Nobody Nowhere is a book by Donna Williams, an autistic woman from Australia. It tells her tragic life story until she was diagnosed and afterwards. What makes this book so special is that autistic people can’t normally express feelings, and Williams can, and she is also blessed with a wonderful memory or so it may seem. More than that, the question of autistic imagination is being answered wonderfully in this book and it shows that an autistic life can be filled with imagination. The notion that I take from this book is the knowledge that when it comes to autism there really is no question taken for granted. Being considered ‘normal’, family relationships and personal identity, which are seemingly straight-forward become a complex challenge. Not only this kind of book can show you the relationships in the family and in the outside world, it can teach you how autistic people think from firsthand experience.
Another thing that I would like to refer to is the question of identity. When she describes her childhood, she says that she had three personalities that were created in her to meet different challenges and it took her a very long time to return to who she was in the beginning. There are poets in different literatures that create an alter ego who writes on their behalf, examples include Tzvika Szternfeld and Amir Or in Israeli literature as well as John Berryman and Pessoa in Portuguese literature, but none of these poets lose themselves and their own personalities the way autistic people do.