former is an instance of autobiographical memory (a blend of semantic memory that relates to yourself as well as episodic memory of personally-experienced events); the latter is semantic memory alone (semantic memory is mostly just factual information, like state capitals or why composting is good for soil).

I’m far more likely to remember that the earth’s core is liquid1 than how I celebrated a birthday. (Writing this, I realize I can’t remember any specific birthday celebrations before age 13).

Research supports the social-deficit theory, and also points to sense-of-self deficits as the culprits.

For example:

• In 2020, researchers found that people with autism (without intellectual disability) tend to have a fuzzier sense of their own identity. They also found that autistic people were less likely to use autobiographical memory for social purposes, like sharing stories. They suggested that these findings explain why autobiographical memories—especially socially significant ones—are harder to access than factual knowledge.

• In 2017, another study found that autistic adolescents (without ID) had trouble recalling both components of autobiographical memory: semantic facts about themselves (like personality traits) and personal experiences (especially ones with emotional detail). The researchers suggested that differences in how autistic people process self-knowledge may help explain why some memories—particularly those with emotional or social meaning—are harder to retrieve.

Explanations rooted in self and social relationships would explain why I can’t remember specific conversations during my birthday celebrations, or even who attended them.

Yet I also don’t remember where these birthdays took place, what the themes were, what kind of cakes I had. Those are semantic memories: facts. It’s not obvious why birthday-related facts are irretrievable, when I can remember random facts unrelated to me (like most—but not all!—of Henry VIII’s wives).2

Which is why a recent research review suggesting an additional explanation is particularly interesting.

In 2023, a review of multiple studies proposed that an altogether different challenge may explain autistic autobiographical memory challenges: scene construction.

This refers to the ability to mentally recreate the visual experience of an event: what the place looked like, how things were arranged. For instance, researchers have found that even when social or self-specific elements were stripped away (like imagining a fictitious beach or museum), autistic people described scenes with less vividness and spatial detail. The same was true for the real events of autobiographical memory; the challenges spanned both kinds of scene visualization.

This suggests that scene construction deficits may help explain why specific events from personal memories are hard to access.

This problem may also affect future thinking and spatial navigation, researchers theorized, since those skills also rely on imagining detailed scenes.

(Some anecdata to ignore at your leisure: I’ve always been known within my family for having a poor sense of direction. I get lost or disoriented easily. The correlation between spatial navigation and autobiographical memory holds up in my particular case—I have challenges with both.)

Even when given strong prompts or visual cues, autistic participants still recalled fewer sensory and spatial details than non-autistic people.

To be clear: the scene construction theory isn’t a replacement for existing explanations. The researchers argue that it is distinct from—but likely interacts with—social and self-related differences, offering an additional explanation for why autistic people may struggle to recall specific life events.

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Why was this overlooked previously?

This is one of the most interesting parts of the theory, because it demonstrates how advanced technology can reveal that earlier conclusions may have been incomplete or based on flawed data.

Our brains’ “social” and “scene-construction” networks sit right next to each other. Which may explain why researchers previously overlooked this spatial dimension of memory in autism.

Take a look at this graphic:

The brain regions shown in (a) are the “canonical social processing regions, defined from large-group studies.” They are frequent targets of autism research.

The regions highlighted in (b) were more recently identified through advanced brain imaging, fMRI. This enabled more precise location targeting, and it reveals that “social regions (blue) are adjacent to, and often interdigitated with, regions involved in scene processing (red), with little apparent overlap (purple).”

If you compare the (a) and (b) images, you’ll see that some regions thought to be social processing are actually used for scene construction, not both.

The study goes on to observe that although the red and blue regions are functionally distinct (as shown by the dearth of purple, the overlap), “the two networks can nevertheless be difficult to disentangle at the group level.” That is, group-level research might mistakenly attribute a mental process to a social region of the brain because it wasn’t able to pinpoint the highly specific scene construction brain location at work, a mere hair’s breadth away. Averaging across brains blurs the resolution needed to distinguish between closely adjacent regions.

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With that, I’m curious: if you identify with poor autobiographical memory, what’s your experience specific to scene construction—for instance, spatial navigation?

As for imagining spaces, like the museum and the beach in the example, the findings were that autistic people had deficits on a relative basis (their scenes were less vivid and detailed than those imagined by non-autistic people), which is hard to form the basis of a self-report. But if you have insights on that as well from personal experience or otherwise, please share!

PS: Are you starting to feel like I post about deficits too much? I am too. The cool thing is that deficits are sometimes one half of an evolutionary trade-off, freeing up brain resources to create strengths in other areas. I’ll explore that aspect in future posts.

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Looking for more to read? Check out these past posts:

• What we know about genetics & autism

• When the DSM gets it wrong: vulnerable narcissism and autism

Research cited in this post:

• Romain Coutelle, Marc-André Goltzene, Eric Bizet, Marie Schoenberger, Fabrice Berna, Jean-Marie Danion. 2020. Self-concept Clarity and Autobiographical Memory Functions in Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder Without Intellectual Deficiency. J Autism Dev Disord. 50(11):3874-3882. Read online.

• Sally Robinson, Patricia Howlin, Ailsa Russell. 2017. Personality traits, autobiographical memory and knowledge of self and others: A comparative study in young people with autism spectrum disorder. Autism 21(3):357-367. Read online.

• Anna M. Agron, Alex Martin, Adrian W. Gilmore. 2024. Scene construction and autobiographical memory retrieval in autism spectrum disorder. Autism Research 17(2):2024-214. Read online.

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Stay curious,

Laura

I hadn’t planned to begin with this journal entry. I found it by accident while searching my Evernote archive for the word “memory.” What turned up was uncanny.

I wrote it eight years ago, in 2017, while getting a pedicure—something I only know because I left an abrupt note to my future self at the end. At the time, I had no idea I was autistic. I was just trying to process an unusual feeling of loss after divorce.

What follows is that entry, nearly in full.

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I've always had trouble with memory. I noticed it first with movies. Friends quoted entertaining or witty lines with precision. On the other hand, I forgot critical turning points of films, entire plot points. Recently a friend asked if I remembered an apparently critical scene in Pulp Fiction. I did not, even though I did remember that I’d had to watch the film at least a dozen times for a college research assistantship. Yet I had no memory of a pivotal scene.

But that’s a harmless example. Comparing notes with my brother about our childhoods is more alarming. He remembers where we went and what we did, even who said what to whom. I remember decapitated feelings and free-floating impressions. I remember catastrophic events, but very few of the quieter moments that make up a life.

And so I rely on others to remember those things, and in doing so to reveal, in a way, who I was then. (Because who can say they are the same person over time—or that they would even want to be?)

My longest romantic relationship was with my ex-husband. We met when I was 23, he was 30. I left when I was 29, he was 36. We were miserable and suffered from an inability to connect for sustained lengths of time. But he knew me better than anyone in the world, and he probably still does.

When I think of the rare moments when I felt connected with him, it often involved his ability to tie the present to my unremembered past. “I know this look,” he’d say. “The way you're resting your elbow on the table with your palm up, the way you're lowering your chin and raising your eyes, it's just like that time we had dinner at your law professor’s house. Just before you started arguing with him.” In this way he would teasingly recall so-called “classic” moments. In his recitations and remembrances, I felt seen and loved.

After we divorced, I started having him over for dinners on Sunday. This was over a year after we had separated; I had begun and ended two new relationships in the meantime. We drank the bottle of wine he always brought and talked about our past. And without being fully aware I had missed them, I regained six lost years of my life through his ability to testify to their contents.

Prompted by these engaging dinners and the unusual connection they entailed, we got back together. And then broke up again, for good.

And so I lost access once more to that period of my life I had regained, and to the more complete sense of myself he offered. It’s as if a library holding rare volumes, the only copies in the world, burned to ashes. The volumes mattered only to me and so it’s a personal tragedy, but a tragedy nonetheless.

Without a witness who has paid close and curious attention to the way I was and am, I feel erased.

As it pertains to my memories (or lack thereof), this all feels true still and I’m grateful to my past self for writing it down. But it leaves something out.

In certain ways, my memory is excellent. As a lawyer, I can recall the minutiae of a case—names, dates, document details—on the spot, without notes. It’s served me especially well in court. If an opposing counsel fudges a fact, I can tick through the rebuttal in real time, citing specific evidence from specific documents. I well, actually the hell out of them. Once, in a long case against a particularly misogynistic attorney, I did it so thoroughly the judge ordered that the other side pay my attorney’s fees—twice!—because I’d shown, line by line and in real time, just how unsupported his claims were.

So my recall is inconsistent: excellent for facts that don’t involve me; terrible for events from my own life.

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What is autobiographical memory?

Until recently, I hadn’t encountered the term autobiographical memory. But according to a 2022 comprehensive review, it describes what I wrestle with: the ability to remember the events of your own life, including what happened, where, when, and how you felt.

Autobiographical memory weaves together different types of memory—facts, emotions, sensory details—into coherent scenes.

Researchers often describe autobiographical memory as a form of “mental time travel.” It’s not just recalling facts; it’s reliving personal moments as if you were there once more.

For everyone—neurodivergent and neurotypical alike—these memories serve three core functions:

1. Self-identity. Remembering your past helps you understand who you are over time.

2. Social connection. Shared memories create continuity and bonds in relationships.

3. Directive use. Drawing on past experiences guides us in making decisions and imagining (and preparing for) the future.

Even the perspective from which we recall autobiographical memories has been studied. We revisit these memories in either field mode (through our own eyes) or observer mode (watching ourselves as if we’re a character in a film).

When I read that, I realized that I almost always remember in observer mode.

Other firsthand autistic accounts

The struggle I described back in 2017 isn’t unique to me.

Reddit provides the richest trove of firsthand autistic experiences to be found online, and there are countless posts and comments on this topic.

A sampling:

• “My memory is either very sharp or absolute garbage, it’s annoying.” (link)

• “My partner often expresses their worry for how bad my memory is, I don’t remember most of the things we’ve done together in the past, if I do remember it’s usually just the emotions surrounding them.” (link)

• “I had all kinds of problems in my last relationship because of this. They’d be mad at me for not remembering going to a specific store with them, or not remembering some small event that happened years ago.” (link)

• “I have this and am shocked by how bad it is. My best friend has a good memory and I'm amazed by how often she brings stuff up that I have no recollection of. It must get annoying for her.” (link)

• “My family brings up things I've done that I completely forgot. Like sewing by hand an entire eternal sailor Jupiter costume.” (link)

• “I essentially can’t remember my life at all. Apart from a few glimpse my childhood is complete gone for me. Eg. I went to boarding school for two years and can’t remember a single day. I went to university for 4 years and essentially can't remember any of it. I retain the knowledge, but can’t practically remember any of it.” (link)

• “I can tell you facts like ‘I went to school at whatever university, studied this major, worked at this agency, then moved to some city’ but a lot of memories of day to day experiences are just gone. Once in a while people will say ‘do you remember when we did xyz’ and I just won’t. Makes me kinda sad.” (link)

Commenters have also supplied their theories for these personal memory losses: burnout, trauma, masking, aphantasia. And many express anxiety over it. “I am really worried for myself. I don’t remember my life. It’s like I have Alzheimer’s,” a poster wrote.

Not everyone in these threads has memory deficits. Some say they remember too much, especially painful experiences. But at least according to these self-reports, profound disruptions to autobiographical memory appear to be more the rule than the exception.

Reddit comments aren’t scientific data, but they offer a kind of distributed anecdotal evidence. And in this case (as in many others), the research backs them up.

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Autobiographical memory impairment and autism

There is resounding evidence that autobiographical memory is impaired in people with autism.

The aforementioned 2022 review by Carol Westby summarized the striking ways in which autobiographical memory is often impaired in autistic people. Research has found that we tend to:

• Recall fewer memories overall, especially specific, one-time events

• Retain less detail: fewer sights, sounds, emotions, and contextual cues

• Take longer to retrieve memories, or struggle to access them at all

• Recall general patterns more easily than specific episodes

• Struggle to place events in time or understand the sequence

• Have a reduced ability to describe our own past emotional states

• Remember from an outside perspective (observer mode) more often

• Show stronger memory for facts (semantic) than for lived experiences (episodic)

• Have a weaker connection between personal traits and personal memories

• Find it harder to use past experience to plan or problem-solve

• Construct less coherent life narratives—making it harder to feel like you have a stable identity over time

• Engage in less autobiographical reasoning (connecting the past to a larger sense of meaning or growth)

• Experience diminished mental time travel to both the past and future

• Recall actions performed by others more readily than actions performed by ourselves

While some researchers started mapping these impairments as early as 2006, the scope and depth are still coming into focus.

In fact, just last year a new compelling explanation was offered for why these deficits occur. That will be the focus of a future post. (Trying to keep a reasonable length here!)

Augmenting my mind with an external archive

What strikes me most, rereading my 2017 journal entry, is how closely I described what I now know is a distinctly autistic experience. I noticed the connection between memory and selfhood, and how my inability to recall the events of my life left me feeling “erased.”

I also now recognize the loss of the directive function described in the research. How memory helps us use the past to understand the present and predict the future. I have a gnawing suspicion that I’ve had the same insights multiple times in my life without realizing it. That I’ve arrived at personal truths, forgotten the paths that led me there, and then rediscovered them later, thinking they were new.

Finding the 2017 entry—having no memory of writing it—brought this suspicion home.

It’s become clear that I need help accessing my own life. I need to write things down not just to share them with others but to preserve them for myself.

I had already noticed this when it came to parenting. Other parents recall when their kids first crawled, or what they were like as babies. I struggle with this, and it’s painful. The vivid child in front of me elbows out any ability to picture how they were before. I’m lucky to have photos and videos, but I’m starting to see how important narrative is, too.

So I’ve begun writing down everyday occurrences: the funny phrases my kids invent, the obsessions of the week, other fleeting moments. These small things add up to something monumental that I don’t want to lose.

I don’t regularly keep up with it; something more pressing always comes up. But writing this piece is impressing on me just how important that practice is. When my kids are grown, I won’t be able to tell the story of their childhoods from memory. So I need to create an archive for us all to draw from.

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Looking for more to read? Check out these past posts:

• When you see yourself in your child—and start worrying for two

• My autistic special interests: the fire that burns itself out

Research cited in this post:

• Carol Westby. 2022. Nature and Effects of Autobiographical Memory Issues in Persons with Autism Spectrum Disorders. Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment 2022:18 2279-2293. Read online.

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Stay curious,

Laura

Still, I decided to share this as an honest reflection of where I am — and how I feel — with the sense that I’m probably not alone.

My life runs on two planes. On the surface there are the rituals and logistics of daily living: ordering socks, snuggling kids, RVSP’ing (late) to birthday parties, watching streaming TV, forgetting to walk the poor dog. This is the domain where things are generally fine. It’s hard raising young kids but in a specific, temporary way.

Underneath is a slow-moving, cold current of dread. I have a constant, general worry about things I have no control over: the planet, my children’s futures, the way people seem to be OK with misery on a mass scale so long as it doesn’t touch them. I’m not always conscious of this current but it’s continuously there, shaping my thinking.

The other day while drawing, my daughter said, “I want to be an artist when I grow up.” I smiled and told her that was awesome. Then I thought: What will the world look like when she’s grown? What kind of choices will she really have?

I think lots of people are feeling this heaviness but hide it beneath the regular interactions: How was your weekend? Doing any travel this summer?

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I’ve been reading the wartime letters and diaries of Tove Jansson, the Finnish artist and writer best known for her mid-century children’s series the Moomins. She’s not well known here in the United States; that’s our collective loss.

In the early 1940s, Finland was at war fending off the Soviet Union’s annexation attempts and aligned, for a time, with Nazi Germany — a compromised position borne of desperation and proximity that played out against the larger World War.

Jansson, then in her late twenties, lived through it all in Helsinki where she worked as a political cartoonist and recorded her thoughts in letters and diary entries.

In July 1941, Jansson wrote a Jewish friend who had fled to the United States: “The fact is that life is just waiting now, one isn’t really living, one just exists.”

Later that same summer, she tried to hold onto hope: “Deep down one firmly believes all will be well — that we’ll all meet again, that we’ll all be able to be happy.”

But in November, she sounded a more desperate note: “It’s as if the whole world has become a lump of anguish. I have never seen friendliness so mixed with bitterness, love with hate, and the will to live a good and worthy life so mixed with the pleasure of just getting out of the way and letting go.”

These contrasting pairs are woven throughout her wartime writings: friendliness and bitterness, love and hate, worthiness and withdrawal. Reading her letters, I found myself comforted by the way she acknowledged these ever-present contradictions.

“You have to either scream and quarrel or keep silent,” she wrote. “I’ve chosen to keep silent.”

Jansson may have chosen silence sometimes, but you wouldn’t know it from her outward work. While her brother was fighting on Finland’s front lines, Jansson waged her own battle — in cartoons.

She designed hundreds of cartoons for the national magazine Garm. These were not warm and cuddly, like the later Moomins. These satirical cartoons were brazen attacks on Stalin and Hitler, at a time when Finland was still ambivalent toward the latter and it was dangerous to be an outspoken critic of either — the war’s outcome being uncertain.

Hitler was helping Finland fight that war; an ally for a time. For her attacks on Hitler, Jansson barely dodged prosecution for “insulting a leader of a friendly foreign power.”

Looking back on this period Jansson later wrote, “I enjoyed working for Garm, and what I liked best was being beastly to Hitler and Stalin.”

But this piece isn’t really about Jansson’s outspoken stands.

It’s about the odd familiarity of her accounts of herself and society.

She wrote of how the Finnish people became more entrenched on their respective sides instead of coming together, implicitly rejecting any whiff of contradiction in favor of all-in identities:

Pressed by the compulsion to keep silent, isolated by anxiety for their own little circle, each withdraws further into his or her shell. The great events around us, instead of broadening our vision, have contracted it to a petty obstinacy; in their panic, people firmly fix themselves to the misguided terminology of nationalistic slogans; boundaries became ever more inflexible and logic goes out of the window. The old principles and prejudices are asserted ever more widely. In this chaos of monologues contact becomes completely impossible with a people who even before were incommunicative and stubborn.

That could just as equally describe how people in the US and elsewhere reacted to pandemic fears by retreating further into tribalism and scapegoating. It’s only gotten worse since then. Why understand the other side when you can condemn?

The connection came to mind because Jansson’s description of wartime polarization in Finland evoked Naomi Klein’s incisive treatment in Doppelganger of how the pandemic’s anxiety produced the same dynamic in our time.

Jansson also wrote on a personal level about the continuous dread buried beneath her surface persona:

As things are, anxiety grips me; even though from the outside I might seem to be living an ordinary daily life, working as usual — if I feel happy, there is always a dark, burrowing background of anguish and a mass of gruesomely clear images in the imagination that are not always easy to chase away.

This is just what I was describing at the start — those two planes of living.

What comforts me about Jansson’s writings is a sense that contradiction is normal in these freighted moments. It’s natural to feel torn, sometimes to “scream” and sometimes “keep silent.” This is the reality of trying to live an ethical life under strain.

More than once she wrote of ignoring the news, of keeping the radio off, of avoiding the telephone. “They dig up everything that’s smouldering and burning deep inside you,” she said.

I’ve done the same these past years, a kind of hiding that feels cowardly. Not because I don’t care; because I care too much, and there’s only so much you can take. Jansson’s example shows me that on a historic scale, that’s a normal reaction to societal crisis, which makes it feel more OK.

Jansson’s writings have lingered in my mind. Not because they offer clarity on today’s (very different) events — they don’t — but because they mirror the confusion and anxiety many of us feel now.

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I’m reminded of Anne Helen Peterson’s recent piece “The World Has Always Been on Fire.” She explores many ideas about our current societal and historical moment, and there are convergences with Jansson’s writings on the theme of contradictions and contrasts.

Peterson rejects the idea that “creating art in dark times is somehow inappropriate — or evidence of a lack of commitment to justice.” We don’t have to be all one way or another, just as Jansson wasn’t in her decision at times to scream and at others to keep silent. We don’t have to flee contradictions, like writing about “romance or frivolity or joy or fantasy” (Peterson’s words) when we also feel despair. We can live with contradiction; we need to live with contradiction.

By accepting contradiction we can make progress. “If a burning world is our lived reality,” Peterson asks, “how do we continue to steer ourselves towards the sort of compassion that might create a different one?”

The answer, she says, is not to “police” each other or “parse others’ good-faith posts for ill-intent.” I find myself wanting to pause there. Because Petersen quickly moves to clarify — to defend the point — by adding that she’s “not saying make friends with fascists.” But I wish she had stayed longer with the original claim: that we don’t need to parse and police to move forward with our principles.

Because I think that’s another aspect of living with contradiction. That just as we can be OK with our contradictory insides, we can be OK with contradictory outsides, too. What happens when we openly acknowledge that we disagree and agree with the same person on different issues? What happens if we remain allied with a person who says things that are “right,” but also says things that are “wrong”?

What’s at stake when we demand perfection and consistency is stagnation versus movement. When we accept contradiction in ourselves, we don’t get stuck trying to fit into a single shape. When we accept it in others, we can sidestep the subplots and skirmishes that keep us circling the same ground. Being OK with contradiction means avoiding the all or nothing trap that keeps us glued to one place. Paraphrasing Peterson, we can use our energy to move with clearer purpose in the direction of the world we want.

Let’s reject purity tests in all forms; they’re insidious no matter the context. Perfection — and its cousin, consistency — are not realistic goals for any of us.

There’s no tidy resolution here, which may be just as well for a post that’s mostly about contradiction. Jansson’s writings give us something other than clarity: recognition, permission, and an invitation to acknowledge the contradiction and keep going.

For more on Tove Jansson, an extraordinary person, I can’t recommend highly enough Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words by Boel Westin.

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Looking for more to read? Check out these past posts:

• Divine inspiration, creative possession: how insights emerge fully formed

• The root of storytelling is pattern

Hello! I hope your summer is kicking off well. I’m mostly doing my best to dodge the rising East Coast heat. Summer is my least favorite season (I tell uncomprehending sun-lovers to think of me as a friendly vampire).

I’ve been writing recently about book proposal-related topics (e.g., problems with biography, the root of creative insight), but this latest post marks a return to form with a research deep dive. I hope you enjoy!

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The more I read, the more I become convinced our current approach to describing and defining psychiatric disorders is hopelessly flawed.

It’s not possible to cover all my research learnings here. (My Reader app says I’ve annotated over 100 research studies on neurodivergence… oh god).

So I’ll illustrate what I’m talking about with an example: problems with the DSM’s approach to narcissistic personality disorder (shorthand: NPD or narcissism) and how it obscured a link to autism.

Two tracks: clinical practice v. research

When it comes to our understanding of psychiatric conditions, there are separate tracks: clinical, and research. (This is… mostly relevant, so bear with me.)

The clinical track is represented by the DSM (and its international equivalent the ICD), which are used by clinicians as diagnostic tools. Clinicians are the ones who diagnose and treat patients. They adhere to official manuals for a number of reasons: credibility, consistency, practicality.

The DSM is published by the American Psychiatric Association, and any revision goes through a multi-year process involving expert working groups, public comment, internal review panels, and a vote by the APA’s Board of Trustees. This is diagnostic definition-by-committee; a process that is biased toward conventional thinking and slow to evolve.

The research track, on the other hand, is comprised of the decentralized patchwork of scientific research. Whereas clinical approaches are mostly dictated by the singular authority of the DSM, research teams are free to pose whatever hypotheses they like and see what the evidence says. They build on past ideas, but they’re not bound by them.

Research findings sometimes conflict, which can be a good thing. Conflicts surface methodological flaws, as we’ll see in a study below, leading to breakthroughs.

Changes to the DSM require years of vetting and layers of process. On the research side, well-evidenced and persuasive findings can rapidly float to the top and springboard further investigation. That’s not to say research is perfect. But it’s the more innovative and up-to-date of the two tracks.

Which is all to say: If you want to truly understand psychiatric disorders, dogmatic adherence to the DSM is not the way. We’ll see that in action in a bit.

Rethinking the DSM’s approach to narcissism

More relevant context: the DSM’s approach to narcissistic personality disorder.

NPD was added to the DSM-3 in 1980. Contextualized as one of 11 personality disorders, narcissism’s diagnostic definition was heavily influenced by psychoanalytic theory.

Today, the DSM-5-TR defines NPD as “a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts,” and sets forth nine sub-criteria, five of which must be present for diagnosis.

Although the DSM presents NPD as a single disorder, by 2009 researchers were proposing two distinct phenotypes based on clear variability within the NPD population: grandiose narcissism and vulnerable narcissism.

What’s the difference between these two types?

• Grandiose narcissism is marked by arrogant, aggressive, attention-seeking, and exploitative behavior, a lack of empathy, and self-serving beliefs about one’s own importance and entitlement. “These individuals can be socially charming, despite being oblivious to the needs of others, and are interpersonally exploitative,” a 2015 study notes.

• Vulnerable narcissism is marked by hypersensitivity to criticism or failure, avoidant or inhibited social behavior, perfectionism, and acute, intrusive shame. “Interpersonally these individuals are often shy, outwardly self-effacing, and hypersensitive to slights, while harboring secret grandiosity.”

Growing appreciation of narcissism’s variability prompted a slight change in 2013’s DSM-5 edition, which allowed for more nuanced presentations.

(Illustrating the DMS’s definition-by-committee approach, NPD was initially proposed to be dropped from the DSM-5 for lack of empirical support, but a group of clinicians and researchers successfully lobbied for its continued inclusion. This supports my point above, that the DSM is biased toward conventional thinking.)

The DSM today describes a “single, relatively homogenous syndrome” that doesn’t account for the wide range of real-world presentations. “Individuals with narcissistic personality disorder may be grandiose or self-loathing, extraverted or socially isolated, captains of industry or unable to maintain steady employment, model citizens or prone to antisocial activities,” the 2015 study noted.

Nor does the DSM acknowledge what researchers now align on: there are (at least) two different kinds of narcissism. (Some researchers present evidence for a third, “high-functioning” category alongside “grandiose” and “vulnerable.”)

Researchers aren’t sure if these types even belong under the same label. Grandiose and vulnerable narcissism could be extreme ends of the same continuum, but it’s also possible they’re different conditions entirely. This is a focus of current research.

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The broader problem with the DSM and personality disorders

We just saw problems with the DSM’s treatment of NPD. But there’s a growing belief that the DSM’s approach to all personality disorders is flawed.

Researchers increasingly believe that personality disorders aren’t distinct, diagnosable pathologies. Instead, they are loosely defined, overlapping clusters of traits that lack strong empirical support.

A core goal of diagnostic manuals like the DSM is to guide treatment through diagnosis. But in addition to lacking empirical support, the DSM’s personality disorders don’t reliably map onto effective treatment plans. There’s simply too much variability within each category.

If these diagnostic labels don’t reflect well-defined conditions, nor do they inform effective treatment, is the current system really serving us?

Many researchers think not. There’s a growing trend toward using the Five Factor Model (FFM)—a trait-based system that categorizes personality along five broad dimensions and their facets—to study psychological conditions. Against that backdrop, some experts believe that personality “disorders” are extreme or maladaptive variants of normal personality traits.

This aligns with a trend in autism research. Guided by genetic evidence, researchers increasingly see most forms of autism as a concentration of “normal” traits. (Normal because they circulate in the general population). Under this framework, autism’s individual traits are not atypical. What is atypical is their concentration in a single individual.

(I covered this polygenic understanding of autism in a prior post.)

New research: Autism and vulnerable narcissism

All of this sets the stage for a recent study that found a link between autism and vulnerable narcissism.

Researchers had already observed through the lens of the Five Factor Model that autistic individuals and people high in vulnerable (but not grandiose) narcissism tend to score high on neuroticism. Neuroticism is one of the eponymous Five Factors and is marked by emotional reactivity, self-doubt, and sensitivity to stress.

These shared links to neuroticism raised an interesting possibility: could autism and vulnerable narcissism be directly connected?

A team of researchers in Milan set out to test that idea. In 2024, they published the first study to directly measure traits of vulnerable and grandiose narcissism in autistic adults (without intellectual disability).

They administered a widely used narcissism questionnaire (the PNI-52) to 87 autistic adults and compared their responses to a large normative sample.

The results were striking: autistic participants scored significantly higher on vulnerable narcissism traits, but not on grandiose traits.

Roughly one-third of participants scored high enough to suggest a pathological narcissism diagnosis. Pathological narcissism is when narcissistic traits are severe enough to interfere with emotional functioning, relationships, or self-regulation. This risk was driven almost entirely by the group’s scores on the vulnerable subscale, not the grandiose one.

The study also found that vulnerable narcissism was strongly correlated with autistic social communication difficulties. The more social difficulties someone reported on an autism measure, the more likely they were to score high in vulnerable narcissism.

A shared sensitivity?

So why the link between autism and vulnerable narcissism?

The researchers propose a couple explanations.

One is based in neuroticism, the personality trait associated with emotional sensitivity, self-doubt, and difficulty regulating negative emotions. Neuroticism tends to be elevated both in autistic individuals and in people high in vulnerable narcissism. This was the common link that initially prompted the study. In other words, this presence of this trait is a shared causal factor.

Another explanation involves the more specific trait of sensory sensitivity. This trait is commonly found in autism but was only recently linked to vulnerable narcissism. It involves heightened sensitivity to sensory and emotional input, which can make social environments feel overwhelming.

The researchers propose that both autism and vulnerable narcissism result from this underlying sensitivity. In people who are especially reactive to criticism, uncertainty, or social overload, these sensitivities may lead to coping strategies like withdrawal, perfectionism, or internalized shame, which are patterns that appear in both profiles.

This raises a deeper question: to what extent are vulnerable narcissism and autism truly distinct conditions, versus diverse presentations of a shared genetic foundation?

That question is likely to shape future research.

Why this link was missed before

And here’s the aspect of the study that underscores shortcomings in the DSM’s approach to NPD.

There were earlier studies that found no correlation between autism and narcissism. At first glance, the 2024 study seems to contradict those studies.

But there’s a clear explanation: the prior research treated narcissism as a single construct, following the DSM’s lead. Those studies did not disentangle grandiose and vulnerable narcissism scores and test them separately.

Once the two kinds of narcissism are independently tested, a different picture emerges. The association between autism and vulnerable narcissism, previously hidden, becomes visible.

This is what I meant earlier when I said that conflicting research findings can sometimes expose methodological flaws.

In this case, the flaw was relying on the DSM’s definition of narcissism as a single condition — an approach that has been criticized for more than a decade — in studies of narcissism and autism. The Milan team broke from that pattern by treating grandiose and vulnerable narcissism as distinct constructs. That innovation allowed them to uncover links to autism that had previously been obscured.

What else are we getting wrong?

This study illustrates the value of getting granular with psychological profiles and staying open to new frameworks. What we currently label as a single disorder may turn out to be multiple, distinct conditions that never should have been grouped together in the first place. Or, distinct conditions may end up having a common basis and should be linked together.

More broadly, our system of “disorder” labeling may be flawed. Many so-called pathologies might just be maladaptive concentrations of common traits, deemed maladaptive only because they clash with a society built around the more prevalent templates.

Rethinking “disorders” this way could open the door to a better understanding of difference, and to more effective support for traits that cause distress across a range of conditions, rather than siloed treatments based on arbitrary line-drawing.

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Looking for more to read? Check out these past posts:

• My autistic special interests: the fire that burns itself out

• Evolutionary mismatch: just one part of the neurodivergence story

Research cited in this post:

• Eve Caligor, Kenneth N. Levy, Frank E. Yeomans. 2015. Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Diagnostic and Clinical Challenges. American Journal of Psychiatry 172(5):415-422. Read it online.

• Giovanni Broglia, Veronica Nisticò, Bianca Di Paolo, Raffaella Faggioli, Angelo Bertani, Orsola Gambini, Benedetta Demartini. 2024. Traits of narcissistic vulnerability in adults with autism spectrum disorders without intellectual disabilities. Autism Research 2024 17:138-147. Read it online.

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Stay curious,

Laura

History has been misread through a neurotypical lens.

That’s the central thesis of a book proposal I’m working on, which proposes to examine misreadings of historical figures and promote greater nuance in depicting different kinds of minds.

I’ve got the deep research part of the equation covered (oh boy do I). But I know nothing about writing biography, even though I’m proposing to write a dozen side-by-side profiles of historical figures. How does life writing work? Where do I start? Not with birth for every one of them, surely.

I’m not a just wing it! kind of person. So rather than plunge in, I set out to study the art of biography itself. This has been a useful detour because in the process I’ve sharpened why I think this project is so important.

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How biography began

There are countless books on writing fiction, memoir, screenplays, but comparatively few on biography. For such a popular genre it’s a surprising gap. What is biography? Why does it matter? What are the rules and how might they be broken?

My self-education started with Hermione Lee’s Biography, A Very Short Introduction. Lee is a celebrated biographer, mostly focusing on other writers like Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Philip Roth, and Tom Stoppard.

To start, Lee offers a simple definition of biography: “the story of a person told by someone else.” A story, not an “account,” because “biography is a form of narrative, not just a presentation of facts.”

(Which is what scares me. I’m good with facts and research. I’m a lawyer; I can assemble a compelling case. But the storytelling aspect? I can’t even tell a joke.)

Biography has its roots in the ancient stories of exemplary figures, Lee tells us. These stories were designed to instruct, to model, to awe: the accounts of the Egyptian Pharaohs; the titanic profiles in the Old Testament. Although there are exceptions, these were mostly one-dimensional.

Noah, of Ark fame, is presented as a singularly righteous person but says almost nothing and displays little interiority. He obeys, builds, survives, gets drunk. (“When he drank some of its wine, he became drunk and lay uncovered inside his tent.”)

Next came the classical life-story tellers, Herodotus and Suetonius, who added more shape. And then the hagiographers who backtracked to flatness. Hagiographies are lives of saints, meant to prove their holiness; the goal wasn’t to depict a real person but to outline a holy model.

Our modern form of biography was really born with Plutarch (40-120 CE) and his Parallel Lives. It features 23 paired profiles (46 total), of figures like Alexander the Great and Cicero. They are presented in pairs to invite comparison and contrast.

“I am not writing history but biography,” Plutarch explained. He argued, for the first time, that the big events of a life—“the most outstanding exploits”—were not the most illuminating. “Often, in fact, a casual action, the odd phrase, or a jest reveals character better than battles involving the loss of thousands upon thousands of lives.”

One such detail: Plutarch recounts in his Life of Solon that when the dramatist Thespis claimed that inserting lies into his tragedies was harmless play, Solon struck his staff against the ground and warned, “If we praise and approve of such jests as these, we shall soon find people jesting with our business.”

It’s a moment of theatrical protest that reveals Solon’s black-and-white thinking, his discomfort with artifice, and his belief that invention, once permitted, will not stay bounded—a concern that resonates with the liberties some biographers take. I’ll come back to that soon.

Whereas the early life stories turned mortals into larger-than-life figures, Plutarch did the reverse: he cut legendary figures down to size. He stripped men of “the pageantry of life,” John Dryden wrote in his 17th-century life of Plutarch. “You see the poor reasonable animal, as naked as nature ever made him; are made acquainted with his passions and his follies, and find the Demi-God a man.”

(In a powerful parable of biography’s impact, Plutarch’s Lives helped Frankenstein’s monster break through his own one-dimensionality into a fully-fleshed being).

“Catching a likeness”

Biographers often analogize their work to portrait painting.

If a dozen artists paint the portrait of the same studio model, you get a dozen distinct images. Each artist makes countless choices: which parts of the face to render in detail, how to interpret the sitter’s expression, what style of brushwork to use, and so on. And there are also unconscious decisions, produced by the limitations of their abilities or their unexamined point of view.

The end result is one depiction among an infinite number of possibilities. Success lies in whether the depiction reveals some truth. Not the whole truth—that would be impossible—but enough to find meaning.

“Catching a likeness,” is how Lee phrases the aim of the biographer. In 1814, William Hazlitt wrote that “portrait-painting is the biography of the pencil.”

What biography is today

Biography evolved from its one-dimensional focus on actions alone to address psychology, too. This started with Plutarch but took off in the 20th century, when Freud began his interrogations of mind and subconscious. “Western biography from this time has more to say about contradictions and fluctuations in identity, and about the unknowability of the self,” Lee says.

And so, biography has evolved alongside psychology and the social sciences, as tools for understanding character have grown more nuanced.

Today biographers wrestle with the why of the person; the fundamental puzzle of nature versus nurture. Was the person always going to be this way? Or were they formed, as Lee puts it, “by accidents, contingencies, education, and environment”? Of course it’s not an either/or proposition, and the work is tracing the confluence of factors that make the person who they are.

Biographers today, in my view, tend to overrate nurture and underrate nature—a tendency that reflects a broader cultural belief in our own agency. You see the same impulse in the early days of autism research, when “refrigerator moms” were blamed for their children’s perceived coldness and self-containment. And it persists today in the resistance to autism’s genetic basis: the insistent search for an external cause that might, by implication, offer a means of prevention. We fear that something so fateful might lie outside our control.

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When biography fakes it

I say what I mean, and I run into trouble because I assume others do the same. I take what people say literally.

Until fairly recently, I thought that if historical nonfiction or biography uses quotation marks to set off a person’s speech, then the person really uttered those words.

I only realized this wasn’t necessarily the case when my practicality overcame my gullibility: I’d read conversations for which there is no transcribed record, or details of mundane events that have no original source.

I’m uncomfortable with this fabrication. On the one hand, dramatization makes for a more entertaining read, and imagined dialogue can have a “ring of truth.” But how does the biographer ensure that they’re toeing the line? That they aren’t venturing into mere fantasy?

I have a particular objection when such embellishment isn’t signaled in the text.

Here’s an example, from Carole Angier’s Jean Rhys: Life and Work (1985), describing a scene where a teenage Rhys goes school clothes-shopping with her aunt in London, where Rhys spots:

an elegant three-quarter length coat and a grey fur collar. “Oh do let me have it,” she pleaded – but silently, inwardly. “I will be so different if you do, you’ll like me better, oh I must have one pretty thing . . . .” But the price ticket said twenty-five guineas. “Not at all suitable,” Aunt Clarice said; and chose one for four guineas instead [...] Jean said nothing, but she was heartbroken. How could she appear before a lot of strange girls in such a hideous thing? “They’re bound to dislike me,” she thought.

Flipping through Angier’s references, I don’t see any source for these specific thoughts, and they didn’t feature in Rhys’s autobiography, which I’ve read. From my extensive readings of Rhys, these imagined thoughts about the fur coat clang like discordant notes. They don’t sound like her.1

Another example, from Stephen Backhouse’s Kierkegaard: A Single Life (2020), depicts an undated scene at a popular cafe fronting a Copenhagen square, where two old grandees sat people-watching:

They did not see Søren coming, but as this odd man lurched by their table, arm outstretched to order his third coffee of the day to go with his fourth cigar, they would have been jostled.

Really? There can’t possibly be a record that on this particular day these two old farts were “jostled” by an unseen Søren. This is less problematic because it doesn’t invent thoughts, but I still find it distracting.

The proper boundaries of invention

Perhaps it’s my literalness that makes me uneasy. But I’m not the only one who values an accurate story over an entertaining one.

I have company in Jean Rhys herself, the subject of the first biography sampled above. The editor’s foreword to Smile Please (1979), Rhys’s autobiography, explained that Rhys insisted on accuracy at the expense of breadth:

In a factual account she would have to rely on memory, not instinct, and this alarmed her. Her honesty was uncommonly strict, so she felt that the only dialogue she could use in such a book would be that which she was perfectly sure she remembered exactly.

Rhys’s approach to autobiography was not typical, so this offers rich insight into how her mind worked. A counterpoint: Ford Madox Ford, Rhys’s novelist mentor (and onetime romantic partner), was known for crafting legends about himself that he carried forward in sensationalized “autobiographies.”

Seat me on the Rhys side of the aisle.

Yet I’ve learned that a biographer doesn’t have to choose one or the other: entertainment at the cost of integrity, or integrity at the expense of telling a good story.

Although some biographers adhere strictly to primary-source documentation, others allow for limited reconstruction if the speculation is clearly marked. For instance, signposting with “she might have felt…” or “perhaps…”

Signposting seems essential if you’re going to invent. Otherwise the reader is left to puzzle out what’s based on evidence and what’s imagined. Maybe that’s a simple task for some, but for those who—like me—have a tendency to take things at face value, we might be misled.

Lee’s book mostly avoids being prescriptive as to how biography should be written, but she comes closest when the topic of invention comes up.

“Plenty of biographers dramatize their narratives with descriptions of emotions, highly-coloured scene setting, and strategies of suspense.” But it can go too far, Lee writes:

Some biographies read more like fiction than history. This can attract readers, but can also give the genre a bad name. John Updike once remarked that most biographies are just “novels with indexes.”

For Lee, the harm extends beyond marring the genre’s reputation. “Untruths gather weight by being repeated and can congeal into the received version of a life, repeated in biography after biography until or unless unpicked,” she cautions.

I’ve seen this dynamic in a frequently told story about Rhys and two dolls: one “fair,” one “dark.” A biographer interpreted the dark doll, given to Rhys’s sister, as a Black doll—despite no textual support for that reading. In fact, the dolls likely mirrored the sisters’ appearances: Rhys had light coloring; her sister was dark-haired, suggesting that the dolls were chosen to match the girls. Rhys wanted the dark doll, and when she didn’t get it, she smashed the fair one’s head with a stone. From this, the biographer inferred that Rhys was violently rejecting her whiteness from a desire to be Black—a speculative reading built on a false premise. If anything, the episode suggests a revolt against her alienation within the family unit: Rhys was the only blonde in the dark-haired family. She was also the only one of five children who was socially inept and “alien,” which singled her out for harsh treatment. That she was the only one with light hair was symbolic of her more essential divergence.2

The biographer should resist the urge to gap-fill with invention, Lee says. When the historical record is spotty, “then the true story would have to take the form of unanswerable questions or gaps in the records.”

Toward a new way of reading lives

The problem I’m pinpointing here gives me confidence in my purpose. As I wrote at the start, my strong belief is that history has been misread with a neurotypical lens. This misreading can then be compounded if invented thoughts or words are attributed to a subject, based on assumed neurotypical thinking patterns.

My project shines a spotlight on the problem of assuming neurotypicality when examining history. I seek not only greater fidelity to individual minds but also to surface the buried assumptions that have historically carried life-story telling.

I will be clear that in my profiles, I’m offering neurodivergent readings. The reader can agree with those readings or not based on the evidence I present. The important thing is to be transparent, to bring subtext to the level of text.

Why should anyone care?

In a book proposal workshop I’m in, we’re asked repeatedly to justify our projects. Why should anyone care? Why is this book needed?

It’s a critical exercise that pushes us to be precise about our aim and the surrounding stakes.

I’m currently reading a collective biography that I picked up for inspiration, but have found myself utterly absorbed by.

It’s Jane Austen’s Bookshelf by Rebecca Romney, an exploration of the forgotten women writers who inspired Austen. In an early chapter, Romney reflects that themes from Evelina, an 18th-century novel by Frances Burney that Austen loved, surprisingly echo moments of Romney’s own modern coming of age.

Romney writes:

This is why we continue to read books centuries after they were first published: not because they have reached some subjective standard of ‘perfection,’ as some critics like to suggest, but because they still have something to say that is meaningful to us.

I underlined these words. They apply equally to biography, I think. We continue to care about lives—imperfect lives—centuries later because they reveal meaning in the present day.

My project is to recover the meaning that has been distorted or lost when lives are read through a neurotypical lens.

Tell me in a comment: What’s the best—or most recent—biography you’ve read? What do you look for in biography, and what irks you?

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Looking for more to read? Check out these past posts:

• The root of storytelling is pattern

• "I can't make it sincere enough": Karen Read, Amanda Knox, and the performance of innocence