Strange Clarity: Neurodivergent History

Living with contradiction: Tove Jansson’s wartime diaries, and ours

Laura Moore — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 12:41:03 GMT

This post has been sitting in draft for a little while. I kept hesitating to hit “publish.” It’s one thing to say these things privately; another to say them publicly. I’m admitting that I’m not always brave, and I don’t always have clarity of vision. Most of the time, I’m observing from the sidelines, offering only financial support for the things I care about.

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.

Tove Jansson in her studio (public domain)

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.”

A selection of Jansson’s Garm covers during World War II

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.

Illustration from Comet in Moominland (1946), from tovejansson.com

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.

Biography and the temptation to make things up

Laura Moore — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 14:02:26 GMT

Gertrude Vernon, Lady Agnew of Lochnaw by John Singer Sargent, 1892

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.

A 1579 edition of Plutarch’s influential Lives

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.

Virginia Woolf, the subject of a biography by Lee, wrote an essay The Art of Biography

“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.

Sigmund Freud, Stanley Hall, Carl Gustav Jung, Abraham Arden Brill, Ernest Jones and Sándor Ferenczi, 1909

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.

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.

Jean Rhys, author of Wide Sargasso Sea (date unknown)

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.

A 1951 stamp from Dominica, the Caribbean island where Rhys grew up, depicting King George VI

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.

Frances Burney (1752-1840), a subject of the recent book Jane Austen’s Bookshelf, painted by her cousin Edward Francis Burney

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?

Before vaccines, we blamed fairies

Laura Moore — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 14:14:39 GMT

illustration by Ida Rentoul Outhwaite (public domain)

RFK Jr. is in the news again, this time claiming that genetics is a “dead end” explanation for autism.

“These are kids who, many of them, were fully functional and regressed because of some environmental exposure into autism when they’re 2 years old,” he said.

He’s wrong, but not just because the research doesn’t support him.

What he describes as a baffling modern phenomenon – children losing abilities around age 2 – has been part of the human experience for centuries. Before we had a medical name for autism, we had another story: the changeling.

The impulse to find a culprit for autism is far older than the modern anti-vaccine movement.

In the 2023 novel Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries, the protagonist Emily Wilde is an academic conducting field research on fairies in an obscure part of Norway. After interviewing locals, she realizes an eerie being she had spotted on a walk was a changeling, an object of professional curiosity for Wilde:

The creature I had seen in the window had not been a wight at all. It had been a changeling. Changelings are monstrous offspring produced by the courtly fae, weak and sickly creatures who bring misfortune upon a household for as long as they remain there….

The changeling was terrorizing its host family, who were also dealing with the loss of their real child.

Wilde was determined to help. To force the changeling into submission, Wilde began to hurt him: “I gave Shadow a signal, and he snapped at the child’s foot, distracting him. I thrust the nail into the child’s chest.” In the novel, the changeling is a purely magical creature, and the violence does no harm.

The changeling story has had a resurgence alongside romantasy, the breakaway bestselling novel genre. Emily Wilde features a changeling plot point; other romantasy novels have echoes of changelings as well: stolen children, kidnapped heirs.

In the milieu of these novels, the changeling is presented at face value: what you see (a magical, malevolent child-being) is what you get.

But in actuality, changeling folklore was about real human children. It was an attempt to explain what has long haunted parents: a child who didn’t behave like other children; a child who was dramatically different.

Let’s back up. What is this changeling myth all about?

A changeling is a creature that looks like a human child, but is a kind of dummy who has been cruelly swapped by fairies. A family’s real child is taken back to fairy land, and they are left with a poor copy.

Some characteristic features of a changeling:

a flat affect and lack of affection
by turns silent and wailing
obstinacy; a terrible temper
may even become violent, striking or biting its parents
often intellectually stunted; it might not talk at all
or, it might display preternatural cunning and unusual talents

These behaviors were taken as proof that a swap had occurred.

The target child is often a boy around toddler age. After a period of normalcy, the child suddenly changes – regresses, you might say.

The changeling folklore is rooted in Gaelic and Celtic cultures, but there are similar traditions across the globe: from the Scandinavian countries of Denmark and Sweden, to Spain, east to China, and as far back in time as ancient Rome.

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A link to autistic regression?

Autistic regression typically occurs between 15-30 months of age and may involve a loss of words, social engagement, or other acquired skills.

But this is a relatively uncommon trajectory of autism. Research suggests that regression occurs in 20% to 30% of cases.

Moreover, in some cases regression may be more of a function of what parents are noticing than what’s really going on. There are likely to have been subtler signs of difference prior to the observed regression. In any event, regression is understood to be part of a broader neurodevelopmental trajectory, not a sudden derailment.

Despite being an uncommon occurrence, regression has received a lot of attention ever since that debunked study linking autism to childhood vaccinations.

Even though the link between vaccines and autism has been debunked, repeatedly, people still buy into the theory. The notion of a sudden transformation – a normally developing child turns into a stunted child after being vaccinated – echoes the changeling transformation.

In the belief systems at the time, the changeling wasn’t a real child, just a perverse doppelganger.

So, authorities advised parents to deal with changelings harshly. In Ireland, treatments included throwing the changeling – the child – in boiling water or sitting them on a red hot shovel. Tormenting the changeling-child near to death was believed to induce the fairies to reverse the swap. Changeling-children were also tied up in forests and left there for the fairies to reclaim.

Even if society at the time believed these myths, which it seems they did, the end result was abuse, trauma, and infanticide.

Because these changeling stories weren’t just dark entertainment. D.L. Ashliman, a leading scholar, writes that they were based on actual events: these were methods for dealing with children with disabilities. For this reason, they fall in the category of legends – stories taken as true – rather than fairy tales.

A notable person who believed the stories was Martin Luther. As Ashliman explains:

[Luther] sincerely believed that Satan was responsible for the malformed children known as changelings, and that such satanic child exchanges occurred frequently. In Luther's theological view, a changeling was a child of the devil without a human soul, “only a piece of flesh.” This view made it easy to justify almost any abuse of an unfortunate child thought to be a changeling, including the ultimate mistreatment: infanticide. Luther himself had no reservations about putting such children to death.

The belief in changelings far outlived Martin Luther, who died in 1546. And although the changeling myth focused most often on children, adults weren’t immune. In 1895, Irish woman Briget Cleary was murdered by her husband and neighbors by burning, after other banishment methods failed to work.

The belief even survived into the 20th century. In 1911, an academic who took the stories as true published an extensive study of changeling folklore, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries. As recently as 1924, people in rural Germany still took ritual precautions against the “demonic exchange of infants.”

As Ashliman notes, “Views held firmly for a thousand years do not die easily, especially when they appear to answer some of life’s most troublesome questions.”

It seems we’ve now replaced one myth with another. And, it’s not just the common people circulating the myth; it’s the United States’s head bureaucrat in charge of health policy.

The latest myth is that there is a discrete environmental cause for this “epidemic.” That it can’t be merely a function of genetics.

People still want an easy answer to this “troublesome question.”

The fact is, autism is a function of genetics. There are two genetic pathways to autism: spontaneous high-impact gene mutations that principally lead to autism with intellectual disability, and lower-impact inherited genes that, if concentrated enough in a person, lead to a presentation of autism.

It’s true that our genes interact with environmental factors in complex ways, and there likely is some interplay between autism genes and the environment.

But if that’s the case, it’s only part of the story. The main story is one of genes, spontaneous and hereditary, that combine to result in the assemblage of traits we call autism.

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Naomi Klein covers this modern iteration of the changeling myth beautifully in Doppelganger. She assembles testimonial evidence of parents grappling with sudden transformations in their children around age 2.

Klein quotes Jenny McCarthy, who described what she perceived as the effect of a vaccine on her autistic son: “Boom – the soul’s gone from his eyes.” The departure of a child’s soul from his body sounds quite a lot like the departure of the real child in the changeling folklore.

Klein also draws on Steve Silberman’s observations from his bestselling book Neurotribes:

…stories began to circulate on the Internet about babies that seemed to be developing normally until they received a routine immunization … Parents referred to their sons and daughters as having been kidnapped, as if a thief – dressed in a pediatrician’s white coast – had stolen them away in the night.

Klein’s book is where I first came across the connection between changeling mythology and autism. I found it immediately persuasive. Of course societies before ours would have sought an explanation for autism, just as we do today.

Except in our era, it’s not the fairies who are to blame. It’s vaccines. Or, if not vaccines, some other environmental cause that RFK Jr. insists is out there.

“Views held firmly for a thousand years do not die easily, especially when they appear to answer some of life’s most troublesome questions.”

The changeling tradition proves that parents have been witnessing regression for millennia. They’ve seen their children develop in ways they neither expected nor wanted.

I can’t personally speak to what that’s like. For many parents, it’s devastating.

But history shows us the cost of reaching for the wrong explanation. Scapegoating – fairies, vaccines, something else – is not the answer.

Thanks for reading Strange Clarity, where I write about neurodivergence, cognition, and the hidden architectures of thought.

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More to explore:
🔍 Related post: Some rules for thinking about autism
🧠 Big-picture essay: Artificial intelligence isn’t replacing me – it’s extending me

For further reading on this topic, check out:

Changelings, an essay by D.L. Ashliman (1997)
Autism and Changelings, an article by Michael Fitzgerald, Trinity College Dublin (2005)
Changelings and the Folk History of Autism, an essay by Kayley Whalen (2023)

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With curiosity,

Laura