HOW TO BE HUMAN

A deeply moving memoir from the first autistic student to attend Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.

Diagnosed with autism at age 5, Fleming has little memory of his life before age 11 or 12. As a child, he screamed for hours each day and never wanted to be more than a few feet from his mother. Eventually, with the aid of family, friends, and educators, the author, who “wasn’t expected to graduate from high school,” received a college degree and was named a Rhodes Scholar. At Oxford, he recently completed his master’s degree in philosophy. In his debut book, Fleming tells his story to Winik, and the result is a fascinating deep dive into the murky waters of consciousness and identity. Because the author doesn’t think about language like most people, he must translate information into his own code to understand it. He says he has “no idea” how other people process emotion, but he learned how to listen with empathy from a college leadership training manual. Whereas most people just “have” a personality, Fleming had to construct one: “serious and friendly and intellectual” but also “bubbly and dorky and witty.” Fleming’s rules for living spring from his Christian faith, and he believes that when it comes to solving the world’s abiding problems, it’s vital that we practice both “ruthless optimism” and “practical idealism.” Winik interviewed Fleming multiple times and went through hundreds of pages of transcripts to help him shape the narrative, organizing the material in a Q&A fashion around chapters covering topics such as energy and memory, language barriers, and “things that matter.” Never intrusive, she elegantly provides context for Fleming’s brilliantly unique outlook. This tremendous work should be savored; every clearly written chapter offers fresh insight into how to shape a life from the inchoate matter of consciousness.

Fleming’s extraordinary journey will inspire any reader weighing what it means to be human in a troubled world.