Speech difficulties

• “Language became explicable to me, but I did not burst into conversational speech. However [for a few weeks] I was just about bursting to speak, not just to say words of items which I wanted, but to converse in a reciprocal sense. This wasn’t a learned skill but something like a biological urge that had developed two decades too late. Even ten years later I look at someone, and find my sensible words expelled as a single grunt. If I try to make speech, my mind goes blank—literally. This is one example of what Donna Williams calls “mono,” an awful catastrophic cause of misunderstanding what autism is all about.”

• Lucy Blackman, Autism and the Myth of the Person Alone, p. 160