Hello,
On Tuesday, I was excited to speak to Daniel Tammet about his latest book, Nine Minds: Inner Lives on the Spectrum.
I’ve been reading Daniel’s writing for a long time - his first book, Born on a Blue Day, came out in 2006. At the time, he was writing about his experience as a savant (his synaesthesia means that he conceptualises numbers and dates in a completely different way to most of us), and it was interesting to talk here about the way that he was treated during those years. Daniel is a beautiful writer, but his talent was often invisible to people who only wanted to see him as a kind of specimen, not fully human. I deeply admire the way he’s persisted, asserting his rightful place as a thinker and a master of prose.
Nine Minds: Inner Lives on the Spectrum is a very necessary book. A close-up portrait of nine different autistic people, it is at once poetic and illuminating, showing the insight and passion that autistic minds bring to the world. It’s a pleasurable, immersive read, and it does the important work of humanising a group of people who have so often been dehumanised.
There’s a Reading Guide here, and you can watch Daniel talking about the book on BBC Breakfast here. Nine Minds is published by the Wellcome Collection, and is available in all good bookshops in the UK, or on Kindle in the US.
You can listen in the Substack podcast feed, watch the video, or subscribe here to listen via your favourite podcast app from Friday. There’s also a transcript below if you prefer to read our conversation.
Take care,
Katherine
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True Stories Book Club with Daniel Tammet