Matt Haig

Autism was Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, wasn't it?

That was autism.

And then, obviously, the spectrum's been widened and the definition's been widened since then.

But I just had this difference.

It wasn't a naughtiness specifically, but I was difficult for teachers in that I wasn't concentrating ever.

I would be chatting away, staring out the window, being very blank, doing something else.

fidgeting, being on a calculator when I shouldn't be, whatever it is.

And does that stay with you forever?

Are you still autistic?

Yes, because it's not like a mental illness, like anxiety or depression where it ebbs and flows.

It's kind of a condition.

It's a state of being.

But obviously, as with everything else, so I don't know if in a hundred years' time,

i will be diagnosed with something else or whatever but in 2026 if you have this thing you know which i believe is autism you are you know different in lots of ways we're going back to the 1980s when you are at school you are an undiagnosed person with autism and undiagnosed suffering from adhd and you're feeling

I mean, I like...

imagining and i liked stories i did like writing stories and i like reading stories and even though i grew up in a town without a bookshop and without a cinema so it's the archetypal small town that you kind of want to escape from we did have a very good library in the center of town and it's still there it was brand new then and it's unusually for a library it's it's got a lot of glass

So it was like a giant conservatory greenhouse in the centre of town with a park around it.

And I would sit there after school before my parents got home from work and I would just read whatever it was.

Well, I often mention there was a book by an American writer called S.E.

Hinton called The Outsiders, which is fitting as I was a bit of an outsider, which I loved because it felt so different at times, but everything teachers had encouraged me to read because it was a book about quality.