Parallel Play by Tim Page

(Reproduced from my original review on Goodreads, May 13, 2011.)

This is an interesting but ultimately depressing look at the life of a man with Asperger's syndrome. The book feels unbalanced, with extreme focus on bands, music, and counterculture, with other aspects glazed over.

Many people, I think, including myself, have some symptoms of Asperger's syndrome, so there's a lot to relate to in Page's book: his social difficulties (although they seemed to ring false to me - he often wrote that he felt socially awkward, but the actions he recounted didn't support that), his fixations and the way he thinks about things.

There is very little retrospective here. Page doesn't think much, except very generally, about how his Asperger's syndrome may have influenced the events of his life as he recounts them. It could have been a memoir about anyone, so the Asperger's hook was weak.