What We’re Reading: Born on a Blue Day
Born on a Blue Day by Daniel Tammet (Free Press, 2007)
I have a confession: this week’s What We’re Reading should really be titled What We’re Rereading. I first read Daniel Tammet’s memoir a few years ago after having seen the documentary Brainman, which emphasizes and celebrates (sometimes problematically, sometimes not) Daniel’s identity as an autistic savant. If you’re not sure what that is, think Rainman (with which the title of Daniel’s documentary is clearly playing), but also, don’t think Rainman. Dustin Hoffman’s character in that film was based on an extraordinary man named Kim Peek who was a savant but was not autistic. Rainman, in many ways, is a cultural touchstone that tries and fails to describe and explain the place of people who are extremely gifted but struggle in other areas. And this is part of why Born on a Blue Day is so important, so necessary for us.
Like many memoirs, Born on a Blue Day is often expansive in scope, detailing Daniel’s life from a very young boy up to a twenty-something man. We learn that he grew up poor, his mother and father constantly striving and fighting to keep his family (Daniel is one of nine children) happy and healthy. In crystal clear prose, Daniel recounts his childhood struggles with epilepsy, the bullying and teasing he experienced in the early years of school, his growing understanding of his own sexuality and desires for love and friendship, his Asperger’s diagnosis, and his deep appreciation for and fascination with languages. The subtitle of the book is Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant, and there are ways in which this book is absolutely the chronicling of an extraordinary mind.
Maybe the best example of this is one of the climactic chapters in which Daniel recounts his recitation of the digits of pi up to 22,514, which took him over nine hours and is a world record. Daniel, you see, has a really special relationship with numbers; he sees them with colors and textures and personalities in his mind. Numbers were, for a younger Daniel being bullied and teased at school, friends. At a recent talk in Montreal, I heard Daniel talk about pi as a beautiful poem, and this way of thinking about numbers—as beautiful, as emotional—is at the heart of Daniel’s recitation of pi.
In chapter 10, “A Very Large Slice of Pi,” Daniel starts with a mathematical discussion of pi—its history and place in mathematics, strategies other pi enthusiasts have had for memorizing and remembering digits, etc. But for Daniel, the process of learning the number was much more akin to falling in love with someone and experiencing every aspect of that person as unique, as special, as memorable.
When I look at a sequence of numbers, my head begins to fill with colors, shapes and textures that knit together spontaneously to form a visual landscape. These are always very beautiful to me; as a child I often spent hours at a time exploring numerical landscapes in my mind. To recall each digit, I simply retrace the different shapes and textures in my head and read the numbers out of them.
This is Daniel discussing his relationship with numbers and how remembers them, and this is where the memoir became intensely interesting for me. Yes, the recounting of pi is an incredible feat, and yes this way of thinking about numbers is totally unique, but the mechanism here—losing oneself in a mental landscape, perhaps to escape the world, perhaps to better understand it—is something that I spent most of my own childhood doing, except with made up fantasy worlds and stories instead of numbers. And this, I think, is ultimately the point of Daniel’s memoir; it’s not an account of Exciting and Interesting Otherness. Rather, it’s an account of someone who has struggled with things fundamental to what it means to be human: loneliness, love, family, friends, and self-exploration. In the eighth chapter, “Falling in Love,” Daniel talks about his first love, and his concerns are those everyone has in that situation: will I be loved for myself? Will I be safe? Will I be able to contribute to the relationship?
Much of the writing done about Daniel or other autistic savants has been to emphasize their difference, their extraordinary gifts. But it’s important, crucial, that these stories and retellings emphasize the humanness of these people. This is what Born on a Blue Day does best: it uses the unique and extraordinary specifics of a single man to explore and affirm the universal in each of us.
What works have you been connecting with recently?