The electricity of every living thing A woman's walk in the wild to find her way home

In this powerfully descriptive work, a grueling hike becomes a metaphor for a woman's experience with Asperger's syndrome. At 38, May (Wintering) sets off on foot along England's 630-mile-long South West Coast Path, "a difficult, craggy and bloody-minded walking route." May's motivation: "something about the feeling that I am probably now halfway through my life; that time is running out; that it's now or never." She does the hike in stages, sometimes alone, other times with friends, and almost always with her husband, "H," and her three-and-a-half-year-old son, Bert, meeting her for dinner. May's vivid snippets of "mental suffering," domestic struggles, conflicts at school and work--all heart-wrenching testimony to her and her family's strength--are interwoven with descriptions of the trail as she seeks in nature the solace she needs to deal with the world. Her writing is sharp as she navigates the "self-flagellating zig-zagging" of the trail and her life: "I am a testament to the confabulatory powers of the human brain. I have made a whole, gleaming, normal person out of jagged shards of a broken one." Candid, rough, and uplifting, this moving account shines. Agent: Madeleine Milburn, Madeleine Milburn Agency. (Oct.)

A vital chronicle of a rocky journey. In 2015, nearly 38, English essayist and fiction writer May decided to walk the "difficult, craggy and bloody-minded" South West Coast Path in England, a 630-mile trek. Sometimes accompanied by her husband, their toddler son, or a friend, she aimed to cover 25 miles per month for 18 months, spending nights at home. The trip, she hoped, would allow an escape from daily constraints, a space for her mind to soar, and also a chance to make sense of herself. (In this vein, readers may recall Raynor Winn's 2019 book, The Salt Path.) In her candid, intimate memoir, May recounts two challenging journeys: one, a physical crossing of rugged terrain; the other, a sensitive probing into the reality of an atypical mind. Hypersensitive to noise, crowds, and "unruly movement," May has always been beset by a sense that people "carry electricity," transmitting "a current that surges around my body until I'm exhausted." She sees the world as if "through a fairground mirror, where the signals get warped and mangled so that they're sickening." Feeling she was different, even as a child, she "watched, carefully, the way that other people behaved, and mimicked it precisely." She was "addicted to passing," and she found relief when she was alone on the trail. "Perhaps walking," she thinks, "is the only place where I don't have to pass." Her efforts "to construct an acceptable personality," though, left her feeling disconnected from her "real self." Then one day, three months into her journey, listening to a radio talk about symptoms of Asperger's, May felt a shock of recognition--and an explanation for the behaviors and emotions that had long confused and troubled her. "The truth is," she writes, "that the label of ASD helps me to make a better account of myself, and to finally find a mirror in which I can recognise my own face." A graceful memoir of startling self-discovery. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Prologue The Isle of Thanet, November Late afternoon in November, and it's dark already. I'm driving. To my left is the sea at Westgate; to my right, the low sweep of Pegwell Bay. Not that I can see either of them in the gloom, but I know this stretch of road well. The land feels spacious when the sea's nearby, and this is the furthest tip of Kent, the jutting hound's nose where you're suddenly surrounded by water. I'm late. I hate being late. I switch on the radio for company. A man is interviewing a woman. She is talking about the intensity of everything around her; the way all her senses are heightened to light, noise, touch and smell. They make her anxious. I turn on the windscreen wipers and clear myself two arcs in the drizzle. She finds people hard to understand; she would prefer it if they said what they meant. Too true , I think. Good luck with that. Then the interviewer says that his son is on the autism spectrum too, and he needs to write everything down or else he won't be able to take it in, and I think, Yes but I'm like that, too . I hate plans made on the hoof; I know I won't remember them. I can't ever recall names unless I see them in writing. Mind you, I can't remember faces, either. People just fade in and out of the fog, and I often have no sense of whether or not I've met them before. My life consists of a series of clues that I leave in diaries, and address books, and lists, so that I can reorient myself every time I forget. It's like that for everyone, though. We're all just trying to get by. 'All autistic people suffer from a degree of mind-blindness. Is that true of you?' asks the interviewer. 'To some extent,' says the woman. 'I'm better at it than when I was young, because I'm more conscious of it as an issue. I'm constantly searching for clues in people's faces and tone of voice and body language.' Thank God for my social skills , I think. Thank God I can get on with anyone . There's a twinge of discomfort there, as I push away the sense of what that costs me, of how artificial it all feels. I am good at this , but I have to qualify it with nowadays . 'By and large, do you tend to think visually more than you think in language?' he says. 'Yes,' says the woman, 'I have an eidetic memory.' I certainly don't have one of those. Although I suppose I do remember whole pages of books sometimes, like an imprint on my eyelids. At school, my French teacher laughed as I recalled pages of vocabulary: 'You're cheating!' she said. 'You're just reading that from the inside of your head.' And me, at thirteen, squirming in my seat, because I couldn't work out if this was a compliment - in which case, I should laugh along - or an accusation . 'Were you interested in other children, as a child?' says the man. 'No, I just didn't see the point. When I got a bit older, I would try to play with other people, but I wouldn't get it right. By the time I got to seventeen I had a breakdown, because I couldn't deal with all the stuff that was going on.' The memory surges up of those blank days when I thought I might just give up talking for ever, because the words seemed too far away from my mouth; of the red days when I would hit my head against the wall just to see the white percussive flashes it brought; of the sick, strange days when the drugs made everyone else say I was nearly back to my old self again, but I could feel them in my throat, tamping everything down so that it didn't spew back up . . . 'One cliché about autism is that romantic relationships are very, very difficult,' he says. 'You're married. How did courtship work for you?' . . . And I find myself nearly spitting at the radio, saying, out loud, 'How fucking dare you? We're not completely repellent, you know . . .' And that word, we , takes me quite by surprise. Excerpted from The Electricity of Every Living Thing: A Woman's Walk in the Wild to Find Her Way Home by Katherine May All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.