Genre as Siobhanism is a tricky thing. We must have standards—I’m not quite sure why we must have standards, but we must have them. Tim Page’s second-grade teacher thrust this necessity for standards-meeting into his brain quite virulently: in fact, I figure that my fourth-grade teacher must have latched onto the same commentary contagion. While on a fieldtrip to a Boston museum, eight-year-old Page (2007) was required to write a report with trip details, and he did just that: he timed the bus trip and noted what streets they turned on. Of course, he mentioned nothing about the museum itself—but the prompt asked of the trip, not the museum, so his teacher’s nasty pen etchings leave many an autistic perplexed. (Or so I project—because, again, I’m so ingrained in my own pages that I can’t quite get autistically intertextual.)

Similarly, when my teacher, via journal, asked for details about my weekend and the book I was reading—he got details about my weekend and the book I was reading, very precise details. Yet, I mentioned very little of what he wanted me to—but how was I to understand the ways in which he wanted me to perform, the ways in which he wanted to author me? According to medicalized genres, my body is authored with the inability** to “read between the lines,” the inability to discern metaphor and idiomatic phrases. “Tell me about your book” sounded, at the time, as though my teacher wanted to know about the physical properties of my book. And thus, the normative autistic narrative has possessed my cerebral cortex once again.