a recent nyt review of dawn prince-hughes' gorilla nation

[Guest guest]

Well, It's midnight in NYC and the times has some stuff with the

sunday date on it, but nothing about Asperger's. I thought Amy's

article would be in a sunday supplement kind of thing, but as far as I

know she hasn't announce to anybody that the article has been printed.

So maybe it's for later?

Camille

The Zoo Story

By Angier

SONGS OF the GORILLA NATION

My Journey Through Autism.

By Dawn Prince-.

225 pp. New York:

Harmony Books. $24.

THE great New Zealand novelist Janet Frame, who was spared the

lobotomist's knife when a hospital official read that she had won a

literary prize, resented the decision by a panel of psychiatrists that

she did not have schizophrenia after all. The tag, she wrote, ''had

been the answer to all my misgivings about myself,'' and without it

she had nothing but the ''homelessness of self.''

Dawn Prince- knows only too well the harsh burden of suffering

without taxonomy, of feeling that you don't fit your fate and you

don't know why or who or what gnostic Merck Manual might define your

despair. As she explains in this unsettling, lyrical, sometimes

self-pitying but ultimately redemptive memoir, Prince- did not

receive a diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome, a form of high-functioning

autism, until she was 36; the fact that she survived through decades

spent ''alienated, different, disconnected and hurting,'' the pain

made more malignly intimate because its cause was unknown, strikes her

as ''no minor miracle.'' In addition to her Framean sense of psychic

homelessness, Prince- endured years of being ''technically

homeless,'' living on the streets, sleeping in a church stairwell,

eating out of garbage cans, consuming whatever alcohol and drugs came

her way. Sometimes friends or acquaintances would take pity on her and

invite her to stay with them. Eventually her ''odd habits and chronic

lack of resources,'' her difficulty with social lubricants like simple

banter or looking+people in the eye, would make them uncomfortable,

and they'd ask her to leave.

The individuals who proved her true and resilient salvation, who

allowed her to settle quietly into the berth of herself and from there

extend synaptic lifelines of love and work to the world outside, were

not Homo sapiens at all, but a group of our larger, shaggier ape kin,

the gorillas. ''Songs of the Gorilla Nation'' is as much a rhapsody to

gorillas as it is an anatomy of autism. It was through getting to know

the gorillas at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle as an adult that

Prince- began to feel, for the first time, connected, safe,

understood. A gorilla could gaze at her, or touch her, or grunt at

her, and she would feel serenely joyful. She describes the moment a

massive silverback male named Congo accidentally brushed his fingers

against hers, and then kept them there for ''what seemed like a long

time,'' in religious-ecstatic terms, Hildegard of Bingen by way of

''Jane Eyre'': ''This is what it is, I thought. This is what it means

to love and be loved'' and ''to not be alone in the vastness of the

space we hurtle through.''

Her experiences resonate with what I have heard from field biologists

who have studied the apes. Chimpanzees may be our closest living

relatives, having diverged from Homo sapiens about five million years

ago, but they can be hot-tempered, argumentative, sometimes violent.

Gorillas, which diverged from the line that gave rise to humans and

chimpanzees perhaps seven million years ago, are surprisingly gentle

and low-key, and when they accept you into their fold, one researcher

told me, ''you feel honored, even blessed.'' Dian Fossey, another

woman who had difficulty adjusting to social norms, found a haven

among mountain gorillas. But whereas Fossey's love for the gorillas

seemed to heighten her misanthropy, Prince- parlayed her

trans-genus bond into an earnest, if hesitant, appreciation for her

own kind, and a desire for their acceptance and admiration. She began

studying the gorillas, taking such impressively detailed notes on

their behavior that she attracted the attention of the zoo's director

of research. And thus a woman who had dropped out of high school began

a methodical course of research that eventually earned her a doctorate

in anthropology.

Less formally if no less zealously, she studied how to get along with

people, comparing herself to Seven of Nine in ''Star Trek: Voyager'':

a woman who had been raised by the ruthlessly robotic-communistic

Borg, and who on re-entering Star Fleet society in adulthood had to

learn the rites, the rituals, the chitchat cassettes of ordinary human

relationships.

Prince- also began exploring her own nature. She learned that a

young relative had Asperger's, and when she saw his behavior, she saw

herself. ''He grimaced and held his body in strange postures, spoke to

people in ways that were blunt and considered rude,'' she writes,

''and displayed nervous tics when his many anxieties and sensitivities

were brought close to the surface.'' Watching him was painful and

enraging, she says, like looking in a mirror and hating the view. Yet

she knew that autistic traits often run in families, and his diagnosis

inspired her to consult a doctor, who confirmed that she, too, had the

syndrome. ''I felt an immense wave of relief wash over me as

everything suddenly made sense,'' she says. ''Like someone making

amends in a 12-step program, I almost felt compelled to contact

everyone who had ever been impacted by my autism -- whether positively

or negatively -- and explain.''

Autism is widely discussed these days. Much evidence suggests that the

condition is on the rise, and nobody knows why or what to do about it.

Asperger's has attracted particular interest because of its

association with so-called geek culture: people with Asperger's are

often highly intelligent, and they may focus intently, even

obsessively, on one or a handful of subjects to the exclusion of

everything else. This may sound like a useful attribute in a

keyboard-driven economy, but Prince- does an excellent job of

puncturing that idle thought balloon. Yes, she is extremely bright,

and able to fixate on a subject with admirable concentration. But

mostly what she conveys in her autobiography is naked desperation --

to calm down and loosen up, not to see a break in a routine as the

beginning of the apocalypse, to trust that the lover who is angry at

you now will not be angry at you forever.

In time, Prince- found somebody to love and trust, a woman named

Tara, with whom she now has a son. She became comfortable enough in

the world to get a job as an adjunct professor of anthropology. Yet

she still has to monitor others and herself, to count the number of

seconds she looks in somebody's eyes before looking away. And she

admits that she will never understand certain forms of human

entertainment -- clowns, for example. ''It is hard to express the

horror I feel when I am out at a parade or carnival,'' she says, ''and

I see a clown coming.'' Now that is a sign of real mental health.

Angier, who writes about science for The Times, is working on

a book about the scientific canon.

Published: 03 - 21 - 2004 , Late Edition - Final , Section 7 , Column

3 , Page 12