They’d spent the evening roaming from bar to bar to hear his musician friends play. His wife, her friend, was there too. First here, then there, then a short stumble down the road to the next place. She made him laugh with risqué lines about how the waitress was coming on to him. His musician friends laughed too. “Hey, can you fit these beers in your bag? We don’t have any at home,” he said, as they got ready to leave the bar. And she did, the scent of foamy hops filling the car as they all headed back to his house, where they downed the now-warm beer and laughed until past 3 a.m. She crawled into his daughter’s bed, the girl away for the weekend.

She woke to see him sitting on the side of her bed, his hand stroking her leg and inching toward her crotch. She was groggy, still drunk. “She’s just across the hall,” she said quietly, referring to his wife, her friend. “We can’t,” she murmured. He shrugged and went away. At dawn she called a cab, counting the change in her wallet and hoping she’d have enough to get home. Halfway there, she made the driver stop. She was mortified to be that girl, the one with her head hanging out a cab door vomiting into the gutter, the one that married men propositioned. She didn’t have enough money for a tip.

After, she was embarrassed because she must have done something to encourage him. She never told his wife. After, she smiled and made jokes with him. She was friendly to him on the phone. She couldn’t meet his eyes when he stared at her.

2.

He fondled and fingered and squeezed and hurt her. He held her, pants down, in front of a mirror so that he could look at them both, sharing the excitement with himself. She looked away. She was eight. He was a teenager.

After, she didn’t tell anyone, not for years. When he saw her, he’d go out of his way to speak to her, to stare her down, to keep her in her place. After, thirty years after, she heard he would be visiting their hometown at the same time as her planned vacation. She cancelled her ticket home.

3.

He hit her, drunk and angry and…drunk and angry. The doctor saw the bruises down her back where he’d kicked her. But it was the 1970s, so the doctor took her at her word when she said she’d fallen down some stairs. She made plans to leave him, to enrol their daughter in school in Montreal, their others grown and gone. But then she didn’t. He mostly stopped drinking. We think he stopped hitting.

After, years after, they celebrated their 50 years of wedded success with a party at the church hall. 

4.

She leaned over him, bending forward to kiss him goodbye as he sat in his armchair, her sister—his wife of decades—at the door behind them. He reached up and grabbed her breast, meeting her startled eyes, daring her to say something. She didn’t.

The next week they were at a family party at a cottage. He sat inside while the others were outside. She went in to get a coffee. “Come here,” he said. She stepped closer, but not too close. “Come closer,” he said.

“I’m close enough,” she replied.

“I can hardly hear you. Come closer,” he said.

“I’ll speak up,” she said. “What do you want?”

“I want to eat you out,” he said.

“Fuck off, you pervert,” she said. After, she joined the others outside, but didn’t say anything to anyone. She didn’t want to ruin the party.

After, a day after, she told her sister what had happened. They agreed it must be the beginning of dementia. Her sister asked her husband if he remembered doing it. He said no, that they should tell the doctor because he didn’t want to embarrass himself. But there was no dementia. Later he told people she was a lying whore.

5.

She met him for supper. They’d found each other online. When she sat down the first thing he said was “You’re not as pretty as your photo.” Surprised, she tried to explain why her photo might not look as she did that night. He spent the evening talking about his “projects.” One was a thousand-page single-spaced lesbian vampire novel. “You should read it!” he said.

After…well, she’d stayed for dinner, after, hadn’t she? She paid her half of the bill. And she wondered for a long time if she were as pretty as her photo. Lots of times, she thought she wasn’t. 

6.

She sent him texts and emails throughout the day, tempting recipes from which to choose his evening meal. This complicated dish or that tasty repast? When they dined, he’d rate her efforts. She never got more than a six out of ten. “If only you were a better cook,” he said. “If only you ate less,” he said. “If only you weighed less,” he said. “You could be a pretty girl.”

After, she’d try harder, trying to please his perfectionist’s palate, trying to be less of what he didn’t like and more of what she wasn’t. Until she saw him from the streetcar, temple to temple with another woman, laughing as they strode towards his apartment. And still, for a time after, she wondered what she had done wrong to lose him. 

7.

She went back to his home with him after a first date. As they kissed, he slapped her, three times. Later he choked her until she couldn’t breathe.

After, she sent him flirtatious emails. A handwritten note saying she loved his hands. After, years after, when she heard he’d done it to others, she filed a complaint with the police. She was cross-examined on the stand, his lawyer pointing to the inconsistency between what she said he’d done and what she’d done after.

After. People were surprised by what she did after.

Gann’s pretense puts him in the company of another, more illustrious (and less felonious) group. Musician Gary Numan, BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen, economics Nobel laureate Vernon Smith, surfer Clay Marzo — all are part of a growing list of successful individuals who’ve stepped forward to say they, too, are Aspies (the preferred short form of the label for those with Asperger’s). But why? Perhaps it’s because few disorders are associated with such an outwardly favourable mix of symptoms, providing the suggestion of genius alongside a built-in excuse for behaviour most would view as narcissistic, tedious, or rude. One can’t help but wonder whether some, at least, are conning themselves into believing that their social failures have a genetic cause.

Before the HBO biopic about ASD advocate Dr. Temple Grandin, the Aspergian Dr. Sheldon Cooper on The Big Bang Theory, and John Elder Robison’s memoir Look Me in the Eye (but a year after Mark Haddon used a “savant” as his protagonist in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time), comedian Dan Aykroyd admitted to having mild Asperger’s to National Public Radio Fresh Air host Terry Gross in a 2004 radio interview. “I can’t tell if you’re kidding or not,” said the usually unflappable host, after Aykroyd added that his mild symptoms are now mostly limited to an obsessive fascination with the police, and a need to carry a badge at all times, because without one “I feel naked.” He’d been diagnosed as a child in the early ’60s, he said — though Asperger’s wasn’t listed in the WHO’s International Classification of Diseases, used in Canada, until 1992.

In fact, while children with Asperger’s are now typically diagnosed between the ages of five and eight, many adults were misdiagnosed with other psychiatric disorders or labelled as juvenile delinquents for apparent anti-social behaviour, or simply stumbled along feeling out of step with the society around them. For a lucky few, their obsessive interests led them to excel in their chosen fields, and that success in turn allowed them greater leeway for their social quirks: the eccentric professor, the nerdy computer whiz, the ill-tempered musical genius. Meanwhile, as the diagnosis gained prominence, so too did the Internet, and with it widespread access to self-diagnostic tools like the Autism-Spectrum Quotient or AQ test, developed at Cambridge University’s Autism Research Centre by psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen (cousin of comedian Sacha Baron Cohen).

“I’m going to get into trouble for saying this,” says Anthony Easton, a twenty-nine-year-old University of Toronto graduate student who was diagnosed with Asperger’s fifteen years ago (when treatment included having hula hoops suspended around his teenage frame to teach him the concept of personal space). A member of various ASD social groups, he has observed that “often the basis for self-diagnosis starts with ‘I have no social skills.’ Well, you have no fucking social skills because you play fourteen hours of World of Warcraft a day!”

“just because you’re Aspie doesn’t mean you’re not an asshole.”

But there’s a flip side to facile self-diagnosis, says Elesia Ashkenazy, a board member with the US-based Autistic Self Advocacy Network: adults who can’t get a medical diagnosis because they’ve managed to “compensate” for their Asperger’s symptoms and so no longer fit the diagnostic criteria. “People are punished for learning to pass,” she says. Now even those diagnostic criteria are up for debate. The committee charged with revising the American Psychiatric Association’s widely referenced Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is considering eliminating Asperger’s as a distinct disorder and officially pulling it under the ASD label.

Diagnostically, this is exactly the kind of muddle that tends to irritate precision-oriented Aspies. What if some people who claim to have Asperger’s really don’t? Perhaps it doesn’t matter, says Ashkenazy, if along the way the misdiagnosed find support and connection with a group that welcomes them — especially if the larger community considers their behaviour socially dysfunctional. “There are people who are suffering because they don’t have a diagnosis,” says Easton, softer now. “They don’t understand why they are how they are — people who can’t hold down jobs, can’t maintain relationships. These things are real, and they ruin lives.”

It sounds like a flip-flop, but Easton argues that there’s a more nuanced way to look at it. “Sometimes I piss people off because I mean to piss them off,” he says, “and sometimes I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing and I provoke by accident. But people assume that it’s one or the other, that I’m always provocative, or it’s all because of the Asperger’s.” The problem, he believes, is our human tendency to attribute behaviour to a single cause. Is it possible there’s a bit of the con in all of us? Easton smiles. “As my friend Ray says, just because you’re Aspie doesn’t mean you’re not an asshole.”

It’s rare that Atkinson gets explicitly challenged on his marital and parental status. But come February, with Valentine’s Day and Family Day packed into the shortest month of the year, it’s tough for those who are single or childless to avoid the message that they’ve missed the boat.

And that’s ironic, given the demographic shifts of the last few decades. Those shifts are influencing consumption patterns, healthcare issues, our collective environmental impact and other social issues—but are largely being ignored as we continue to focus firmly on family and kids, says Bella DePaulo, a visiting professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and author of Singled Out: How singles are stereotyped, stigmatized and ignored but still live happily ever after (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2007) and  Single With Attitude: Not your typical take on health and happiness, love and money, marriage and friendship (CreateSpace, 2009). “Singles are no longer marking time until the day they become unsingle,” says DePaulo. “They’re pursuing their passions, nurturing friendships and creating nets of people they care about and who care about them.”

And while February’s holidays may be sending the message that kids and marriage are the norm, for more and more Canadians, they aren’t. The shifts crystallized for the first time in 2006 when according to Canadian census data 51.5% of people over age 15 were unmarried, the first time unmarried people outnumbered the wedded since the census began in 1871. That same census signaled a second turning point: for the first time since 1871, there were also more families without children at home (42.7%) than those with (41.4%).

The numbers aren’t quite as straightforward as they first look. For instance, not all of those unmarried Canadians are single—the number includes those living common law. And that “households without children” number captures empty nesters whose children simply don’t live under the same roof.

I never played with baby dolls. I played with Barbie dolls, and they had very interesting careers and very interesting sex lives, but they didn’t have children.

But the number of truly single households is growing, with 30% of Canadian households occupied by singles, a number expected to hit almost 40% by 2026. And Canada isn’t alone in that change: around the world, the percentage of one-person households is on the rise, expected to grow at almost twice the rate of average population growth over the next decade, according to global market research company Euromonitor International.

At the same time, childlessness is growing as well: in the early 1970s, figures from the US and other developed countries showed that about 1 in 10 women over the age of 40 had never borne a child. Today that proportion—in the US, Canada and a number of other developed countries—sits at 1 in 5. It’s a shift driven by both expanding economic and birth control choices for women and more recently amplified by a change in what researchers have dubbed “transition timing.” With more young people delaying leaving the family home, they’re also putting off having children of their own—and the longer they leave it, the less likely some of them are to ever have kids.

“I never played with baby dolls. I played with Barbie dolls, and they had very interesting careers and very interesting sex lives, but they didn’t have children,” says Diane Forrest, a financial services communications specialist in her early 50s. “I just don’t think that instinct is very well developed in me, and I think that’s true of a lot of people.” Forrest is happy to be of a generation where her choices about marriage and children were within her control. For her, that choice meant no kids but does include a long-term boyfriend—and separate residences. She lives near the Don Valley while he lives near High Park. “We’re the first generation of women who really, really had choices,” she says. “There were a lot of obstacles, but basically we could do what we wanted and I was very conscious of that growing up.”

Part of that awareness was driven by the examples she saw around her. Her grandmother “was a terrible mother—she should have been a professor of theology or something like that, there was no way she wanted to have kids and probably not a husband either, but what else was she to do? Those were the only choice available.” Forrest’s sister Sue, 10 years her senior, was living the life of a carefree 20-something, traveling the world and teaching. And Forrest’s family had always maintained connections with a number of never-married aunts—“a long line of spinster school teachers” she laughs—who seemed  quite happy.

But still, that cliché of a childless life being an empty one is hard to shake. “ Sometimes when I’m reading obituaries and I read about a childless, unmarried woman, I think ‘Oh my god, that’s so sad,’” says Forrest. “And then I think ‘Wait a minute, that’s me!’”

For Dave Atkinson, his single childless status is driven less by an explicit decision to avoid kids and marriage and more by a decision in favour of a life structured around travel. For the last two decades, Atkinson has spent half the year working in Canada and the other half traveling the globe. It’s not a life that makes long-term relationships easy. It’s also not a life of luxury: he operates a one-man window and eavestrough cleaning company six months of the year, working 12-hour days and living in a modestly furnished bachelor apartment. Then, come winter, he packs a 28-litre backpack—“basically the size of a child’s school backpack”—and heads to sunnier climates.

And when someone suggests that his lifestyle might be, well, selfish? “Selfish means you’re doing something for your benefit to the detriment of others. If I choose not to have kids, that’s not about being selfish, it’s just about being a realist. I like ‘em but I don’t want them,” says Atkinson. “It’s more self-absorbed than selfish really. But I make no apologies for it.”

Not all childless singles are quite as secure in voicing their status, though, says DePaulo, despite research showing that more than half of all singles are not looking to embark on a committed relationship. “Single people who really like their lives feel reluctant to say so because they’re wary of getting the response that ‘you’re fooling yourself’ or ‘there’s something wrong with you,’” she says. “So they moderate their response: they say they’re not looking right now because that’s more socially acceptable. And when people don’t say they like being single, it makes other people reluctant to say they like being single.”

It doesn’t help, she says, that anti-single stereotypes are so prevalent that coupled friends and family routinely suggest that singles “must have issues” if they say they’re single and happy. “Can you imagine saying to a married person [who says they’re happy], ‘What’s wrong with you? Why are you so dependent?’”

The stereotypes differ slightly by gender, says DePaulo. For women, you’re either a promiscuous party girl who no-one will marry or a pathetic sad sack who can’t get a date. If you’re male, single and childless, you’re either a hopeless slob living in your parents’ basement, a closeted homosexual or a suspicious potential child predator.

A 2008 study by the U.S. Pew Research Center demonstrated the strength of those stereotypes. In testing voting patterns, the study presented voters with four potential candidates: a woman with children and one without, and a man with children and one without. The man without children scored the fewest votes, the man with children the most (the women were tied in the middle).

Those stereotypes can be more deadly as well. DePaulo cites a US study of healthcare workers that found singles admitted to hospital received lower quality care than patients surrounded by family, with workers admitting that they presumed that the singles weren’t worthy of the same level of care because they weren’t surrounded by loved ones.

DePaulo also points out that singles generally don’t get access to the “piñata of benefits” that come with being coupled. Their health insurance and pension benefits offer fewer options than those available to couples—they can’t opt-in non-spouses for insurance coverage and their pensions revert to the state or company pension plan when they die rather than being assumed by a designated beneficiary. They can pay higher prices to travel alone—or even to socialize closer to home. “A couple coming to dinner brings a bottle of wine,” says DePaulo. “A single person doesn’t get to bring half a bottle.”

Fortunately for singles, there is an upside: they also tend to have more wealth, especially if they’re childless. According to a 2009 study of older Americans, unmarried childless men have as much as one-third more wealth than their peers, while unmarried childless women were one-third more wealthy than unmarried mothers.

While the cost of singlehood can be irritating for singles, it’s both a boost to the economy and a potential problem for the environment. According to a 2007 report by Euromonitor International, the rise in single-person households has pushed up the purchase of homes by singles along with the consumption of appliances, electronic goods and in-home entertainment. At the same time, though, those single households take up more space per capita and consume more energy and resources than shared households. A 2006 study of UK single households found that one-person households consume 38% more products, 42% more packaging, 55% more electricity and 61% more gas per capita than four-person households.

Still, the full impact of a shift toward singlehood may be yet to be felt, says DePaulo, as these new generations of singles move into old age. It’s something Dave Atkinson and Diane Forrest are already planning for. Atkinson is socking away savings so that he can purchase a small rural property for his time in Canada, though he hopes to keep traveling beyond Canada’s borders for as long as possible. Forrest says she’s conscious of keeping younger friends in her life and jokes that she’s making sure she’s “nice to my nephew’s wife, since she’ll likely be the one choosing what nursing home I end up in.”

But she’s also got something else in mind: “I have a couple of friends who are in a similar situation to me and we’re talking about what we call the Old Broad’s Home,” she says. “The idea is that we’ll buy a fourplex and get some university student to live in the basement and plow the snow and stuff like that. And if we have guys at the time, we might let them come along too.”

“People are making plans that centre on the people who are important to them,” says DePaulo, “to move to the same city or the same neighbourhood or to share a big house. We’re seeing more experiments in living. It’s hard to track, but it’s there.”

And maybe, by then, February’s celebrations of lovers and families will be joined by a third—this one focused on friends.

Listen to the radio documentary Tina Pittaway and I did on singles at http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/shift/2010/12/24/single-file-1/

But before you cry uncle, you might notice she’s repetitively tapping her right cheekbone with the middle fingers of her right hand. Your eyes might wander to her chest or left arm, where scars from cutting herself are clearly visible. If you’re not paying attention to what she’s saying, or don’t understand it, her demeanour and tone might seem rude.

And if you were a writer, someone like me, say, you might worry about describing her so bluntly. To which she would laugh and respond: “I don’t care what you say — if it’s true.”

***

“Michelle is not a curiosity,” says Laurent Mottron, a psychiatrist and director of Montreal’s Laboratoire de Neurosciences cognitive des troubles envahissants du développement, his words accented with his native French. “She is a really important intellect who is obsessed by truth, and while it is usually considered a fault to be obsessed, it is of value to us.”

Since 2004, Dawson has made important contributions to the study of intelligence in autistics — a field she didn’t enter until she was in her forties. In fact, she’d never worked in science; when she met Mottron, she was employed as a Canada Post letter carrier (more on that later). In one landmark study published in 2009, she and members of Mottron’s research team demonstrated that measuring IQ in autistics by using a visual-based, rather than language-based, test resulted in some dramatic increases in IQ scores.

Currently, Dawson is working to develop a description of how autistic brains process and analyze information. Our best understanding of non-autistic brains suggests that people who aren’t autistic tend to modify their perceptions — the data brought to them by their senses — through existing experiences, knowledge, expectations and emotions. Non-autistics tend to push new data through existing information-processing hierarchies in what’s called a “top-down process.” What this can mean is that “things 
are lost but also filled in,” says Dawson. For example, non-autistics can fail to notice things they don’t expect to see (called “change blindness”—to see this in action, click here) or fail to see that two choices are identical if they are presented in different contexts (called “framing effects”). Dawson believes that autistics, by contrast, have more flexibility in the way they handle new data. “Top-down influences are more optional — not deficient, absent or dysfunctional — rather than more mandatory, and brain areas may function more independently but are not isolated,” she suggests. A non-autistic might be tempted to view this as an inefficient way to handle new information — after all, the autistic may not be quickly sorting it into existing categories as might a non-autistic. And that non-autistic sorting might be more efficient if there were nothing unexpected in the data. But if there are differences, the autistic brain could be better at noticing them simply because it is better at seeing what is truly there, as opposed to seeing what it expects to see. Dawson calls this “cognitive versatility.”

“It seems to be a good enough hypothesis,” Dawson observes. “The point isn’t to say that I’m right, but that these guesses — and I would call them wild guesses just to make sure everyone knows they’re still speculation — seem to be quite useful. They might turn out to be wrong in some way and someone way smarter than I might come along and point out things I’ve totally missed, which I hope happens, because it pushes the science forward.”

“I think Michelle Dawson’s general idea of the primacy of science and ethics and her investigations of autism are ahead of their time and the world is still waiting to catch up,” says American author, economist and debunker of bad science, Tyler Cowen. “She is an exceptional mind and I think 20 or 30 years from now, people will look back and see her as an intellectual pioneer.”

***

When Mottron met Dawson in 2001, however, her intellect was not immediately evident. Then in her late thirties, she was featured in a television program as an example of an autistic whose life was in disarray. She exhibited self-injurious behaviour — cutting herself. She was embroiled in a dispute with her employer, Canada Post, and was depressed. Mottron, whose work on autism was already well regarded, was featured in the same program as an expert on the condition, and he recalls thinking, If I can’t be of help to her, what’s the use of my work? Medical ethics prevented him from contacting her to suggest he counsel her, but she subsequently phoned his office to ask for assistance in dealing with her employer. “I tried to help her with the various ways we help autistic adults,” says Mottron, offering her life skills advice and other practical strategies. “All we tried didn’t work.”

For Michelle Dawson vocational school was “sort of like high school, but with ashtrays.”

Dawson, like some other autistics of her generation, wasn’t diagnosed until adulthood. She was, she recalls, an odd child. She taught herself math at age four by watching grown-ups play cards. She read early and voraciously, studying encyclopedias — although, while she could recite what she’d read, as a youngster she didn’t fully understand it. She ate what she describes as “very unusual and extremely restricted choices of food.” At school in Western Canada, she was a “math head” but “nobody thought of me as a nerd because I looked too slow.” And while teachers clearly found her peculiar, her marks were good enough — sometimes exceptionally good — for her to pass from one grade to the next. Her parents never treated her eccentricities like “some kind of tragedy,” she says, perhaps because one of her siblings had suffered a near-fatal illness, which may have given them a unique perspective on Dawson’s behaviour. In high school, she sat through classes drawing on her clothes or sneakers and sometimes sleeping. When there were breaks, she found places within the school to hide and relax by rocking. And while her marks qualified her for entry to university, it didn’t occur to her to apply. Her father was a university professor, but Dawson had no concept of what university was or why she might want to go there. “I liked keyboards. I was good at typing. So I thought I might be a typist.”

That didn’t happen. Instead, an acquaintance was registering for vocational school — “sort of like high school, but with ashtrays,” she remarks — and Dawson decided to register too, ending up in a two-year drafting course. She excelled, winning a scholarship for her second year. But her success at school didn’t lead to success beyond: She graduated into a recession, and computer-assisted drafting programs soon made most of her drafting skills obsolete.

Over the next few years, Dawson drifted from job to job prior to moving to Montreal, where she worked in a sweatshop before applying for work as a letter carrier. She aced the entrance test and was hired. For the next 11 years, she had an exemplary work record, garnering excellent performance reviews. “It’s a really great job for autistics. You need persistence (which I have a lot of), you need to be resourceful (which I have in the extreme), you need to be able to remember and process a lot of information, and being able to notice anomalies is a very good skill to have too. When you walk around on your route, you always, in effect, carry the instructions of what to do next in front of you because you have the next piece of mail in front of you; there’s a limited amount of time working in an actual office, and you have interactions that are fairly short and based on a very set subject matter, which autistics generally handle well. And they don’t really care how you do the job so long as you do it really well.” She pauses. “You can tell that I really liked this job, eh? I do really still miss it.”

It was work Dawson would have been content to continue doing. She had been diagnosed with autism in the early 1990s, and in 1999, when a change in schedule meant she had to request a minor accommodation based on her disorder, Dawson disclosed her diagnosis to her employer. Behaviour previously viewed as eccentric became characterized as pathological. Her self-injury was taken as evidence of potentially violent behaviour. For almost a decade, Dawson and Canada Post were engaged in ongoing legal disputes, which ended up before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, where Dawson ultimately won her case. However, she did not return to work at Canada Post.

It was at this time that she connected with Mottron. And while his efforts at life skills training with Dawson had little effect, he did notice her mastery of processing large amounts of information. Since she was a native English speaker and he was not, he asked her to copy-edit a scientific paper he’d written for publication in English. She did a good job, so he asked her to edit a second one. “It was then I realized she had actually read all of the works I cited in the bibliography — and was critiquing the way I quoted those works,” he explains. “Her level of precision but also her judgment and her seriousness were exceptional. She was an unbelievable insurance against making mistakes. So I stopped being her psychiatrist and became her colleague.”

Mottron initially tried to pay Dawson for her work, but it became clear to both this wouldn’t work. Being in an employee relationship and tracking billable hours was so difficult for Dawson it almost stopped her from doing what little work she took on. So she became a volunteer. As her role grew from checking accuracy to contributing intellectual property, Mottron invited her to co-author scientific papers.

Today, the vocational school graduate is working with doctoral- and post-doctoral-level researchers. Within that team, her skills and tendencies have found a home. Where in other situations her drive for absolute certainty (“She can’t accept just 99.9 per cent accurate,” says Mottron) was a crippling fault, within the research team, she actually pushes scholars to produce better work. Her combative intellectual arguments are welcomed; they challenge team members to rigorously examine and defend their conclusions. And her breadth of knowledge — what Mottron calls her “absolutely unusual” ability to process and recall the fine details of thousands of scientific papers on autism — makes her an invaluable resource.

The pluses for Dawson? “I like the work I’m doing now,” she affirms. “Considering how badly I might have been expected to screw up, this has been quite productive. It’s better than a kick in the pants, you know? It’s better than a stick in the eye.”

It would be tempting to end Dawson’s story here, a happy transformation from misunderstood misfit to industrious intellectual, finally recognized for her work; her disorder viewed not as a list of deficits but revealed as a source of hidden strengths.

But that wouldn’t be, to use Dawson’s own yardstick, 100 per cent true.

***

“Have you seen Michelle’s apartment?” asks Montreal lawyer Doug Mitchell as we talk on the phone one October evening. “It is…” he pauses. “You would never want any of your children, family members or anybody to live in that apartment. But she doesn’t want to live anywhere else.”

Mitchell is one of Dawson’s long-standing friends and the father of an 18-year-old autistic son. Their friendship began, as have so many of Dawson’s, with arguing. Dawson sought Mitchell’s help in her dispute with Canada Post, and he would spend hours on the phone “trying to give her a bit of perspective on how her obsessions, perspectives, whatever word you want to use, would be 
perceived by the legal system and people in the ‘normal’ world.

“People in the office would raise their eyebrows when I got a call from Michelle: ‘Oh, here comes another two-hour call where Doug’s unavailable.’ ” And while Mitchell was accustomed to offering clients — many of whom he says are in “odd situations” — insight into how the legal system might view them, “what was unique in my relationship with Michelle was the opposite also happened. She gave me tremendous insight into trying to be able to understand things from the perspective of an autistic person.”

It was a vision Mitchell was hungry for: He was deeply drawn to understanding how the world appears through his son’s eyes. “I remember her saying, ‘You don’t ask blind people to look you in the eye, so why do you ask autistic people to look you in the eye?’ I just remember that striking me as, Holy shit, that’s really interesting. She’s challenged me to think about things differently.”

Mitchell has helped Dawson challenge others’ thinking as well. In 2004, she applied for the right to present arguments before the Supreme Court of Canada in what was known as the Auton case, in which a group of parents was fighting to have the B.C. government pay for a widely used behavioural treatment program for autistics. The court rarely allows individuals to intervene in cases, but it granted Dawson that right and Mitchell appeared for her in court. Their key arguments? That the court was being asked to make decisions affecting the rights of all autistic people without having heard from an autistic individual, which was inconsistent with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. As well, Mitchell and Dawson argued the studies supporting the treatment technique in question had the same basis as those used to treat what was known as the “disorder” of homosexuality in the 1970s.

“I became involved in Auton because the false and unethical claims and practices by both sides had a drastic effect on the well-being of autistics in Canada,” says Dawson. “I intervened as one such autistic, who had lived the consequences and would continue to live the consequences.” Her fundamental point was that it’s wrong to make a decision affecting the human rights of autistics without understanding the disability or hearing from autistics themselves. Ultimately, the court ruled against the parents.

It was a victory that led some parent advocates to condemn Dawson’s motives and accuse her of faking autism — perhaps not surprising, given that many of them believe treatment is essential for their children’s development. “Every day children with autism do not receive treatment, they’re being discriminated against. It’s clear. Every other group in Canadian society receives treatment for their core condition, every other group, except for kids with autism,” mother Sabrina Freeman told the CBC. Dawson’s response to this type of argument? Prove it with science. (Lest one think her stance places her in the autism self-advocacy camp — a movement of autistics who say, among other things, that only they can truly advocate for themselves, and that there is a unique autistic culture and identity — it’s worth noting Dawson has also pointed out that some self-advocacy groups play fast and loose with scientific evidence, earning her their enmity as well.)

It was a case Mitchell might have been expected to argue for the parents’ side. “I guess I was willing to listen to Michelle,” he suggests. “It wasn’t until I spoke with her that I appreciated autism could really be a strength. So I was willing to listen. And despite her, her vigour, I sensed she was also listening to me.”

Yet “I remember, one of the first few times I met Michelle, thinking I don’t want my son to grow up like that. That’s too tortured a soul. And she’s managed to overcome that tortured soul part, and I think she now lives a pretty good life as far as she’s concerned. But she still has limitations.” A few minutes later, he comes back to this thought. “My wife and I have never been a couple to chase a miracle cure.” He pauses. “But that said, I’m still not sure that if I could find a ‘cure’ I wouldn’t do it. It’s not easy to watch somebody you love in obvious difficulty. I mean, I wouldn’t tell Michelle that,” he says, laughing ruefully.

“Well, maybe I would, but it wouldn’t be easy.”

Precarious and lucky. Dawson uses these two words again and again as we talk over the weeks. Her existence is precarious because her autism limits her ability to do things as simple as buying a cup of coffee. She is sometimes paralyzed by what she describes as waking nightmares. When she is stressed, she may bolt or simply shut down. And she is extremely guarded about letting outsiders inside her life because she knows the label “autism” makes her more vulnerable to intervention from authorities who may judge the way she lives and where she lives to be unacceptable, and who might seek to compel her to live in circumstances they define as “normal” and she would find intolerable.

Nevertheless, she has also been enormously lucky. Lucky to have connected with Laurent Mottron, Doug Mitchell and other loyal friends, who emphasize their relationships with Dawson are two-way streets: They’re not her “helpers,” they’re friends who gain as much from her as they offer her. Lucky to have found a way to use her exceptional skills to contribute to the messy, noisy and sometimes ugly conversations changing the way we view autism. Lucky.

And precarious.

“What I can’t do is really obvious,” Dawson says at the end of a three-hour phone call. “And what I can do is more obscure. But if you don’t give autistics the opportunity, if you don’t take that risk, then what happens? Not only are you cheating autistics, you’re cheating non-autistics too. So what’s the real risk here? Not seeing the possibilities? Or deliberately discouraging autistic people from doing what we do well?

“I could be in an institution. It is only luck that I’m not. And for other autistic people, it isn’t that they’re not working hard, it isn’t that they haven’t done fantastic things, but they have to be lucky too. Because if they’re not lucky, forget it. You’re not going to hear about them except as some burden on somebody.”

As we end our conversation, I tell her I’ll be back in touch to double-check that I’m interpreting what she’s said accurately. “Yeah, that’s a good idea. I’ll probably freak out a few times, but it’s just what I do. It’s inevitable. I freak out really politely.” She laughs. And hangs up.

This article was written with the assistance of a CIHR Journalism Award from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

Loretta is 23 weeks pregnant with triplets. And she is bleeding.

No. No. No. The denial holds her fear in check. It’s nothing, it’s going to stop. Just like the last time.

Two weeks ago, Loretta was admitted to RVH with vaginal bleeding. She was released after eight days and sent home on bed rest. Loretta and her husband, Michael, thought they’d made it past the crisis. They hoped that the worst they’d be faced with was arranging a sitter to look after their 15 – month – old son, Adrian, while Loretta stayed flat on her back trying to make it to 30 weeks — the magic number.

With triplets, the Fearmans knew prematurity was almost guaranteed. But just how premature has become the agonizing question faced by parents and medical staff alike. Only two out of 10 babies born at 23 weeks will survive. And only about half of those survivors will be free of a major handicap: brain damage is not uncommon, and as many as 25 percent of survivors will develop the neuromuscular disease cerebral palsy by age 2. Vision and hearing problems are common, as well as a higher than average rate of learning disabilities. The risk of handicap declines with each successive week, until at 30 weeks preemies and full – term babies have an almost equal chance of “intact survival.”

But Loretta Fearman is still seven weeks shy of that safety zone. Her contractions have started, and there’s no going back. It’s a labor that is “100 times worse than with Adrian, because there was no happiness to carry us through it,” she’ll say later. Both Loretta and Michael are certain their babies won’t make it if they’re born this early. It’s a conclusion that numbs them with grief. They’re so focused on the black – and – white of life and death, they don’t even consider the gray zone: life at a price. Everyone in the hospital seems to beavoiding them, like “there’s an aura of sadness around us, and they don’t want to touch it,” Michael says later.

At one point, Loretta asks a nurse why they’re making her deliver naturally — why can’t they just knock her out and get it over with? The nurse tells her that if she’s going to abort these babies, it’s better for her to do it naturally. To Loretta, the nurse’s words hammer home the message: my babies are dying.

By 5:30 a.m. on Monday, July 11, Loretta is in the final stages of labor, and the call goes out to her obstetrician, Dr. David Johns. He instructs the nursing staff to alert the pediatrician on call, as well as additional delivery – room nurses and respiratory technicians. “Even in the worst situation, you go in hoping to save them all,” he says.

Just before 6 a.m., Loretta, with Michael at her side, is wheeled into the crowded delivery room. Looking around, she suddenly feels a spark of hope — with this many people here, maybe there is a chance the babies will survive. Michael just tries to shut it all out and stay focused on Loretta’s face. At 6:18, the first baby announces her arrival with a cry that under other circumstances should have prompted smiles. But to Michael, who has given up all hope for his babies, it seems like a cruel joke. (“I didn’t want to hear them or see them,” Michael says later. “I thought they weren’t going to make it, and I just wanted it to be over, and for Loretta to be okay.”) Leah weighs only 608 grams, just over a pound. Nineteen minutes after the first birth, the second baby, Isabelle, is delivered stillborn. Her tiny body, weighing less than 600 grams, is laid aside as the medical team focuses on Leah and Loretta.

Finally, nine minutes after that, the third baby — born breech, as the first had been — arrives. Dana weighs in at 18 grams over her surviving older sister: 626. But while she may be slightly ahead in weight, the last triplet simply doesn’t look as well as her sister. She’s bruised from head to toe, proof of her fragile condition.

Both babies are so immature that their tiny eyelids are still fused together. But breathing is the first priority. The delivery – room teams struggle to get a tiny airway, only 2.5 millimetres in diameter, threaded down each baby’s throat to sit at the top of lungs not much bigger than the top joint of an adult thumb. Leah’s lungs respond well. But Dana’s remain stiff, and doctors apply surfactant, a lung lubricant, to ease her breathing. Then, the babies are bundled into incubators and rushed down the hall to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). At full speed, it’s a 20 – to 30 – second journey.

Loretta and Michael are left behind in the delivery room, Loretta on the delivery table, numb with exhaustion and hopelessness, Michael standing next to her, still holding her hand. This isn’t happening. This isn’t happening. This isn’t happening.

***

Only a generation ago, extreme prematurity — births earlier than 32 of the average 40 weeks of pregnancy — was typically a death sentence. While incubators could keep a baby warm and supplied with high levels of oxygen, more often than not, the babies simply didn’t make it. Then came the mechanical ventilator in the early 1960s, and with its use, saving 30 – to 32 weekers became a matter of course. Refinements in ventilator technology and advances in intravenous nutrition pushed the barrier back even more, and by the 1980s, babies born between 28 and 31 weeks had a better than eight – in 10 chance of survival. Then, by 1989, came a major advance. In extremely premature babies, the lungs are stiff and easily ruptured, like a balloon that has never been blown up. But researchers developed a lubricant called surfactant that reduced the stiffness. The survival barrier moved back to 23 weeks, but not without raising new ethical questions.

A 1993 Toronto study that looked at premature births at three of the city’s hospitals over a five – and – a – half – year period paints a stark picture: of 330,000 live births, 568 infants were born between 23 and 26 weeks’ gestation. Of those premature infants, only one child born at 23 weeks and three at 24 weeks were free of a major handicap by age 2. All required months in a neonatal intensive care unit. And while the babies studied were born before surfactant was widely used, the authors still concluded that “an aggressive approach before 24 completed weeks’ gestation is not warranted.” But the technology exists. And the number of very early – stage preemies keeps growing.

***

In the neonatal intensive care unit at Barrie’s Royal Victoria Hospital, the teams work against the backdrop of pink and blue walls, stuffed teddy bears and softly drawn pastel angels decorating walls and shelves. IVs are inserted into each of the two Fearman babies’ umbilical arteries and umbilical veins, not because other vessels are hard to find — the babies’ skin is so translucent that veins are clearly visible — but because their bodies are so small that these two major vessels are the only ones large enough to allow the quick insertion of an IV catheter. Blood samples are drawn and analyzed for blood gases, to see how well their lungs are exchanging oxygen and carbon dioxide. Intravenous glucose is fed into their veins glucose is fed into their veins to maintain adequate blood sugar levels and replace fluids.

Dana and Leah also receive two rounds of intravenous antibiotics. Babies develop most of their immune systems during the third trimester of pregnancy, when antibodies are transferred from mother to child. But these infants are so immature that their own immune systems barely function. By now, there are almost more tubes and wires visible than baby. The open isolettes, heated by an overhead unit, are surrounded by high – tech digital readout monitors and computerized IVs. There are low – tech touches too: in an effort to stabilize their temperatures, both babies have been snuggled against latex gloves filled with warm water. The gloves are almost as big as they are.

Back in the delivery room, Michael calls his parents from the phone next to Loretta’s bed, to let them know what’s happened. His mother answers and he starts to explain, but the words get swallowed by his tears. Loretta strokes his arms and takes the phone from him — she’s numb enough to speak without crying. Then, they phone her parents.

It is 8 a.m., and against the odds, the two tiny babies have made it through their first 90 minutes. But to survive they’ll need to be moved to a Level 3 nursery, with long – term one – on – one nursing and around – the – clock intensive care. For the medical team, there is no ethical dilemma. There’s a chance these babies can be saved. The Fearmans are not consulted. The call goes out to Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, and an air ambulance is dispatched from Toronto Island Airport on the 20 – minute flight to Barrie.

It will be another two hours before the transport nurses feel Leah and Dana can be moved. Leah, the eldest, has stabilized well. But Dana is still having problems. Her temperature bobs up and down, and even with the heated incubator and latex – glove hot – water bottles, she never makes it over 36C. She needs 100 percent oxygen to keep her blood gases even near normal, while Leah is at 21 percent — normal room air. And it is taking far more ventilator pressure to push that oxygen in and out of Dana’s still – stiff lungs. The team faces the choice of spending more time trying to stabilize Dana, or of moving both babies right away. They decide that Dana is as stable as she is likely to get. It’s time to transport.

Michael wheels Loretta down the hallway to say good – bye. They’ll have to follow by car; there’s no room for parents in the helicopter. It is the first time they have seen their girls up close: earlier, Michael watched briefly from the nursery doorway as the team worked to stabilize them, but there were so many people in the room, he couldn’t get close to them. Now, Dana and Leah are tucked into the same transport incubator. It’s equipped with high – tech life – support and monitoring equipment. Again, there is low – tech help too — Dana’s and Leah’s tiny heads are warmed with knitted hats, their feet in tiny booties. Both babies wrap a tiny pink hand around Loretta’s finger as she and Michael kiss them good – bye.

And then they are gone.

***

For the detached and statistically minded authors of the Toronto preemie study, “an aggressive approach” to saving Dana and Leah is not warranted. But “babies aren’t statistics,” says Dr. Barry Smith, director of neonatology at the Hospital for Sick Children. If an infant is struggling to survive, “you have to err on the side of life,” he says. And you keep on erring on the side of life until the baby dies or the parents and doctors agree that the infant’s prognosis — short – or long – term — is so grim that death is a kinder option.

How do you know when you’ve reached that point? Often, you don’t. “One gets caught on a one – way train,” says Dr. Muniini Mulera, neonatologist and head of pediatrics at RVH. Dr. Mulera’s words are precise but laced with compassion. “You have already come this far, there is a parental bond with Baby, and because you can’t predict the future, you keep going because you hope that this is one baby that will be all right.” But more often than not, the baby is not all right. And then both physician and family are faced with deciding whether it is time to stop the train.

It’s a decision that rarely gets made the way you see it on television dramas like ER or Chicago Hope, with time for discussion and high – toned conflict. In real life, more often than not, you don’t know what questions to ask. Fear overtakes feistiness. Decisions get made by default. And the moral of the story depends largely on your viewpoint.

And it matters that most medical dramas are American. Why? Because outside of direct experience, our Canadian views of high – tech baby -saving are shaped more by American dramas than any other single source. In the United States, step – by – step consultation with parents of preemies and high – tech interventions are far more likely than in Canada. For one thing, you or your insurance company are footing the bill. Also, you’re more likely to sue if something goes wrong. But a major factor is an early 1980s court case commonly referred to as the Baby Doe case. The U.S. courts ruled that hospitals discriminated against people with disabilities by even considering quality of life as a factor in treatment decisions regarding premature babies. The ruling led to a period of pulling out all the technological stops to save a baby, regardless of the long – term prognosis or even the parents’ wishes. And while the Baby Doe decision was eventually reversed, some hospitals still opt for the life – at – any – cost route.

Here in Canada, Dr. Smith maintains, hospitals are much less likely to let technology drive the decision – making process. Parents need to be making the decisions, he says, because long after the medical team has forgotten the family’s name, the parents will be living with the consequences of their decision. “They bear the burden of caring for a severely handicapped child,” says Dr. Smith, “and if the decision is made not to treat, it’s also the parents who are likely to carry the greatest guilt over fearing that the decision was wrong.” But he admits that circumstances sometimes derail the consultative process, and that even under ideal circumstances, many parents still defer to medical staff.

***

After the helicopter leaves with Leah and Dana, Michael wheels Loretta back to the delivery room, where a nurse has bathed and swaddled Isabelle, the tiniest of the triplets, the one who didn’t make it. Loretta cradles the nearly weightless bundle in her arms, saying good – bye, as Michael wraps his arm around her shoulders. And then the tears come, this time from both of them. Michael has been up for over 36 hours and is in no shape to make the drive to Toronto. Loretta will be in the hospital for at least another night. There is nothing they can do until the next morning.

It’s just after noon when the babies arrive in Toronto. At Sick Kids’ hospital, Dr. Smith is on call when the Fearman babies arrive. Leah, stable at transport, is still doing well. But Dana’s fragile condition worries him. Her temperature continues to drop despite every effort to support it. She’s acidotic — her tissues aren’t getting enough oxygen from her lungs. Dr. Smith makes the decision to call the Fearmans: he needs their permission to remove her from the respirator.

Loretta is alone when the call comes in; Michael has just gone home to check on Adrian and to make arrangements for a funeral home to pick up Isabelle’s body. Dr. Smith explains the situation and reassures Loretta that Dana won’t be in pain, won’t die alone. It’s a decision no parent should have to make, but Loretta does. She hangs up the phone, draws a long breath, and calls Michael at home. In Toronto, Dana is given a painkiller by IV and removed from the respirator. One of the nurses quietly cradles and rocks her until she is gone.

Tuesday morning, Loretta and Michael arrive at the Hospital for Sick Children, with its soaring atrium entrance decorated with balloons and mobiles. They held hands for much of the hour – and – a – quarter drive, discussing the funeral arrangements for Isabelle and Dana, and worrying about Leah.

On the third floor, the Fearmans stand outside the softly lit visitors room waiting to be paged into the restricted – access NICU. On the wall outside the room, pictures of the unit’s success stories — children now toddlers or school – age — fill a display case, but on this first visit, the Fearmans are too preoccupied to notice.

A nurse comes to get them. Leah is in a ward with half a dozen or so other infants, some premature, others full – term but very sick. She’s in a closed incubator surrounded by monitors and IVs. The nurse updates them on her condition, and they’re given information about the hospital, the NICU and its routines. Neither is able to take much of it in.

Leah’s alive, but it’s still touch and go. For the next hour, her parents sit side by side on low chairs at eye level with the incubator. Michael is convinced that Leah will be okay. He’s not sure why he thinks so, and it’s not like him to discount even the possibility of a bad outcome. But he does. He hugs Loretta as she starts to cry. She wants to believe Leah will do well too, and she clings to that hope. She has already lost two babies in 24 hours; no God could be that cruel, she thinks, to take their third.

The rest of the week is a blur. Every day, the Fearmans travel back and forth from Barrie to Toronto. A neighbor pitches in to look after Adrian. There are funeral arrangements for Dana and Isabelle to be made.

Finally, on Friday, they meet with Dr. Smith. He tells them that Leah has made it through the most critical time, and that her chances of surviving are now about 50/50. Which side of 50, they ask. “I wouldn’t discourage you from buying her an RESP,” he replies.

But four months will pass before Leah is ready to go home. Like many premature babies, she develops apnea and bradycardia — her body forgets to breathe, and her heart rate dips dangerously, setting off alarms on the monitors. Gradually, the episodes become less frequent and finally end altogether. Leah also has a heart murmur. In premature babies a tiny vessel in the heart, which normally closes at birth, stays open. Sometimes surgery is required; Leah’s eventually closes without it. There are concerns about her eyes, too; in some cases, the high levels of oxygen used to keep preemies alive leads to blindness. The ophthalmologist considers eye surgery, then decides it’s not necessary.

And there are happier milestones too. On August 23, Loretta gets to hold Leah for the first time. Her little girl is 43 days old, and weighs 810 grams. Three weeks later, another major advance: Leah joins the “Kilo Club” by pushing past 1,000 grams, and comes off the ventilator. Finally, on November 18, Leah Fearman comes home.

One year later, Leah’s biggest health problem appears to be astigmatism in both her eyes, “but we can deal with glasses,” says Michael. She’s small for her age — only 14 pounds — but she’s lightning fast when she crawls to keep up with her older brother, and she burbles and laughs playing peekaboo with Mom and Dad. She doesn’t like you to hold her hands or touch her feet, though. Loretta thinks it’s because they were frequent targets for IVs and blood samples.

Like most premature babies, Leah has chronic lung disease, the result of scarring caused by the high levels of oxygen and respirator pressure required to save her life. But as her lungs grow, new tissue will develop and the scarring will disappear. The learning disabilities that often plague premature children, if there, likely won’t show up until she’s in school. “We’ll just have to deal with things as they come,” says Michael. Although she shows no early signs of cerebral palsy, it’s still too early to tell for certain that she’s beaten the odds on the disorder. However, a severe form would have occurred by now, says Dr. Smith.

For 23 – weekers, Leah is the exception, not the rule. Dr. Mulera points to a recent — and more typical — case. The baby survived, but was blind, deaf and had severe cerebral palsy. He admits that in cases like that one, he inevitably questions whether they’ve done the right thing in saving the infant. And he cautiously ventures what might be called a “hierarchy of luck.” “Leah and babies like her are the luckiest, but the second – luckiest group are those who die early on,” he says. “The most unlucky are those who survive but then endure lives of pain and suffering, both for the infants and their families.” It’s true that many severely premature infants will end up handicapped. But Dr. Smith notes that since the 1960s, the overall rate of handicap among children hasn’t risen. The prevalence of cerebral palsy is the same now as then. “That at least tells me that the same technology that is saving extremely premature babies is preventing handicap in other babies,” he says.

Even given the benefits of those technological advances, Dr. Smith agrees with Dr. Mulera that now the research focus at least should shift away from the technology of salvation and toward the science of prevention. “We still don’t know why labor begins early,” says Dr. Mulera. We do know some of the risk factors. As in the Fearman case, fertility drugs increase the risk of multiple births which in turn boosts the risk of prematurity. Maternal poverty is a significant factor in many cases. The use of alcohol, tobacco or other substances can also be contributors. So can infection, malnutrition, even emotional stress. Physical problems with the uterus can also play a role. The next challenge, they agree, should be to focus on making the use of technology less necessary by making prematurity a thing of the past. “We didn’t get rid of polio by treating the symptoms and developing better iron lungs,” says Dr. Smith. “We did it by finding a way — a vaccine — to stop the disease.”

For the Fearmans, there’s little talk of prevention or ethical dilemmas. With an active 3 1/2 – year – old and a 20 – month – old baby to care for, their lives are full and happy. The cry Loretta and Michael didn’t want to hear that July morning has become a welcome sound, and a daily reminder of their little girl who seems to have beaten the odds.

And none of it would have happened without what Penny calls “the gift of despair.” From the outside her life looked great: she was a successful CBC radio host in Winnipeg, Quebec City and then Montreal. But she was also an alcoholic, “desperately unhappy, lonely and embittered.” In her mid-30s, she came to “the proverbial fork in the road: I couldn’t sustain this unhappiness any longer, so I either had to do myself in or make a change.” Change won out: Penny entered a 12-step program and stopped drinking. Not long afterwards, she met the man who would become her husband, Dr. Michael Whitehead, chief of hematology at Montreal’s Children’s Hospital. It sounds like a fairytale, and in this one, Penny quit her job to devote herself to her childhood dream of writing a book.

And then she was paralyzed: She spent the next five years “eating gummy bears and watching Oprah.” When people asked about her book, she lied. “What if what I wrote was no good, if I put my lifelong dream to the test and was found wanting?” Finally, in desperation, she set her project aside and decided to write a murder mystery “just for me, just for fun.” She modeled Gamache on husband Michael, set the fictional town of Three Pines in the Quebec Townships landscape where they live. She finished her draft in a year—and spent the next 18 months facing rejection after rejection. One publisher simply scrawled “No” across her letter and sent it back. Others told her “no-one wants to read mysteries set in Canada.”

“I was left with the feeling that they must be right,” she says. “The book must be crap.” And then salvation: in 2003 she entered the manuscript in a British competition for unpublished authors. She didn’t win—she placed second—but while in London for the awards ceremony, Penny met an agent who agreed to take her on. Within months, she signed contracts with publishers in London and New York. “And I knew my life had changed.”

Still, there were challenges ahead. “I threw out the entire draft of my second book,” she says. “I was too worried about what people would think and I couldn’t connect with my characters.” She saw a therapist, worked past the block and wrote the new draft in two months. Two more books have followed since, with work on her fifth just started.

Given her path, it’s not a coincidence that the characters in Penny’s book only find Three Pines if they’re lost—and only prosper there if they’re true to themselves. “Three Pines is the place where we become who we are,” says the woman who has become who she is: a writer, grateful for the despair that got her here.

Louise Penny’s latest book The Brutal Telling recently debuted at number 19 on the New York Times Bestseller List.