SILVER SPRING, Md., November 8, 2011 —Kay Schneider, the main character in Jane Meyerding's mystery novel Mapping Charlie, knows she is autistic. She doesn't know, however, that she is also face blind. She discovers the concept of face blindness when she comes under suspicion in the murder of a college classmate, a man she had been the last to speak to without ever realizing it.

Kay is a unique character for a mystery novel. She is a solitary, middle aged woman who is unable to recognize individual faces due to her face blindness, more formally known as prosopagnosia. Under suspicion for murder and forced out of her job, Kay turns to the murder victim's partner in an effort to help find his killer and clear her own name.

Something else that makes Kay unique is her author. Meyerding is herself autistic and face blind, giving her an authentic knowledge of Kay's motivation and mindset. While there are more and more books featuring autistic characters, most of them are written by neurotypical authors. In Mapping Charlie, autistic readers will see a recognizable portrayal of their autistic lives, while neurotypical readers will see a glimpse of what it might really be like to live life with autism. Both will get a compelling mystery read.

Now 61, Meyerding was only formally diagnosed with autism slightly more than a decade ago, with her self-diagnosis coming a few years before that. She says that recognizing herself as autistic allowed her to move from worrying about her deficits to concentrating on and enjoying her strengths. She says her formal diagnosis was validating.

"It's very wearying to go through the world surrounded by disbelief in who one is," she says. "For me, autism is not "the" explanation of life, the universe, and everything. Nor is it "the" explanation of Jane Meyerding. It is, however, the best explanation I've come across thus far to explain a constellation of experiences that have been part of my life all along."

Jane Meyerding as a child

Meyerding is witty and charming when talking about her own history, one that begins with Quaker parents and two older sisters who, she says, helped to socialize her. ("My brother, seven years younger than I am, came along too late to participate in the project," she says.) After her father's death when she was 11, Meyerding's family settled in the Philadelphia area, where she managed to get by with some difficulties, but, as she says, "no more than the usual kerfuffle."

"Children weren't scrutinized so closely in those days," she says. "If you didn't cause trouble in school and you didn't set any fires at home, you were assumed to be okay."

Once in college, Meyerding began to flounder a bit. "I had no idea what to do," she says. "Other people, I later realized, found things out by talking to other people. Doing that didn't occur to me, so I was reduced to reading signs on walls and watching what others did. Everyone else just seemed to know, as if by magic."

Despite help from a "big sister" assigned to her by the college, Meyerding was unable to cope with college life and abruptly left school near the end of her second semester. "So much for the supposition that, because I was 'bright,' of course I would whiz through college, go on to law school, and become a successful crusading lawyer, doing good while doing well," she says.

Meyerding currently works as support staff at a state university, where she got her college degree at age 44. She enjoys friendships with a few long-term friends, including local friend Nancy, whom Meyerding sees regularly and speaks of with great affection.

Meyerding has been a writer for many years, although she has mostly written non-fiction essays, some of which you can find on her website at http://www.planetautism.com/jane/index.html. In 1994, a small press published a mystery novel she wrote, in a process that Meyerding describes as "exceedingly painful," which is one reason she chose to self-publish Mapping Charlie.

Face blindness is obviously a personal subject for Meyerding, considering that she experiences it daily. She's never pursued a diagnosis ("I guess it's just too obvious to require confirmation," she comments.) for her prosopagnosia, but she says that learning about it was a revelation.

"Other people really could recognize each other right away," she says about her wonderment in learning of face blindness. "They weren't just pretending better because they had better social skills, and there really is a part of the human brain to handle that function—except that my brain simply doesn't."

She goes on to say that knowing about faceblindness helps because, "You realize you don't have to choose between 'I'm lazy' and 'I'm crazy,' and you can meet others online or elsewhere and share strategies for dealing with the face-sighted majority.

Meyerding's character Kay has to do exactly that in Mapping Charlie. Her faceblindness leads to her becoming a suspect when a college classmate of hers is murdered. Unbeknownst to her, because she didn't realize he was the same person, Kay is the last person known to have spoken to him, after running into him on a city bus.

Kay is a slice-of-life study for neurotypical people who might like to know how someone with autism deals with life—both everyday life and extraordinary circumstances. Reading it is revelatory in its own way for people who want to better understand what it is like to live life as an autistic adult.

"I think it would be lovely for parents to read the book and get an idea of how one autistic character thinks," Meyerding responds when asked whether she thinks her book could help parents understand how their autistic children think.

"If they come away from it with some insights, a modified perspective, perhaps some ideas of ways to approach X or Y situations differently—hooray!" she says. "The only harm the book could do, I think, is if it fell into the hands of a parent so misguided as to apply a Kay-shaped cookie-cutter to an actual, individual, autistic child."

Meyerding says that when she reads books about autistic characters written by neurotypical writers, she mostly cares that they are well written. "The thing is that I am adamant about the need to allow each character—as long as it's written well enough—to be unique. What bothers me most about any book with an autistic character is when readers respond as if that character is 'autism,' is the model of what autistics are like," she says. "It's frustrating that readers continue their bad behavior in that regard, but I am not willing, even so, to sacrifice the writer's freedom to create whatever believable autistic characters he or she can imagine."

Author Jane Meyerding

Along those lines, Meyerding says that the many characters she's read in books through her lifetime of reading helped her write the neurotypical characters in Mapping Charlie. Was it difficult for her to write those characters? "It didn't feel difficult," she says. "Whether it was difficult probably isn't for me to judge, because it would be measured by how successful those characters are at seeming realistic and individual."

What Meyerding has done with the engaging Mapping Charlie is to create an interesting group of characters who learn about each other as they puzzle through the mystery of a young man's murder. She has written a second mystery novel featuring Kay and plans to begin writing the third and final Kay mystery during National Novel Writing Month this month.

Meyerding says she sees her books as a form of advocacy, that her novels are "a way to help people understand that most assumptions about autism so far are based on stereotypes and simply don't fit the reality of autistic lives."

"The ultimate goal," she says, "is a world full of novels by all flavors of autistic people, each providing a unique and valid portrait of an autistic person or persons."

Mapping Charlie is available from Amazon and Lulu.com. Keep up to date on Meyerding's work and publishing schedule on her website at http://www.planetautism.com/jane/index.html. For more information on face blindness, visit http://www.choisser.com/faceblind/.

Jean writes a personal blog at Stimeyland and an autism-events website for Montgomery County, Maryland, at AutMont. You can find her on Twitter as @Stimey. Read more of Jean's work at Autism Unexpected in the Communities at the Washington Times.

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