Found in Newtown Gunman’s Home: Books of Hope


It is all but impossible to know if mother or son were helped by the books, “Look Me in the Eye: My Life With Asperger’s” and “Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant,” or whether either opened, or even had use for, them. While those familiar with Mr. Lanza and his family have said he had an autism variant known as Asperger’s syndrome, investigators have not confirmed the diagnosis.

“Look Me in the Eye” (2007), by John Elder Robison, and “Born on a Blue Day” (2006), by Daniel Tammet, are both memoirs that chronicle the painful chasm of misunderstanding that separates people with Asperger’s from the world around them. Both accounts turn hopeful as their writers grow comfortable in their own skins and more successful in communicating with others.

That is why Mr. Robison, 55, said it might be expected that his book would have been found among the Lanzas’ belongings.

“It’s the most widely read book about Asperger’s out there,” Mr. Robison said by telephone from his home in Amherst, Mass. “Hundreds, if not thousands, of parents have come to me in the years since that book was published to say, ‘Your stories have given me a window into the mind of my son or daughter.’ It’s not a surprise to see that book in the home of any family touched by autism.”

The discovery is not entirely welcome, however, if it reinforces an imagined link between autism and violent crime — a link for which experts say there is no evidence. Americans have struggled for three and a half months to understand why Mr. Lanza killed first his mother, then 20 first graders and 6 educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School, before taking his own life.

Over the same period, Mr. Robison has been worrying about an ill-informed rush to judgment. “Reporters are saying the killer had Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism,” he wrote on his blog on Dec. 20. “Every time a news story does that — by tying ‘killer’ and ‘Asperger’s’ in the same sentence — they are at some level implying that there is a connection between autism and mass murder.

“There’s not,” he continued. “Statisticians have a phrase for this situation: Correlation does not imply causation.”

In the telephone interview on Friday, Mr. Robison went further. “The dialogue about Asperger’s and violence has reached a point where it’s become a civil rights kind of question,” he said. “Autistic people are fearful, angry, scared; scared to send their kids to school, scared their children are going to be bullied, scared they’re going to be bullied.” Often unable to communicate well, those with Asperger’s are “inherently more vulnerable” to abuse, he said.

Mr. Robison has dealt all his life with mistaken assumptions about his motives. He describes some of those episodes with a wry candor reminiscent of Augusten Burroughs, the author of “Running With Scissors,” who is in fact Mr. Robison’s brother.

When Mr. Robison was 12, after one of his mother’s friends told him that a boy whom he did not know had just been killed by a train, he smiled. The friend was aghast. Young John was humiliated and confused. Only later did he figure out that he had smiled because neither he nor his family members nor his friends had been killed, and because he would never have been so foolish as to play on railroad tracks.

“ ‘Sociopath’ and ‘psycho’ were two of the most common field diagnoses for my look and expression,” Mr. Robison wrote. “I heard it all the time: ‘I’ve read about people like you. They have no expression because they have no feeling. Some of the worst murderers in history were sociopaths.’

“I came to believe what people said about me, because so many said the same thing, and the realization that I was defective hurt. I became shyer, more withdrawn. I began to read about deviant personalities and wonder if I would one day ‘go bad.’ Would I grow up to be a killer? I had read that they were shifty and didn’t look people in the eyes.” He learned all he could about prisons and decided that if he were ever incarcerated, “I hoped for a medium-security federal prison, not a vicious state prison like Attica.

“I was well into my teenage years before I figured out that I wasn’t a killer, or worse,” Mr. Robison continued. “By then, I knew I wasn’t being shifty or evasive when I failed to meet someone’s gaze.

“By then,” he added, “I had met shifty and scummy people who did look me in the eye, making me think the people who complained about me were hypocrites.”

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • email
  • StumbleUpon
  • Delicious
  • Google Reader
  • LinkedIn
  • BlinkList
  • Digg
  • Google Bookmarks
  • HackerNews
  • Posterous
  • Reddit
  • Sphinn
  • Tumblr
  • Tumblr
  • Tumblr