Hello, Stranger My Life on the Autism Spectrum

“… Insights from a time when a young person with autism grew up in a world where nobody understood them!” – Temple Grandin, author, Thinking in Pictures

“An extraordinary look at autism from the inside – by turns heartbreaking, uplifting, illuminating, witty, and wise.” – Steve Silberman, author, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

Barbara Moran has never known how to be good.

As a child, she made strange noises, fidgeted constantly, and licked her lips until they cracked. She had “upsets” that embarrassed and frustrated her family. Worse still, she developed friendships with inanimate objects—everything from roller skates to tables to an antique refrigerator—and became obsessed with images of cathedrals.

She was institutionalized, analyzed, and marginalized, cast aside as not trying hard enough to fit in.

But after almost forty years, Barbara was given an answer for her inability to be like, and to connect with, other people: autism.

Hello, Stranger is the story of a misunderstood life that serves as an eye-opening call for compassion. Bracingly honest, Barbara describes the profound loneliness of being abandoned and judged while also expressing her deep yearning simply to be loved and to give love.

Hello, Stranger is a challenge to every reader to see the beauty and the humanity present in every individual.

Barbara Moran is a graphic artist from Topeka, Kansas, who was not diagnosed with autism until she was in her early 40s. She has spoken at autism conferences, and her artwork has been exhibited by Visionaries + Voices, at Bryn Mawr’s annual Art Ability show, and at the MIND Institute at the University of California-Davis. Barbara’s art often focuses on personified objects such as locomotives, stoplights, and cathedrals. Barbara shares her home with her companion of forty years, Rooney, a 1934 Monitor Top GE refrigerator.