Today’s post is by author, book coach and historian Christina Larocco.
Nearly thirty years ago, neurologist Oliver Sacks noted that autistic advocate Temple Grandin’s writing, rather than adhering to the sustained narratives he was used to, was uniquely fragmented: the writer bounced from one idea to another with seemingly little reason: “What one does see in Temple’s writings,” he wrote, “are peculiar narrational gaps and discontinuities, sudden, perplexing changes of topic.” What he perceived in Grandin’s work, in other words, was fragmentation.
I’ve been thinking about this subject for years, the entire time I’ve been working on my memoir, How to Be a Human Girl: A Memoir of Grief, Neurodiversity, and Finding a Home in the Universe. When I first conceived of this particular essay over a year ago, I found Sacks’s response anachronistic, even quaint. What relevance did it have amid the growing popularity of the fragmented narrative, the rise of the neurodiversity movement, and declining global attention spans?
A lot has happened in the last year, and as an AuDHD writer I feel compelled to respond.
As Jane Alison points out so eloquently in Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative, there are narrative forms other than the dramatic arc. Rather than hew to this single model, form should follow our experience of life.
I’ve played with form in the past. My last book was a crosshatch, which to me captured both the relationship between the book’s central figure and its writer and my own simultaneous desires to hide and be seen. That had more to do with form mirroring content.
Now, I’m more interested in exploring how my writing can more explicitly reflect the way my brain works. The problem is that my life experiences do not necessarily translate into “good” writing. My writing is circular, referential, fragmented—all qualities that people have consistently identified as weaknesses.
Instead, I see them as aspects of my brain’s native language.
Fragmentation
Throughout my life, readers have found my writing to be excessively fragmented. Like Grandin, I’ve been accused of moving from topic to topic without providing enough connective tissue. Sometimes these criticisms have been valid, and they’ve forced me to productively grapple with what I’m really trying to say. Sustained narrative is not my strength.
But at a certain point, isn’t that urge to move from topic to topic just … writing? I’m an essayist at heart, and isn’t part of the pleasure in writing essays getting to explore a question from many different angles? Isn’t part of the pleasure in reading essays getting to connect the dots? Think of Phillip Lopate’s joy in “follow[ing] a live, candid mind thinking on the page.” This is certainly true for me, as both a reader and a writer.
As other writers have noted, fragmentation seems particularly connected to disability. Disabled writer Paul Rousseau has discussed how a traumatic brain injury forced him to write his memoir, Friendly Fire: A Fractured Memoir, in short bursts. Sarah Fawn Montgomery recently made a similar point in Brevity:
Because my pain levels prevent me from writing for lengthy durations of time, I have learned to structure my work after my lived experience. Many of my projects utilize brief sections that coalesce around a unifying theme or image. These short segments can be written in the fleeting moments of time I am able to write and later arranged together like a puzzle or collage in a way that creates meaning. This form allows me to translate my disabled experience—brief and scattered moments, fragmented and layered, nonlinear and cyclical—onto the page.
Referentiality
My writing also tends toward referentiality, always alluding to or writing through other people’s words. This is the only way I know how to write, with extended riffs on the thinkers with whom I’m in conversation or the cultural products that have shaped me, many of which are as real to me as other people.
Possibly for these reasons, I had the hardest time in grad school understanding intertextuality, or when authors and other cultural producers put their work in conversation with the work of others. Because isn’t that just … how culture works? Isn’t every book we read, movie we watch, song we hear always already in conversation with everything else we have ever consumed?
Readers have often urged me to include less referentiality and more of myself in my writing. As with fragments vs. sustained narratives, this has often been good advice, and my writing has benefited from it.
But at a certain level, that referentiality is me. It is my brain mapped on paper, my fundamental experience of selfhood. Given the fact that some acknowledged experts, especially those who adhere to the outdated “Theory of Mind” model of autism, still argue that people with autism do not really have selves, this experience seems especially important to document.
Circularity
Nonlinearity, too, seems to resonate with writers in various disability communities. As scholar and activist Ashley Shew asks in Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement, “Why should people be forced to move linearly through the text [of this book]? Crip aesthetics value nonlinearity.”
Monotropism (the “special interest”) is a well-known aspect of autism, though it is frequently misunderstood. I certainly have a few of these: those favorite topics that I rarely stop talking about, whether or not they interest my audience. This is the flipside of fragmentation. In my brain, no conversation is ever finished, no topic ever in the past. They’re all still happening in my head and can be picked up at any point.
My AuDHD brain doesn’t necessarily produce the sustained “info dumps” associated with monotropism. It jumps around, circles back, gets caught on an unimportant detail. I can’t stay on any one topic for long, though I circle back to the same subjects over and over again.
Parting thoughts
I do not intend here to posit the existence of a neurodivergent, or even an AuDHD, mode of writing. Rather, I’ve reframed the ways in which my work diverges from “good” writing as aspects of what I think might be my brain’s native language. I do believe that these differences accomplish something important: considered together, fragmentation, referentiality, and circularity resist the logic of the narrative arc, revealing both its porosity and its constructed nature.
That’s the academic argument, at least. These days, it may seem like small potatoes. But if perceived literary inability has become a weapon used against people with autism—and it has—it seems like an important argument to make.
Christina Larocco is the author of Crosshatch: Martha Schofield, the Forgotten Feminist (1839–1916) (Blackwater Press, 2025) and The Women’s Rights Movement since 1945 (Bloomsbury, 2022), as well as an Author Accelerator–certified book coach who helps research-driven writers stop spiraling and start writing. Learn more about her, including how to schedule a free consultation about your work, here.
This is absolutely fascinating – thank you for sharing it. I am just beginning work on a novel that will be told through the first-person in-the-moment POV of a young woman who – like my beloved grandson – has a neurodivergent brain function (and in his case limited intellectual ability and brilliant emotional maturity) due to a microgenetic deletion. I can see how much of what you share here could “explain” the way my grandson’s thought process shows up outwardly. He would never describe how his brain works using the language you did here – but I can actually use your words to interview him, in a way, and give him some new ways to think about his own brain function and understand himself as well. And of course as a writer this will help me more deeply understand, and give voice to, my brave and complicated protagonist. Again – thank you.
Christina, This is one of the best arguments for keeping AI reined in that I have read. We are all unique and that is what makes humans, and reading and writing, worthwhile. Ultimately, homogenization of the hivemind is boring. Thank you!
Thank you so much for this piece, Christina. My wife suspects I could be slightly neurodivergent. I suspect she’s correct. But I hadn’t thought about these kinds of issues impacting how we tell stories. I loved and appreciated Paul Rousseau‘s Friendly Fire, his struggle to write having been shot in the head. But I hadn’t considered that how my mind functions might impact my approach to storytelling. Thanks for helping me gain this insight!
Christina, you have given us all a great gift in so carefully describing modes and methods of thought and reflection. I am not enamored with the typical tropes and their predictability. Writing should reflect the lives of writers, and life itself (as well as our understanding of it, which is, by the way, our means of experiencing it) can be convoluted and less than linear. I am fascinated by the many ways that we can consider things, ideas, events, ourselves, and others. Exploration doesn’t always lead to one particular conclusion and why should we assume that there are answers to everything, or that we need to have all the answers? It can be a gift to wonder, to explore, to consider, and to coexist with “not knowing,” – happily noticing and reveling in the expansiveness of being.
Hi, this post is very interesting. I have been a clinical psychologist and psychoanthropologist for many years. For a long time, I have been thinking about the basic language of the brain, which I believe is the language of the unconscious. Many studies show parallel processes between the laws of unconscious thinking and the principles of brain activity. I believe that the subject Christiana is discussing—neurodivergent brain functions—reveals this parallelism, but it is universal in essence. I have written extensively on this topic, among others, in a book I am currently finishing, “Wired for Freedom: The Science of Integral Psychology.” If there is interest, I would be happy to elaborate further on the subject.
This concept of fragmentation hits for me. I struggle against it to fill in the blanks and now you have me wondering if there’s another way. Thank you!
What appears as fragmentation to some is often just a connection that they do not see. An autistic mind doesn’t flit from topic to topic – they/ we make connections that others do not. There is a lot of beauty in that. One way to help the reader is to go back and make those connections plain. Often we are skipping past miltiple steps to “the answer” but like in high school math sometimes we need to show our work. I look forward to your book.