An interviewer for my local newspaper asked me how I dealt
with the sadness of my protagonist’s situation—the fact that Kiara has
Asperger’s syndrome and cannot keep friends, and her parents, struggling
musicians, are of little help because they must travel for work. I answered
that she draws comfort from her special interest in the X-Men and her belief
that one day she too will discover her special power. I also said that Kiara
finds humor in her situation, a quirky humor that may be difficult for some
readers to understand but that nonetheless makes her real and, hopefully,
likable.
An example: In the first chapter of Rogue, Kiara attempts to
sit with the popular girls at lunch, and one of the girls pushes her tray to
the floor. (This actually happened to me, by the way.) Enraged, Kiara picks up
the tray and slams it into the girl’s face. For that act, she is suspended from
school for the rest of the year. Several weeks later, she meets a slightly
younger boy who has just moved to her neighborhood, but she soon learns that
her reputation has preceded her:
Chad whirls around so
fast that strands of hair stick to his lips. “Hey, wait. Aren’t you”—he snaps
his fingers—“the psycho eighth-grader that got kicked out for throwing a lunch
tray and busting someone’s nose?”
“That’s someone else.
I, uh, travel with the band.” Truth is, I didn’t throw the tray. I slammed it—hands still on the tray.
People usually laugh when I read the passage, in part
because of Kiara’s tendency to be very literal about everything, and in part
because, despite the consequences, she’s still proud of having fought back
against the girl who humiliated her. In her justifiable lack of remorse,
readers and listeners laugh with her, even though they might laugh at her literalness
as well.
One of my pet peeves related to outsiders who write about
characters with Asperger’s syndrome is their overreliance on humor that draws
on our tendency to take idiomatic expressions literally and to fail to
understand when people are being sarcastic. It really hurts when other people
laugh at us. Seriously. Humor can help to defuse the discomfort that people
feel in the presence of disability and distress, but writers have to be careful
not to create humor at the expense of the character. The character should be
the one who initiates the joke.
One of the best examples of humor in a novel featuring
characters with disabilities is Jordan Sonnenblick’s Schneider Award-winning After Ever After (Scholastic, 2010),
which portrays a cancer survivor with lingering physical and neurological
impairments and his best friend, who has also survived cancer. Both boys have a self-deprecating sense
of humor, though protagonist Jeffrey makes jokes about himself and his academic
struggles and friend Tad says the things about their sometimes-clueless classmates
that Jeffrey wishes he could have said. Like my protagonist, Jeffrey and Tad
suffer pain, uncertainty, and feelings of isolation, and the author uses humor
to leaven the story and build connections between the characters and readers
who may not know what it is like to live with a disability.
There is a danger in trying to portray characters with
disabilities as cheerfully accepting their fate and not wanting those around
them to feel bad. Still, while it’s important to show
sadness and struggle, we should also include moments of triumph and plain old
fun.
You can find out more about Lyn and her excellent books at www.lynmillerlachmann.com
2 comments:
Great post! Thanks for featuring Lyn, Janet! and Lyn, I remember your wonderful grad lecture on this subject. Such great thoughts.
Thanks, Linda! Yes, I think humor is the best way to handle adversity, myself. And Lyn hits the nail on the head when she talks about the character needing to have that humorous voice, not the narrator or author.
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