Kids don't talk like adults, but kids on the spectrum don't necessarily fall into the same patterns of speaking or have the same interests as other kids their age.

One advantage to having a kid on the spectrum: they tend to be rule followers. Socially, things are harder for them than most kids.

I'm a novelist who read a lot as a kid. When you grow up on books and then grow up to write books, famous authors are a lot more meaningful to you than TV and movie stars.

For a long time our son was a little boy with autism, which was a certain kind of challenge. Now that he's a teenager with autism - and a teenager who notices girls - we're faced with something else altogether.

What happened was, in my final year of university in Australia, there was a campus comedy competition, and I felt like it was something I could do. I won that competition, and I kept doing it, and I couldn't get a job in law. So I just kept doing comedy.

There is nothing incompatible about laughter and demons, nor about athletic achievement and depression. Mike Flanagan made me laugh, too. But mostly, he made me brave.

My dad read, I think, the Perry Mason mysteries and Zane Grey and some humor compendiums... And then at one point, the bookmobile started coming to town. That was really cool. I mean, that was when I read my first Raymond Carver story. I think that was probably 1969 or so. I must have been 13.

There's such an odd, eclectic group of people that make up the town of Plymouth, New Hampshire. I don't think I could avoid not coming out of there with a pretty good sense of humor.