Nobody Nowhere was written in the days when autism was thought to affect 4 in 10,000 children (currently 1 in 150)… of course there were all those psychotic and disturbed children, assessed at age 2 or 3 who filled the children’s homes, the one’s whose families erased their names, their childhood photos…and the one’s who were kept, sometimes abused into submission, who learned to ‘act normal’ or get locked away, or worse.

As one of that generation, I remembered the ‘A’ word, from when I was about 10. It was around 1973. A primary school teacher had come to one of my family’s 70s pool parties (yes, the whole shebang) with her fiance, who was in the car business like my father. The party ended in the usual brawl (read two parents with their own autism fruit salad concoctions and throw in alcohol and sex for a volatile situation). The result was that the teacher found me in the street in my PJs in the early hours, my head bleeding because I’d got in the way. The guests were hurrying away but this teacher (Christine, are you out there?) couldn’t leave the kid in the street. So they snatched me. First they had to entice me into the car. Confused, with the sounds of breaking glass and gunshots coming from the house, it didn’t take a lot.

Their Thornbury flat was calm, quiet and a bed was quickly made on the sofa. I’d brought home many stray cats and I knew this time it was my turn.

The next day I couldn’t recognise anything or understand these people. I stared at things they showed me. I might have known them somewhere else, but I’m rather object blind and the placement of these things gave me no clues. I couldn’t answer their questions and though I had songs and stored strings from TV shows, I was in a sombre mood and had gone Selectively Mute as was common with most strangers.

They phoned my parents. Ah, yes, they’d been wondering where I was. No police of course, that was Donna… she tended to disappear and without being able to say I was leaving or answer to my name, they figured I’d ultimately resurface.

But it was around then, and also at a time the first popular autism flick came to the movies (an Elvis film) that I had heard the ‘A’ word. I thought is was an adjective meaning ‘withdrawn’. My forehead was already stamped with the word ‘psychotic’ thanks to a 3 day inpatient assessment at age 2 at St Elmo’s Private Hospital in Brunswick (according to my father). Then the school had labeled me disturbed.

My father introduced me as feral. My mother alternated between introducing me as psychotic and disturbed depending on whether I was likely to head butt or hit myself or in a ‘good phase’. So there was no room left on my forehead for another word and especially not the ‘refrigerator mother’ one…not that ‘A’ word.

Today word ‘autistic’ evokes mystery, charity, activism or genius, even a mysticism and, more recently, even trendy among some groups. But in the 60s and 70s the ‘A’ word was a stigma, big time.

Nobody Nowhere was the silent scream I made through my fingers to the page. It embodied the feelings I had never been able to tell people about, about being a ghost with a body, about Exposure Anxiety making it so hard to exist that I had to be several other characters or the cat, about how hard it was to have a body, to dare a mind, to face closeness and need, about a faceblind world in which everyone was a stranger, a world in which language was music, in which touch provoked colors and movement became visual symphonies…and a gothic world in which compulsive disorders sold me prison as sanctuary until it was too late, a place of addiction to patterns and the euphoric ecstacy of pink street lights.

Nobody Nowhere was written in 4 weeks. I barely ate, washed or slept. I wrote the book as a goodbye and a last hope. My plan was to let just one person read it, then shred it and burn it then jump in front of a train. But life is rarely as simple as our plans. Instead of the confirmation of hopelessness I expected, I was thrown a challenge; to allow the book to help others. Instead of shredding it, it became copied and read by millions of people around the world. Instead of being burned, it spent 15 weeks on the New York times Bestseller list and shot to number 1 in US, Canada, Japan, and Norway and got translated into over 20 languages worldwide.

The person who feared being known became known around the world. The terror of existing became replaced with a joy of creating and sharing, the autism evolved into artism, and the world around me changed.

The new edition of Nobody Nowhere has just come out with Jessica Kingsley Publishers. The painting on the cover is from one of my Dreamscapes paintings, called “The Swing”. It represents alternation, indecision, choice but also balance, daring and freedom. The people in the picture have no faces, what matters is their beingness, the music of their beingness.

Inside, the now outdated introduction from 20 years ago has been replaced by a foreword relating the place of autism and it’s changing faces and social status in recent modern history.

The back cover finally again has the quotes which once graced the hardcover editions over a generation ago.

I still get letters every week from young people just reading Nobody Nowhere for the first time. Some read it as their high school text in the US and Canada where it’s on school reading lists. Some read it because their mother or father did (wow, that sure makes me old!). Some read it because there’s something about the title that speaks to so many people. Like a 23 year old BBoy in Brooklyn, NY whose nickname is Nobody and who tatooed his are with Nobody Nowhere then found the phrase has it’s own website. Reading it, he felt he was reading about himself. I wrote to him, me, a 45 year old Aussie living in bushland in the hills, him an urban youth half a world and more than a generation away. We had a laugh at how such different people can still feel so related. Maybe that’s the magic of Nobody Nowhere.

Donna Williams *)

http://www.donnawilliams.net

author, artist, composer, screenwriter.

Ever the arty autie.

Thanks for dropping by

You can find more information on the film and book, Nobody Nowhere at http://www.nobodynowhere.com