my monster essay

My Monster: The Fear of Being Alone Essay

Introduction, fighting my monster, comparison with literature, works cited.

The fear of being alone is a psychological attitude that is very difficult to recognize. A person can suffer from it all their life but not even understand it. They explain the desire to constantly be in the company to themselves by character traits, for example, sociability. At the same time, they do not even suspect that, in fact, their life is controlled by an evil creature. Sometimes the fear of loneliness turns into a monster, becoming so strong that its destructive nature prevents a person from living a full life.

The monster blurs the line between the natural human unwillingness to become an outcast and a disease, subjugating all spheres of life, and gradually absorbing the thirst for life. Thus, my monster is the fear of being alone, and it is similar to several literary characters at once: Grendel’s mother, the Demon Lover, and the fear of a couple from Once Upon a Time.

When the monster of the fear of loneliness appeared in my life, I tried to fight it, but sooner or later, my strength ran out, and I could not resist its attacks. Now it is smaller than before because I realized that I need to try to be friends with it. When I am overcome with anxiety, I do meditation, yoga, and breathing exercises. I try to feel my body, to be alone with myself, without being distracted by external stimuli, to feel what a blessing it is to be myself here and now. When I find the strength to approach the monster and look it straight in the eyes, it no longer seems so scary; this way, I manage to keep my monster at bay.

My monster is more like Grendel’s mother than Grendel himself or the dragon. After a glorious and difficult victory over Grendel, Beowulf receives well-deserved praise, rich gifts, and gratitude from Hrothgar and all Danish warriors. Everyone sits down to feast and celebrate and does not expect the arrival of Grendel’s furious mother, who bursts into the hall and grabs Hrothgar’s closest friend and adviser (Mittman and Hensel 78). Being weaker and more cautious than her son, she immediately runs away to her swamp, dragging the victim with her.

My “Grendel,” whom I killed under the cheers of society, was self-love. Since childhood, I have heard that praising myself and rejoicing in my successes is bad and is called selfishness and arrogance. Therefore, I gradually began to think that I was worse than others. Because of this, I had a feeling that no one wanted me in their life, started to feel suspicion towards relatives, friends, and family, and the need for constant confirmation of feelings. And then, unexpectedly, like Grendel’s mother, the monster of loneliness appeared: after all, I killed my love for myself.

Once Upon a Time

My fear is more like the fear of a white married couple from “Once Upon a Time” than the fear from “The Thing in The Forest” since it is purely internal. The heroes are convinced that blacks are guilty of all the crimes taking place in their neighborhood (Rizzardi 792). They have a prejudice, which in this case is not supported by external facts; therefore, their fear is purely internal and irrational.

My fear of being left alone also has no external evidence. My parents were never cold to me: they always paid attention to me, kissed and hugged me, and paid a lot of attention to my feelings and desires. My friends also always say that I am a wonderful friend, that they appreciate me, and I am dear to them without any conditions. Nevertheless, it still seems to me that I can be left alone; in any criticism, I find confirmation of my words, even if the remark made was fair.

The Demon Lover

My monster is somewhat similar to the demon from “The Demon Lover”; first of all, he is a magical creature from the fantasy world, not belonging to the human world. In addition, at the end of the novel, Callie realizes that she needs a demon; she is drawn to darkness. The heroine falls in love with her demon, and this love turns out to be mutual (Fan 103). The demon himself tells her that a lie told out of love is a lie for good.

My monster is also an unreal creature: there are many people around me who love and appreciate me. My demon is necessary for me to love myself again; like Callie, I will be able to overcome it only when I become friends with it. Thus, despite the fact that my monster is lying to me, it is doing it for my own good so that I can treat myself better and accept myself.

The only one whom nature has endowed with a sensual form of life is the man. This is both a gift and a curse at the same time: human fears are a dark side of our sensuality. Referring to the works of British classics, a general list of human fears known today can be made. The monsters of each of the characters live not only on the pages of novels but in each of us, so everyone can turn to the heroes for help. Looking at them, the reader learns how to fight their demons, keep them at bay, or, in my case, become friends with them.

Fan, Mengyuan. “A Study on The Traumatic Theme in Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Demon Lover”. Journal of Contemporary Educational Research , vol. 5, no. 4, 2021, pp. 103-105.

Mittman, Asa Simon, and Marcus Hensel, editors. Primary Sources on Monsters . Amsterdam University Press, 2018.

Rizzardi, Biancamaria. “Once Upon a Time” By Nadine Gordimer: A Fairy Tale for Peace.” Forum Editrice Universitaria Udinese , vol. 5, no. 19, 2019, pp. 782-801. Web.

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Research essay: a ‘monster’ and its humanity.

Professor of English Susan J. Wolfson is the editor of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: A Longman Cultural Edition and co-editor, with Ronald Levao, of The Annotated Frankenstein.  

Published in January 1818, Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus has never been out of print or out of cultural reference. “Facebook’s Frankenstein Moment: A Creature That Defies Technology’s Safeguards” was the headline on a New York Times business story Sept. 22 — 200 years on. The trope needed no footnote, although Kevin Roose’s gloss — “the scientist Victor Frankenstein realizes that his cobbled-together creature has gone rogue” — could use some adjustment: The Creature “goes rogue” only after having been abandoned and then abused by almost everyone, first and foremost that undergraduate scientist. Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg and CEO Sheryl Sandberg, attending to profits, did not anticipate the rogue consequences: a Frankenberg making. 

The original Frankenstein told a terrific tale, tapping the idealism in the new sciences of its own age, while registering the throb of misgivings and terrors. The 1818 novel appeared anonymously by a down-market press (Princeton owns one of only 500 copies). It was a 19-year-old’s debut in print. The novelist proudly signed herself “Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley” when it was reissued in 1823, in sync with a stage concoction at London’s Royal Opera House in August. That debut ran for nearly 40 nights; it was staged by the Princeton University Players in May 2017. 

In a seminar that I taught on Frankenstein in various contexts at Princeton in the fall of 2016 — just weeks after the 200th anniversary of its conception in a nightmare visited on (then) Mary Godwin in June 1816 — we had much to consider. One subject was the rogue uses and consequences of genomic science of the 21st century. Another was the election season — in which “Frankenstein” was a touchstone in the media opinions and parodies. Students from sciences, computer technology, literature, arts, and humanities made our seminar seem like a mini-university. Learning from each other, we pondered complexities and perplexities: literary, social, scientific, aesthetic, and ethical. If you haven’t read Frankenstein (many, myself included, found the tale first on film), it’s worth your time. 

READ MORE  PAW Goes to the Movies: ‘Victor Frankenstein,’ with Professor Susan Wolfson

Scarcely a month goes by without some development earning the prefix Franken-, a near default for anxieties about or satires of new events. The dark brilliance of Frankenstein is both to expose “monstrosity” in the normal and, conversely, to humanize what might seem monstrously “other.” When Shelley conceived Frankenstein, Europe was scarred by a long war, concluding on Waterloo fields in May 1815. “Monster” was a ready label for any enemy. Young Frankenstein begins his university studies in 1789, the year of the French Revolution. In 1790, Edmund Burke’s international best-selling Reflections on the French Revolution recoiled at the new government as a “monster of a state,” with a “monster of a constitution” and “monstrous democratic assemblies.” Within a few months, another international best-seller, Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man, excoriated “the monster Aristocracy” and cheered the American Revolution for overthrowing a “monster” of tyranny.

Following suit, Mary Shelley’s father, William Godwin, called the ancien régime a “ferocious monster”; her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was on the same page: Any aristocracy was an “artificial monster,” the monarchy a “luxurious monster,” and Europe’s despots a “race of monsters in human shape.” Frankenstein makes no direct reference to the Revolution, but its first readers would have felt the force of its setting in the 1790s, a decade that also saw polemics for (and against) the rights of men, women, and slaves. 

England would abolish its slave trade in 1807, but Colonial slavery was legal until 1833. Abolitionists saw the capitalists, investors, and masters as the moral monsters of the global economy. Apologists regarded the Africans as subhuman, improvable perhaps by Christianity and a work ethic, but alarming if released, especially the men. “In dealing with the Negro,” ultra-conservative Foreign Secretary George Canning lectured Parliament in 1824, “we are dealing with a being possessing the form and strength of a man, but the intellect only of a child. To turn him loose in the manhood of his physical strength ... would be to raise up a creature resembling the splendid fiction of a recent romance.” He meant Frankenstein. 

Mary Shelley heard about this reference, and knew, moreover, that women (though with gilding) were a slave class, too, insofar as they were valued for bodies rather than minds, were denied participatory citizenship and most legal rights, and were systemically subjugated as “other” by the masculine world. This was the argument of her mother’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which she was rereading when she was writing Frankenstein. Unorthodox Wollstonecraft — an advocate of female intellectual education, a critic of the institution of marriage, and the mother of two daughters conceived outside of wedlock — was herself branded an “unnatural” woman, a monstrosity. 

Shelley had her own personal ordeal, which surely imprints her novel. Her parents were so ready for a son in 1797 that they had already chosen the name “William.” Even worse: When her mother died from childbirth, an awful effect was to make little Mary seem a catastrophe to her grieving father. No wonder she would write a novel about a “being” rejected from its first breath. The iconic “other” in Frankenstein is of course this horrifying Creature (he’s never a “human being”). But the deepest force of the novel is not this unique situation but its reverberation of routine judgments of beings that seem “other” to any possibility of social sympathy. In the 1823 play, the “others” (though played for comedy) are the tinker-gypsies, clad in goatskins and body paint (one is even named “Tanskin” — a racialized differential).

Victor Frankenstein greets his awakening creature as a “catastrophe,” a “wretch,” and soon a “monster.” The Creature has no name, just these epithets of contempt. The only person to address him with sympathy is blind, spared the shock of the “countenance.” Readers are blind this way, too, finding the Creature only on the page and speaking a common language. This continuity, rather than antithesis, to the human is reflected in the first illustrations: 

In the cover for the 1823 play, above, the Creature looks quite human, dishy even — alarming only in size and that gaze of expectation. The 1831 Creature, shown on page 29, is not a patent “monster”: It’s full-grown, remarkably ripped, human-looking, understandably dazed. The real “monster,” we could think, is the reckless student fleeing the results of an unsupervised undergraduate experiment gone rogue. 

In Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein pleads sympathy for the “human nature” in his revulsion. “I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health ... but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room.” Repelled by this betrayal of “beauty,” Frankenstein never feels responsible, let alone parental. Shelley’s genius is to understand this ethical monstrosity as a nightmare extreme of common anxiety for expectant parents: What if I can’t love a child whose physical formation is appalling (deformed, deficient, or even, as at her own birth, just female)? 

The Creature’s advent in the novel is not in this famous scene of awakening, however. It comes in the narrative that frames Frankenstein’s story: a polar expedition that has become icebound. Far on the ice plain, the ship’s crew beholds “the shape of a man, but apparently of gigantic stature,” driving a dogsled. Three paragraphs on, another man-shape arrives off the side of the ship on a fragment of ice, alone but for one sled dog. “His limbs were nearly frozen, and his body dreadfully emaciated by fatigue and suffering,” the captain records; “I never saw a man in so wretched a condition.” This dreadful man focuses the first scene of “animation” in Frankenstein: “We restored him to animation by rubbing him with brandy, and forcing him to swallow a small quantity. As soon as he shewed signs of life, we wrapped him up in blankets, and placed him near the chimney of the kitchen-stove. By slow degrees he recovered ... .” 

The re-animation (well before his name is given in the novel) turns out to be Victor Frankenstein. A crazed wretch of a “creature” (so he’s described) could have seemed a fearful “other,” but is cared for as a fellow human being. His subsequent tale of his despicably “monstrous” Creature is scored with this tremendous irony. The most disturbing aspect of this Creature is his “humanity”: this pathos of his hope for family and social acceptance, his intuitive benevolence, bitterness about abuse, and skill with language (which a Princeton valedictorian might envy) that solicits fellow-human attention — all denied by misfortune of physical formation. The deepest power of Frankenstein, still in force 200 years on, is not its so-called monster, but its exposure of “monster” as a contingency of human sympathy.  

by Walter Dean Myers

Monster essay questions.

The novel has a sub-theme of gang violence. How are gangs presented in the novel?

The central gang in the novel is called The Diablos (a Spanish word which translates to "Devils"). The Diablos and other gangs run the Harlem streets, and members of the community consider the gangs to be more of an authoritative presence than law enforcement. This complicated power dynamic explains why the detectives are unable to get unbiased accounts from potential eyewitnesses.

During Osvaldo's testimony, the cross-examiner points to Osvaldo's involvement in the Diablos in order to account for his violent tendencies. In this way, Osvaldo is not seen as "innocent until proven guilty." Rather, his gang involvement suggests that he regularly robs and harms people in his community.

What does Kathy O'Brien's rejection of Steve's gesture of friendship tell us about Steve's expectations?

O'Brien methodically and diligently handles Steve's defense case. Due to her hard work and effort, Steve believes that she truly believes in his innocence. However, O'Brien's behavior demonstrates that she sees her work as Steve's defense attorney strictly as a job. She does not get emotionally involved in the case, and she does not reveal any aspect of her interiority throughout the novel. When Steve learns that he has been acquitted, O'Brien's reaction suggests that she may actually believe that her client is guilty.

Mr. Sawicki believes that Steve's film footage speaks deeply about his character. Is it valid to judge an author's morality based on his or her body of artistic work?

Steve's writing process is his way of coping with the traumatic events in his life. However, Steve also distances himself from his reality by exaggerating the events in the format of a screenplay. The screenplay is a work of art, and thus there is not one objective way for it to be judged. It is clear that Steve's screenplay is an effective mechanism for distraction and creative control. However, it is incredibly difficult to judge someone's character based on their artistic creations. Although art provides an insight into the mind of its creator, its meaning must be seen on its own merits, rather than associating it simply with the views of its creator.

The plot revolves around a story of conspirators and murderers. What is the difference between these two different roles and their respective punishments by law?

A conspirator is someone who is involved in a plan to do something harmful or illegal. A murderer is someone who kills another person. Steve Harmon is on trial for being a conspirator, as he was allegedly the lookout boy in the drugstore robbery. On the other hand, James King is on trial for shooting and killing Arnaldo Nesbitt. They face the same sentence. During her prosecution, Petrocelli argues that all of the four men that are allegedly involved in the murder are equally culpable and should thus receive the same sentence.

Steve's involvement in the murder of Mr. Nesbitt affects more people than just himself. Who are the other people affected by Steve's behavior?

Steve's family suffers as a result of the crime, both as a unit and individually. Steve's younger brother must cope with the absence of his role model. Mrs. Harmon defends her son's innocence, but she is deeply concerned for his emotional and physical well-being. Mr. Harmon's belief and trust in his son wavers, ultimately leading him to abandon his family.

Monster Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Monster is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Wednesday, July 8th

The script allows Steve to speak and express himself when in court... it symbolizes his reality.

Please post your questions separately.

Edgar Allan Poe

This depends on what you want to comment on. Can you be more specific? Is it a specific work that he has done?

what page number is "You do the crime, you do the time. You act like garbage, they treat you like garbage" on

Page numbers differ depending on your book copy but you can find this quote in chapter 6.

Study Guide for Monster

Monster study guide contains a biography of Walter Dean Myers, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Monster
• Monster Summary
• Character List

Essays for Monster

Monster essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Monster by Walter Dean Myers.

• Race and Identity: 'The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian' and 'Monster'
• A Modernist Monster: Techniques and Social Messaging in Myers' Novel

Wikipedia Entries for Monster

• Introduction
• Themes and format
• Autobiographical elements

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How to Write a Monsters Essay?

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Writing an essay about monsters is not a walk in the park. It is a deeply creative and difficult piece of academic work in terms of cultural, psychological, and societal analyses it stipulates. Students tasked with an essay devoted to monsters need to show a thorough cultural understanding of the topic of their essay, be it about a folkloric monster character or a fantasy one.

In this article, we will tell you what makes a monster essay so special, and guide you on how to write a decent essay on monster of your choice, apart from providing some original ideas on possible topics for this kind of essay.

How to write a monster essay

An essay about these creepy creatures – monsters, is not much different from any other college essay when it comes to structural composition and other formal requirements, including length. A typical high school or college paper about monsters as the main theme is 2–3 pages long, and it is usually an open-topic type of paper, i.e., you are responsible for choosing the topic. This freedom is both good and bad news since modern and classic literature and cinema offer us a whole army of monsters to choose from. Check out the very last chapter for some original ideas on topics of essays about monsters.

Meanwhile, you can try out [Company] for immediate and high-quality help with writing your essay assignment. This is a trustworthy academic support agency capable of writing a great essay devoted to the topic of monsters, as well as providing any other academic assistance, including editing, counselling, proofreading, grammar and format check & cleanup, etc.

If you are resolved on writing an essay by yourself, however, below please review several important steps you should consider taking:

• Define a promising topic. Unless you already have a brilliant topic idea in mind, this step may require you to conduct thorough research – recalling the latest fantasy movies you’ve watched about monsters, checking out your folk literature, going online, and generating a couple of relevant search engine results. The result should be an interesting topic, that you find inspiring and can talk about describing its cultural significance, and societal meaning.
• Make a thesis statement. Even an essay about such a popular topic as monsters must have a clear thesis statement. It can be your personal claim, an intriguing opinion you might have about your topic or an assertion that you can prove with reasoning and logic (it would be naïve to expect facts in connection with a fantasy topic).
• Develop a good outline. For your writing to run smoothly, you need to follow a clear plan or an outline. A monster outline essay is equally important as the text of your essay.
• Introduction (including some background information about the topic and a clear thesis statement);
• The main body, which consists of arguments in the form of logic or reasoning. The main body is also the place to “present” your monster, and talk about its place in the society (culture, whether global or local).
• Conclusion – reflect on the chosen topic and its cultural significance. Talk about how you managed to prove/disprove the central point you made in the introductory paragraph.
• Check and edit. Give some time to carefully read your essay, perhaps after a small break. Edit and proofread your text.

We cannot stress enough that your writing would be easier if you spent a little time researching the topic. Even though your favourite monster may be “famous” and you may have plenty of information about it, some background research and extra online reading would always bring additional details (often unexpected), highlight the historical context, and open up new aspects and dimensions.

Monster essay topics

Below, please find several ideas for topics of essays on monsters. You are welcome to change and modify them should you find promising topics for your essay that you’d like to adjust and improve.

• Vampires: discuss the historical origins and cultural connection of the vampire monsters. How they came into being, and what continues to make them an interesting topic for modern book and movie plots.
• Zombies: explore the fears that zombies represent in the global culture. If you are knowledgeable in the local cultural aspects of the zombie phenomenon – that would make up an excellent essay topic!
• Ghosts: what makes the fear of ghosts so ubiquitous? Pick up and explore a ghost story of your choice that is different from the mainstream ghost stories often presented in Hollywood movies.
• Bigfoot: the fictitious and non-fictitious aspects of the Bigfoot. Which cultures and nations are more susceptible to the sighting and stories about Bigfoot, and why?
• Loch Ness Monster: what does the Loch Ness Monster represent? Is it more of a legend or a scientific phenomenon? Talk about the origins of this legend/phenomenon.
• Sirens: what is the exact mythological symbolism of sirens, and why stories about them were so popular during the age of Great Discoveries on the Sea?

Monster essay examples

To aid your writing work, we have located a couple of great examples of essays about monsters online. Check them out below.

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The monsters that made me: Growing up disabled, all of my heroes were villains

Horror movies challenged my relationship with myself

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Every monster needs an origin story. Here’s mine.

I was born with a rare condition — radioulnar synostosis — which restricts the movement of my forearms. I am unable to turn my hands over palms up, the way you might accept loose change or splash water on your face or land an uppercut. I have lived with this condition all my life, and yet it wasn’t until my late 20s that I started referring to myself as “disabled.”

This word carries immense baggage, and many of us within the wide spectrum of disability tend to minimize our experiences or, as in my case, suffer from feelings of impostor syndrome. Could be worse , I often tell myself. You don’t deserve to call yourself disabled .

Coming to terms with my disability took a long time, to not only accept my identity, but also to discard the lingering shame and stigma that coincide with being disabled. A major part of this reconciliation was thanks to an unlikely source of solace — horror films.

I’ve been a horror obsessive as long as I can remember, but I only recently figured out how to articulate why the genre resonates so strongly with me. On-screen depictions of deformed, disfigured killers and creatures serve as reflections of my own otherness. The phantasmagoric realm of horror, though dark and violent, provides an outlet for me to express the discomfort, frustration, and anxiety surrounding my corporeal limitations.

From a young age, I subconsciously related to monsters, madmen, and every combination thereof. Many even taught me to frame disability in a positive fashion. The archetypal antagonists from the golden age of horror cinema — the Wolfman, Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster — all underwent a transformation to be imbued with extraordinary, otherworldly gifts. Their differences were a source of power, inverting the traditional view of disability as a hindrance, a burden.

My attraction to horror began innocently enough. There were clamshell VHSes galore at my babysitter’s house, including all the Disney classics, many of which were plenty horrific, like the “Night on Bald Mountain” sequence in Fantasia . I carefully studied the imposing figure of Chernabog, the winged, devil-horned demon summoning lost souls from the underworld. To me, he seemed benevolent rather than evil, a counterpoint to the sparkling sunrise that banishes him back to the shadows, an essential element of natural balance.

Disney’s version of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” oddly lumped as a double feature with The Wind in the Willows , presented another kindred spirit — the Headless Horseman. Decked in black and adorned with a blood-red cape, clutching a saber in one hand and a flaming jack-o’-lantern in the other, the Headless Horseman, for me, came to represent the extreme limits of human endurance. A cannonball takes the ill-fated soldier’s head and still his body lingers, perseveres.

Another seminal gateway wasn’t even a horror film. On its surface, The Wizard of Oz is a saccharine Technicolor musical romp, but the dream world its characters inhabit is full of menace — maniacal flying monkeys, spear-wielding Winkie guards, and my favorite, the iconic Wicked Witch of the West. Despite her green flesh and pointy chin, I found her beautiful, alluring, and endlessly more compelling than the picture-perfect Glinda. Astride her broomstick, flinging fireballs, stalking Dorothy and her companions through Oz, the Wicked Witch became the reason I watched an old tape of The Wizard of Oz so many times that the reel snapped.

As she pointed toward the camera with her spindly fingers and sharp nails, I imagined the Wicked Witch was singling me out, inviting me into her world. There, everyone was different, from the Munchkins, notably played by a cast of dwarf actors, to the main trio of the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion, who were all “defective” in their own ways, physically and mentally handicapped by the absence of some critical inner faculty. Why Dorothy was so desperate to return to the bleak, monochromatic reality of Depression-era Kansas was beyond me. I would have much preferred to stay in Oz.

By the time I finished elementary school, my tastes sharpened, and I craved harder, more acidic fare. My appetite had been steadily whet by a diet of gory comic books and yellowed Stephen King paperbacks. Cable television in the ’90s was also rife with kindertrauma-inducing spectacle. I was allowed to watch Are You Afraid of the Dark? and Goosebumps , since both were on kid-friendly channels. When left unsupervised, which was often as the child of a single mom who had to work multiple gigs, I could sneak episodes of Tales from the Crypt or X-Files . I knew there was a world of adult horror, and I wanted nothing more than to breach this forbidden zone.

Where to watch the movies mentioned in this piece

• Fantasia : Disney Plus
• Disney’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow : Disney Plus , as a part of The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad 
• The Wizard of Oz : Max
• The Evil Dead : For digital rental or purchase on Amazon and Vudu
• The Brood : Max , Criterion Channel
• Castle Freak : Shudder, AMC Plus, and for free with ads on Tubi

I caught glimpses of it at the video rental store, where I was compulsively drawn to the horror section. I scanned the shelves, memorizing titles for future reference, studying the macabre cover art, scrutinizing the stills of sliced throats, hacked limbs, and oozing ectoplasm. Although I wasn’t allowed to take home anything rated R, I soon found loopholes that granted me access to films I was desperate to ingest.

Staying over at a friend’s house, we would wait until the grown-ups were asleep, then flip to HBO (a luxury we could not afford at my own home). It was there I first watched The Evil Dead , a personal landmark of my initiation into splatter flicks. My friend and I insisted we weren’t scared, as we cowered in our sleeping bags, squealing with perverse delight when the first possessed teenager stabbed her friend in the ankle with a pencil. We chattered throughout the movie to compensate for our obvious nerves, but by the time Ash Williams descended into the cellar searching for shotgun shells with a ravenous Deadite on the loose, the two of us had gone mute with fear.

Ash, armed with his trademark chainsaw, was clearly the hero (and himself destined to become an amputee in the sequel), but it was the Deadites who entranced me. When the demons seized control, the bodily degradation took effect. First, the teenagers’ eyes went white, and before long, their flesh wrinkled, turned sallow, decayed, bile and pus dripping from spontaneous lacerations. I had never witnessed anything so utterly bloodsoaked, resplendent in viscera, a film that relished in the ways a body can be corrupted.

Bodies are frightfully fragile, and we are all one small step away from an accident or illness that can permanently debilitate. Few filmmakers understand the body’s capacity for biological horror more than David Cronenberg , whose oeuvre introduced me to a world where disability is infused with latent eroticism and regenerative potential.

In high school, I got a job at the same video rental store I prowled as a kid. Now I had the freedom to take home whatever I pleased. The older guys who managed the shop would recommend titles to test my limits — Salò , Cannibal Holocaust , Irreversible . Cocksure teenager that I was, enduring “the most fucked up movie ever made” became my solemn quest. But disturbing or violent as they may be, few video nasties were capable of truly scaring me. Knowing I was a devotee of both horror and sci-fi, one of the clerks suggested I check out Cronenberg, so I took a chance on The Brood .

I was deeply unsettled by the story of an estranged couple fighting over custody of their daughter. What frighted me wasn’t the deformed, dwarflike progeny — birthed by the ex-wife and telekinetically driven to brutally murder anyone who crossed her. The broodlings were devoted to their mother, as was I, and would do anything to protect her. What shook me was Cronenberg’s metaphorical treatment of divorce, especially after watching my own parents’ messy split. The rupturing of a family resulting in physiological consequences illustrated the link between body and mind, a relationship of which I was all too aware, having dealt with depression as long as I could remember.

For many people with disabilities, physical and mental anguish are synonymous, feeding into one another. Feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, and alienation frequently accompany disability. More often than not, disability is chronic, permanent, and insoluble. It can be mitigated, people can adapt, but full-blown cures are elusive. My disability is one such case. I may have accepted this reality, come to terms with my fate, but the journey has not been without frustration, anger, and despair — the monster’s currency.

This explains in part why monsters act as they do. Pain begets pain. Violence begets violence. Fear begets fear. As such, the monster embodies the way we perpetuate trauma, wherein the victim becomes the aggressor. This is why we sympathize with Frankenstein’s monster or the Wolfman, because we understand that they were not born to be monsters — they were made that way by forces beyond their control.

Which is precisely why I cannot totally fault my all-time favorite Lovecraftian abomination, the titular Castle Freak from Stuart Gordon’s low-budget opus, another film I chanced upon at the video rental store. The freak is imprisoned from childhood by his deranged mother, routinely tortured until his face and body are a tapestry of grotesque wounds and scars. He escapes the confines of his dungeon and spies on the American family who has moved into his home, taking a special liking to the couple’s blind daughter.

While the freak wastes no time eviscerating unlucky victims, the lecherous, alcoholic father, played by the incomparable Jeffrey Combs, is no less redeemable. The freak’s feral nature is the byproduct of a lifetime’s abuse. The father, by contrast, has no excuse. Watching this film for the first time, I empathized with the freak and thought of my innate freakishness and the times I’ve lashed out or been cruel. What was my excuse?

Even as the maimed, distorted bodies of creatures like the Castle Freak or the Brood or the Deadites or the Wicked Witch mirrored real-world disabilities and offered me an escape, a safe environment where it was appropriate to root for the villain, I realized that I didn’t want to hurt people, to injure others as I’d been, whether physically or mentally. And more than anything, I was determined not to use my disability as a scapegoat, to behave like a monster and blame it on the way I was born.

Strange as it sounds, I learned to take ownership of my mistakes and embrace my faults through horror films, to forgo hiding behind a mask like the boogeymen in slasher movies. Horror demands that we not avert our gaze from “abnormal” bodies. It challenges our prejudices, our preconceptions. These are films that celebrate disfigurement and deformity instead of shunning it. I reject the notion that horror merely co-opts disability as a cheap scare tactic. When I watch a scary movie, I do not see exploitation — I see exaltation, the disabled not as demonic but as divine.

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“My Monster/My Self ” (1982)

From the book a life with mary shelley.

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My Teacher Is a Monster: A Sweet Modern Fable About Seeing Through the Otherness of Others

By maria popova.

“Love,” wrote Leo Tolstoy in his poignant letters to Gandhi on why we hurt one another , “represents the highest and indeed the only law of life, as every man knows and feels in the depths of his heart (and as we see most clearly in children)…” Tolstoy believed that if only we managed to see through our superficial differences and our fear of the other’s otherness, we’d recognize instantly the universe’s basic “law of love” — something to which we are born attuned, only to forget as we enter adulthood. Kids, of course, can often be especially cruel in their inability to accept otherness — but that’s why it’s especially enchanting to witness, let alone spark, the precise moment in which a child lets go of some learned bias and sees in another person his or her intrinsic goodness, a return to innocence and Tolstoy’s “law of love.”

From children’s book author and illustrator Peter Brown comes My Teacher Is a Monster! (No, I Am Not.) ( public library | IndieBound ) — a sweet contemporary fable about one such moment of seeing through the mask of terrifying otherness the soft heart of our shared humanity.

In vibrant, textured illustrations and simple words, Brown tells the story of little Bobby, who sees his stern teacher, Ms. Kirby, as a scary green ogre — until, one weekend, the two unexpectedly bump into each other at the park.

Suddenly, the leisurely environment strips them of their weekday roles. After the inevitable awkwardness and disorientation — in one particularly sweet exchange, Bobby, who resists his initial instinct to just run away, raises his hand while sitting next to Ms. Kirby on the bench; she gently reminds him that, outside the classroom, he can just ask his question — they have no choice but to first reluctantly, then tacitly, then gladly get to know each other.

Just as Bobby makes the first move with a compliment on Ms. Kirby’s enormous hat, the wind takes over.

The hat, it turns out, is Ms. Kirby’s favorite, so she runs after it distraught as the wind sweeps it toward peril. Right before it drops into the duck pond, Bobby leaps and saves the day. Ms. Kirby, ecstatic, proclaims him her hero and the two set out to feed the ducks side by side. Meanwhile, strangely, some of Ms. Kirby’s greenness seems to have faded and her boar-like nostrils have shrunk ever so slightly.

Bobby decides to show Ms. Kirby his favorite spot in the park and they climb up some big boulders, atop which Ms. Kirby — now with an almost neutral complexion and a hint of rosiness — gets an idea.

She hands Bobby a sheet of paper, which he gleefully folds into a paper plane and releases into the sky — the very act for which the monstrous teacher had scolded the kids in the classroom.

“I think that was the single greatest paper airplane flight in history!” Bobby exclaims. “I think you’re right,” Ms. Kirby — now having lost almost all of her monster teeth — agrees.

By the time they return to the bench at lunchtime, both are glad they had run into each other.

Miraculously, Ms. Kirby has transmogrified from a monster into an ordinary woman. With each shared moment and each small kindness exchanged, her monsterness had dissolved into her simple humanity — a sweet reminder that however much people may be the product of their culture and surrounding context, when one learns to see with “the eye of the heart,” their basic goodness will eventually emanate.

In a way, the story shines a compassionate light on a different facet of the same broader issue Brown explored in his previous book, the equally wonderful Mr. Tiger Goes Wild — a tender tale about authenticity and acceptance. The challenge of understanding others despite their differences and that of feeling accepted ourselves despite our quirks are two sides of the same coin — a coin that is undoubtedly our most valuable currency for human bonds.

In a recent conversation, I asked Brown about his thinking behind My Teacher Is a Monster and his broader philosophy of writing and illustrating for young minds:

MP: All of your work emanates such a sense of optimism. Do you feel that it is our responsibility to cultivate this in children or is it, rather, the other way around — our responsibility to ourselves is to bear witness to this natural human capacity in kids, which we unlearn as we grow up, and to perhaps reawaken it in our grown selves? PB: The further I get in my career, the more I think about my readers. I see it as my responsibility to create books that will make kids laugh and think and want to pick up another book. The hope is that I might, in some small way, help to grow the number of readers in the world. And the best way to make more readers is to help people fall in love with reading at an early age. So I try to make stories and characters and art that appeal to the excitement and curiosity that occurs naturally in children. The optimism in my stories is no accident. But I think you’ll find that in addition to positivity there’s always a dose of reality in my stories. Each of my characters face real disappointment, and their story is about them overcoming their disappointment. That’s real, and kids get it. MP: This particular book explores the rather common experience of seeing someone as both frightening and repulsive until we get to know them — one manifestation of our broader, fundamental fear of the unfamiliar . Did you have such an experience yourself, either with a teacher or with another figure in your life, that inspired the book? PB: When I was a kid I had several grumpy adults in my life. There were the old neighbors who would actually yell at me to get off their lawn. There was the mysterious family of five who all seemed to be mean and miserable, even the kids. And yes, I did have a few grumpy teachers, too. I was confused and concerned by all of those people, but the grumpy teachers were especially distressing because I had to be in close quarters with them for a whole school year. To make matters worse, I had a big, uncontrollable imagination, and there was a time when I actually thought those teachers were monsters in disguise. But over time, most of those teachers gradually revealed their softer side — they’d share a personal story, or share my excitement about some little thing — and I’d gradually realize that they weren’t so bad… in fact, they were actually pretty cool. That seemed like a pretty good premise for a children’s book.

And indeed it is — My Teacher Is a Monster! (No, I Am Not.) is an absolute delight. Complement it with The Book of Mean People , Toni Morrison’s similarly-spirited collaboration with her son.

Images courtesy of Peter Brown / Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

— Published August 25, 2014 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/08/25/my-teacher-is-a-monster-peter-brown/ —

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My Family Thinks I Am a Monster Parent for the Most Bizarre Reason

They’ve lost their minds..

Slate Plus members get more  Care and Feeding every week. Have a question about kids, parenting, or family life?  Submit it here !

Dear Care and Feeding,

My mom had me young. Growing up, I mostly lived with her, or some months or years with her at my grandparents’ house, or some months or years at my grandparents’ house while she lived elsewhere with a boyfriend, and even briefly with an uncle. We never had any money but I know mom did care about me and I remain close to my grandparents now. My mom started her first full time job when I was around 30. By that stage, I had already finished school, got a qualification, and been working full time in my field for several years. I have worked hard to be financially secure.

Well, now I have an 11-month-old and while I’ve been fortunate to have been able to stay home with her all this time, next month I’m going back to work.

And she is going to daycare three days a week. My mom and grandparents are aghast and think I am a monster for putting her in care and are reminding me frequently that I was never put in care as they “just couldn’t do it to me.” It’s true I was never placed in paid care but I was shunted around various family members houses a fair bit which often made me like I didn’t have a place to call home. My grandparents are too frail to care for my daughter and my mom works full time, making up for all the years she didn’t have any earnings. So they can’t look after her. But every time I talk to my family now they exclaim “goodness (daughter) looks sick, surely you’re not sending her to daycare tomorrow” when actually she is fine, and make lots of other small comments to show their disapproval. How do I deal with this?

—Daycare Doesn’t Mean I Don’t Care

Dear Daycare,

You’ve made the decision you feel is right for your child and your family. That’s all that matters. I’m sorry your family is being annoying, but this choice truly isn’t up for debate, and you shouldn’t engage with them on it. Don’t let them suck you into an argument about daycare; don’t get defensive or make this about your mother’s parenting choices versus yours. Tell them you’ve made your decision, you know it’s the best one for your family, and you won’t be discussing it with them anymore.

More Advice From Slate

Three years ago, our then­–2-year-old daughter was in an accident that resulted in her losing two fingers while visiting my family for the first time without us. Her father and I went through a very rough patch as a couple due to the fact that he was against her going in the first place, but we got through it. Now, my mom, who moved out of state recently, is coming to visit relatives back home and asked if our daughter could visit and stay while she is here. Due to a scheduling conflict, neither of us would be able to go with our daughter, so we would be sending her by herself.

This Memorial Day, Ask Me About My Brother

B efore my brother Ben was killed in Afghanistan in 2009, Memorial Day was one of my favorite holidays. It meant parties with friends and family, all of us excited by a long weekend and the promise of summer ahead. The fact that Memorial Day was also about violent and traumatic loss was a more abstract and theoretical concept—until the year those losses included my big brother with the contagious giggle and the drive to serve.

For the first few years after Ben’s death, Memorial Day made me angry and indignant. We’re honoring my brother’s death with mattress sales and BBQs? I thought to myself. Nevermind that my brother enjoyed nothing more than barbequing and a good nap. He loved Memorial Day and all its contradictions. He could hold grief and joy together in a way that seemed effortless.

I began to dread attending the Memorial Day events I once enjoyed with him. Would people say anything to me? And did I want them to? Siblings are often asked questions that no one would dare ask a bereaved parent. Questions about how he died. How he really died. “What exactly happened that day?” “What happened after?” “How are your parents doing?” It’s amazing how many questions people can ask about your sibling’s death without ever stopping to ask about their life.

But which is worse: having someone say something or not? I’ve learned that being at that barbeque, knowing everyone else is aware of your loss and its connection to the day but receiving no acknowledgment at all is perhaps the worst outcome of all. I would be left feeling like the elephant in the room, trying to act like everything is fine when it most certainly was not.

The loss of a sibling is a unique form of grief that can be deeply traumatic at any age, and its long-term impact can be seen in every aspect of who we are. Siblings are supposed to be one of our longest shared relationships, and when that is cut short—as it always is when war is involved—siblings are left to pick up the pieces within their nuclear family and support grieving parents and loved ones. Many surviving siblings diminish their own grief so as not to further burden their already broken families, and find themselves struggling to address their loss even years later.

Studies have shown that surviving siblings have increased rates of depression and somatic symptoms, a lower sense of meaningfulness and benevolence in the world, and lower perceived self-worth. Siblings are also more likely to experience complicated grief or prolonged grief disorder, a form of intensified grief that often includes difficulty accepting the loss, preoccupation with the circumstances surrounding it, and a painful combination of bitterness, anger, yearning, and longing. What’s more, siblings grieving on Memorial Day in particular have experienced a violent loss which increases the likelihood that they’re experiencing traumatic grief ; a powerful grief and PTSD cocktail that can rewire your brain and leave you feeling unsafe and utterly alone in the world.

Surviving military siblings, especially, find ourselves dealing with the trauma of war without the sibling we expected to grow old with, our parents grieving so deeply we have nearly lost them, too. Gina Moffa, a trauma-informed grief therapist in NYC and author of the book Moving On Doesn’t Mean Letting Go, explained to me that “people often don't understand how re-traumatizing anniversaries can be for someone who experienced a military loss. While people are having a barbecue or enjoying a long weekend, surviving siblings are dealing with the symptoms of trauma as if they've just heard the news again for the first time.”

Read More: My Brother Was Killed in Afghanistan. He Became Real to Me Again in Quarantine

So what if you haven’t lost a loved one to war, but you’re celebrating Memorial Day with someone who has? Trickier still: What if it’s someone you don’t know well? Social support is one of the strongest antidotes we have to the loneliness and isolation that thrive alongside grief. It breaks the isolation and denial that allows traumatic and complicated grief to flourish.

What if Memorial Day wasn’t about how our siblings died, but about how they lived? Let me talk about my brother’s love of grilled meat in any form. Let me recount our sibling hijinx while we cut the berry cobbler. Instead of asking me to recount his murder, let me tell you about the time he and cousin Steven bought a turkey fryer a few days before Thanksgiving and attempted to deep fry everything in Aunt Jane’s kitchen.

I know this conversation is not easy for anyone involved. Grief and loss is an incredibly complex topic, and if I hadn’t been through loss myself, there’s no way I’d know how to approach someone that's grieving in moments like this. I’m a deeply curious person and I’d probably be ask too many detailed questions. But that also might make me the perfect person to give some advice here. Curiosity is valid and, more than anything, it’s human. But that’s also what Google is for; don’t put someone on the spot asking about their trauma. If you meet someone at a Memorial Day celebration this year who has lost someone in the military, store that info away to Google later and in that moment, focus on life. Ask, “What was your brother or sister’s name?” “Is it helpful to talk about them?” And if yes, “What were they like?”

Your simple question can bring a surviving sibling back to life during an otherwise traumatic day. As Moffa explains, “when somebody checks in and they're compassionate, patient, and supportive; when they just sit with us no matter how long it's been, we feel tethered again. We are tethered to something that can make us feel alive and open the space for joy and life again. It brings us back to ourselves. That check in can be a life saving experience.”

Supporting someone who is grieving this Memorial Day doesn’t mean canceling your plans and spending the day at the cemetery or ignoring all those things you want to do on your day off. It simply means reaching out and checking in, including them in your plans, and making sure they feel seen and heard on that day.

This Memorial Day, you have the power to heal. You have the power to reframe the day from one that memorializes a violent death to one that opens up the door to conversations about life.

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• Scientists Are Finding Out Just How Toxic Your Stuff Is
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• Want Weekly Recs on What to Watch, Read, and More? Sign Up for Worth Your Time

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My son is profoundly autistic. Please don’t say he’s merely ‘neurodiverse.’

Advocates are fighting to eliminate terminology that accurately describes my son and thousands of people like him — who can’t speak up for themselves..

I t was pure coincidence that I happened upon the bloody site. Hoping to surprise my son, I drove to his favorite walking trail, along a lakefront, where I caught sight of police officers in a tense confrontation. Three officers stood side by side in an impenetrable wall while instructing someone splayed out and writhing on the ground. I hope Zack doesn’t get distracted by this scene , I thought.

As I neared the trail, I saw Zack’s aide, slouched inside her car, fully absorbed in texting. She was supposed to remain beside him at all times, but he was not with her. I called out to her, “Where’s Zack?” as my throat tightened with the realization he was nowhere in sight. I began sprinting toward the police officers — only to discover with mounting horror that Zack was the scene they were dealing with.

He was ravaging his forearms with deep, mutilating bites, thrashing angrily on the ground, and then rising to charge at the officers, who patiently but sternly reminded him to “stay seated” and repeated “Don’t panic, you’re not in trouble.” Breaking into the scene, I began a frantic avalanche of contrition. “I’m so sorry, I don’t know what triggered this —” But I was abruptly cut off by an officer who stated calmly, “Yes, we understand who he is and that he’s petrified.”

Somewhere during his sojourn along the lake, Zack, who was 20 years old at the time, had abruptly sat down too close to a woman seated on a bench, who gingerly told him to put on a COVID mask — and Zack bit her on the shoulder for what he perceived as a reprimand. The woman immediately summoned the police, not in anger but in compassion, realizing this young man was seriously disabled and apparently unattended.

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“He’s not in trouble, the woman’s not pressing charges,” the officer assured me. “We’ve been trying to get him to recount a phone number of someone we could contact —” He halted, spying a robust purple bruise on my calf and deep bite marks encrusted with dried blood along my arms. His tone turned solemn. “I can only imagine what you’ve been through. I do understand.”

I stood in stunned silence. I was not prepared for them to be prepared. It had been 45 minutes since they first gathered around Zack with no identifying information, 45 minutes during which his very safety hinged not only on the instincts of a benevolent stranger whom he assaulted but on a shared understanding by all involved of his clinical identity — that Zack is profoundly autistic.

What’s remarkable about Zack’s behavior is how unremarkable it is. Autism has been on an inexplicable rise with no signs of a plateau. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 1 in every 36 children born today has autism, and 1 in every 4 of those will have “profound autism,” a clinical distinction for those with much higher needs than the more verbally and intellectually able people who also have an autism diagnosis. Individuals like Zack with profound autism have minimal or no expressive language and require round-the-clock care to assist with daily living activities and safeguard them from extreme behaviors such as self-injury, the destruction of property, and “elopement” — the term for running or wandering away from caregivers or secure locations.

But while parents like me struggle to manage our children’s dangerous impulses, a powerful cultural movement has taken hold that forbids open discussion of profound autism and its manifestations. Advocates for “neurodiversity” are seeking to eliminate the term “profound autism” — on the grounds, they say, that it makes it seem as if autism is always an affliction. And now they are bullying doctors, researchers, lawmakers, and the rest of society into ignoring truths about Zack’s disorder that define his life.

Sanitizing Zack’s diagnosis and intense needs is dangerous. That day out on the lakefront trail, my son’s safety turned on the officers’ ability to decode from his conspicuous behaviors that he has profound autism in particular. They told me they realized that Zack’s refusal to identify himself to them despite repeated requests stemmed from an inability to articulate salient information in a moment of acute stress. They employed a measured response to his rage by speaking in succinct, assertive phrases, repeating reassurances, and maintaining a physical distance. If they hadn’t had such precise training , which depends on recognizing precise clinical criteria rather than employing general descriptors such as “neurodiverse,” the scenario could have gone very differently — with his arrest, forcible restraint, and even suffocation and death.

The intimidation campaign

I embrace many of neurodiversity’s fundamental tenets, especially the idea that people with intellectual disabilities should be broadly accepted and included in society.

I’ve staked my career on this principle — I used to work in the US Department of Justice as a disability rights attorney. I witnessed firsthand the exclusion of people with physical and cognitive disabilities from the rituals of daily life most other people take for granted. And I believe parents and professionals must aspire to discern a child’s authentic needs rather than superimpose our own preferences on them or force them into compliant molds of “normal.” Our children do not need to be “typical” to thrive in a society designed for its vast majority, nor is that an attainable goal.

But the concept of neurodiversity is going into dangerous territory if diagnostic distinctions across the spectrum are now considered archaic and bigoted.

In 2021, the medical journal The Lancet published a report from a commission of worldwide medical experts who recognized the need for “profound autism” as a discrete diagnostic category. The backlash was swift and mighty.

Autistic self-advocates launched a virulent campaign to quash the term, arguing that it had arisen, in the words of self-advocate Julia Bascom , “because some parents . . . see their kids as needing different kinds of support and different levels of restriction. But they are wrong on all counts.” The Global Autistic Task Force on Autism Research, an advocacy group, responded to The Lancet commission by saying : “For more than 30 years, autistic people have resisted functioning labels as misleading and offensive.”

As neurodiversity advocates denounce any framing of autism as a disability that requires medical intervention, they demand more support systems for people with autism, such as independent living “that honors authentic forms of human diversity.” Groups like the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network, people who identify on social media as #ActuallyAutistic, and parent activists insist that there is no such thing as a “normal” brain, only relative differences that render all humans “differently abled.”

To them, frank discussions about profound autism give a distorted image of people like Zack as unpredictable, cognitively limited, and presenting more behavioral challenges than the general population. Except the image is not distorted. While it’s painful to accept, these descriptors are accurate. Over the course of a single day, Zack, who is now 23, might furiously pummel his head in rage, slam his body into a wall, and bite me hard enough to draw blood.

The neurodiversity advocates — whose members are distinguished precisely by their ability to advocate for themselves, as Zack cannot — are not illuminating the complexity of autism; they are castigating into submission anyone who dares to deviate from their accepted language.

Intolerance for the term “profound autism” is leaching into medical journals and doctors’ practices. Doctors who’ve devoted their careers to treating children who compulsively ravage their flesh and slam their skulls into the ground are now verbally castrated on social media and “canceled” from lectures so regularly that preserving their livelihood requires stifling crucial medical data . It’s become common for autism self-advocates to “shout down” researchers imparting medical data at conferences or to call the researchers out on social media for online hazing and threats by neurodiverse mobs.

Today, both experienced and newer autism researchers contemplate leaving the field because, as one University of California scientist, David Amaral , observed, “People are getting reluctant to give public presentations or to be too vocal about what they’re finding,” despite the fact that “science is supposed to be about communication.” Top research institutions like the National Institutes of Health (NIH), tasked with conducting clinical trials to illuminate the disorder, face vitriolic accusations of being “ableist” and uncomprehending of the very people they are trying to help.

After the The Lancet’s commission recognized “profound autism” in 2021, the journal published an article by a doctor who wrote: “Generally, physicians think that disability is medical, and that if a patient’s condition interferes with their daily life, they are disabled. This traditional, medical model of disability does not address societal factors that influence disability, nor does it recognize disability as a cultural identity. Viewing disability as an issue stemming from an impaired body can encourage physicians to view disabled patients’ quality of life negatively . . . and to offer treatments aiming to fix the patient.”

This is absurd. I know of no person with profound autism who proudly identifies self-mutilating or violent impulses as core to their “cultural” identity. There is nothing bigoted about striving to ameliorate dangerous behaviors.

More critically, it is not the role of medical researchers to kowtow to trending cultural demands at the expense of addressing medically life-threatening conditions. Erasing diagnostic distinctions will make it impossible to perform research into the behaviors that are associated with profound autism — research that could lead to drugs that could benefit people across the entire autism spectrum. Although about 27 percent of all people with autism have profound autism, the condition is already underrepresented in clinical trials, which typically exclude those with an IQ lower than 70.

Two years ago, my son was abruptly ensnared in a cycle of self-injury, physical assaults, and chronic insomnia that within days catapulted him into a dangerously manic state — during which he risked seizures and seriously injuring anyone in proximity to him. Introducing anti-psychotic medicine delivered the jolt of serotonin to Zack’s brain that allowed him to reclaim his stability. Might other medicines become available that would work better? A movement that vilifies any medical mention of “risk,” “limitations,” or extreme behaviors has the power to thwart the development of such urgently needed drugs.

I hope Congress hears parents like me

The Autism CARES Act, which allocates NIH-funded research and services, sunsets on Sept. 30. Fierce debates are already underway about what Congress should do when it reauthorizes this funding. On one side stand autistic self-advocates who rally against any research not explicitly approved by them. On the other are parents who are desperate for clinical advancements but are so engulfed in the daily ordeal of managing their profoundly autistic children’s aggression and property destruction that they are largely incapable of organizing. The few dedicated parents calling for NIH to set aside funding to specifically address “profound autism” are vastly outnumbered by neurodiverse advocates who seek to block the act from passing if such “stigmatizing” language is included.

The loudest voices seek to abolish all spending on autism medical research and replace it with select services, such as workforce initiatives, that assist only those with milder autism. It’s here that the idea of neurodiversity poses the greatest threat — a movement that celebrates autism in all its forms, and depicts even the most severe afflictions as “merely a difference,” vehemently opposes any investigation into autism’s causes as ableist.

The truth is that we still don’t know what explains the steep rise in autism — perhaps it’s the product of widespread environmental contaminants altering our children’s brains — and this increase needs urgent attention. As these children age, state programs already strained by the deluge of adults needing lifelong services threaten to collapse entirely. Capitulating to self-advocates’ demands amid a global proliferation of one of the gravest disorders of our time is not only morally incoherent but medical malpractice.

In the natural course of events, every profoundly autistic child will eventually be orphaned by the most qualified and dedicated caretakers he’s ever known — his parents. Absent meticulous advance planning and abundant resources, that child will be automatically transitioned by the state to placement in a residential living arrangement. For that child to be placed appropriately depends entirely upon having accurate clinical information about the intensity of his needs, taking into account the possibility of physical aggression, self-injury, elopement, property destruction, seizures, and other overlapping medical needs. I’m confident that if a person facing homelessness and a precariously uncertain future were asked whether he values a safe residential arrangement over semantics that obscure his diagnosis, he would choose the former.

For the record, any language that contorts or constricts the full scope of Zack’s identity is something I find deeply offensive. Zack has struggled with innumerable obstacles and heartbreak in navigating a world that does not come naturally to him, and his competence is strengthening to this day. Blurring his identity under the indistinct banner of “neurodiverse” erases Zack’s lived history — all that he has endured and overcome to get here.

Whitney Ellenby is a former disability rights attorney in the US Department of Justice and the author of the 2018 book “Autism Uncensored: Pulling Back the Curtain.” She is also the founder of Autism Ambassadors, which runs recreational events for over 800 families affected by autism in the Washington, D.C., area.

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Guest Essay

A Chill Has Fallen Over Jews in Publishing

By James Kirchick

Mr. Kirchick is a contributing writer to Tablet magazine, a writer at large for Air Mail and the author of “Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington.”

This month, an account on X with the handle @moyurireads and 360 followers published a link to a color-coded spreadsheet classifying nearly 200 writers according to their views on the “genocide” in Gaza. Titled “Is Your Fav Author a Zionist?,” it reads like a cross between Tiger Beat and “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

The novelist Emily St. John Mandel, the author of “Station Eleven” and “Sea of Tranquility,” earned a red “pro-Israel/Zionist” classification because, according to the list’s creator, she “travels to Israel frequently talks favorably about it.” Simply for posting a link to the Israeli chapter of the Red Cross, the novelist Kristin Hannah was deemed a “Zionist,” as was the author Gabrielle Zevin for delivering a book talk to Hadassah, a Jewish women’s organization. Needless to say, the creator of the list — whose post on X announcing it garnered over a million views within a few days — encourages readers to boycott any works produced by “Zionists.”

The spreadsheet is but the crudest example of the virulently anti-Israel — and increasingly antisemitic — sentiment that has been coursing through the literary world since the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7. Much of it revolves around the charge of genocide and seeks to punish Zionists and anyone else who refuses to explicitly denounce the Jewish state for allegedly committing said crime. Since a large majority of American Jews (80 percent of whom, according to a 2020 poll , said that caring about Israel is an important or essential part of their Judaism) are Zionists, to accuse all Zionists of complicity in genocide is to anathematize a core component of Jewish identity.

Over the past several months, a litmus test has emerged across wide swaths of the literary world effectively excluding Jews from full participation unless they denounce Israel. This phenomenon has been unfolding in progressive spaces (academia, politics, cultural organizations) for quite some time. That it has now hit the rarefied, highbrow realm of publishing — where Jewish Americans have made enormous contributions and the vitality of which depends on intellectual pluralism and free expression — is particularly alarming.

As is always and everywhere the case, this burgeoning antisemitism is concomitant with a rising illiberalism. Rarely, if ever, do writers express unanimity on a contentious political issue. We’re a naturally argumentative bunch who — at least in theory — answer only to our own consciences.

To compel them to express support or disapproval for a cause is one of the cruelest things a society can do to writers, whose role is to tell society what they believe, regardless of how popular the message may be. The drawing up of lists, in particular, is a tactic with a long and ignominious history, employed by the enemies of literature — and liberty — on both the left and the right. But the problem goes much deeper than a tyro blacklist targeting “Zionists.”

One of the greatest mass delusions of the 21st century is the belief that Israel is committing a genocide against Palestinians. This grotesque moral inversion — in which a genocidal terrorist organization that instigated a war with Israel by committing the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust is absolved of responsibility while the victim of Hamas’s attack is charged with perpetrating the worst crime known to man — began taking shape before Israel even launched its ground invasion of Gaza.

A charitable description of those imputing genocidal motivations to Israel is that they are ignorant, essentially believing the word to mean “large numbers of civilian casualties.” (Here it’s worth noting that the United Nations, to little notice, has significantly lowered its estimate of the number of women and children killed in Gaza.) For others, accusing Israel of genocide is an emotional outlet for expressing outrage at such a horrific loss of life. A third, more pessimistic, characterization of the ubiquitous genocide canard is that it is only the latest iteration of the ancient antisemitic blood libel, which held that Jews murdered gentile children in order to use their blood for religious rituals.

College students and professional activists using overheated and imprecise language to convey their strongly held beliefs is hardly uncommon, and much of the intemperate language being directed at Israel and its Zionist supporters can be attributed to the hyperbole that increasingly characterizes our political discourse. What should worry us more is when people who have dedicated their lives to the written word manipulate language for a political end, one that is stigmatizing Jews.

Nine days after the Oct. 7 attack, the popular website Literary Hub began publishing what has since become a near-daily torrent of agitprop invective against what it describes as the “rogue ethnostate” of Israel, which it routinely accuses of committing genocide. In March, after a mass resignation of its staff members , the literary magazine Guernica retracted a personal essay by a left-wing Israeli woman about her experience volunteering to drive Palestinian children to Israel for medical treatment. In her resignation letter, one of the magazine’s co-publishers denounced the piece as “a hand-wringing apologia for Zionism and the ongoing genocide in Palestine.”

Whereas antisemitism in the literary world used to lurk in the shadows, according to the Jewish Book Council’s chief executive, Naomi Firestone-Teeter, since Oct. 7, it has become increasingly overt. “The fact that people have felt so proud and open about it is a different beast entirely,” she said. One of the most disturbing developments in this regard has been the frequency and contempt with which the word “Zionist” is now spit from people’s mouths in the United States.

Until relatively recently, the use of “Zionist” as a slur was most commonly confined to Soviet and Arab propagandists, who spent decades trying to render the word the moral equivalent of “Nazi.” Today many progressives use the word in similar fashion, making no distinction between a Zionist who supports a two-state solution (which, presumably, most Jews in the overwhelmingly liberal literary world do) and one who believes in a “Greater Israel” encompassing the entirety of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. And while anyone can be a Zionist, I’ve found in my 20 years of reporting on antisemitism that many Jews essentially hear “Jew” when someone shouts “Zionist" at them.

The corruption of the words “genocide” and “Zionist” lies at the root of the controversy threatening to unravel PEN America, the storied writers’ organization. As with many a literary contretemps, it involves a cascade of open letters. In February a missive that gained almost 1,500 signatures was published demanding that PEN “wake up from its own silent, tepid, neither-here-nor-there, self-congratulatory middle of the road and take an actual stand against an actual genocide.” The dozens of statements PEN had issued by that time calling attention to the plight of writers in Gaza (whom the letter, without citing evidence, claimed had been “targeted” by Israel for assassination)were insufficient. “We demand PEN America release an official statement” about the writers killed in Gaza the letter read, “and name their murderer: Israel, a Zionist colonial state funded by the U.S. government.”

On March 20, PEN acceded to the ultimatum that it endorse the call for a cease-fire. But that did not satiate its critics.

Last month, in advance of PEN’s annual literary awards ceremony, nearly half of the nominated writers withdrew from the competition. A subset of those writers then released another open letter , declaring, “Among writers of conscience, there is no disagreement. There is fact and fiction. The fact is that Israel is leading a genocide of the Palestinian people.” They accused PEN of “normalizing genocide,” denounced PEN for its “platforming of Zionists” and, most shamefully, called for the resignation of its Jewish chief executive, Suzanne Nossel, on account of her “longstanding commitments to Zionism.”

Along with eight other past presidents of PEN, Salman Rushdie signed a letter in defense of the organization , an intervention that earned him an “unclear” rating on the anti-Zionist blacklist. (He has braved far worse from Islamist zealots and their Western apologists.) PEN ultimately canceled both the awards ceremony and subsequent World Voices Festival.

Dissatisfaction with PEN’s purported lack of indignation over the deaths of Palestinian writers is a fig leaf. Where were the efforts by those now decrying PEN to protest the complete absence of freedom of expression that has characterized the Gaza Strip under 17 years of Hamas rule?

The real objectives behind the cynical weaponization of the word “genocide” and the authoritarian insistence that anyone who disagrees with it is an enabler of one are to shut down debate, defame dissenters and impose a rigid orthodoxy throughout the publishing world. It is a naked attempt to impose an ideological litmus test on anyone hoping to join the republic of letters — a litmus test that the vast majority of Jews would fail.

A campaign of intimidation, the sort of thing that happens to the dissident writers in closed societies whom PEN regularly champions, is afoot to pressure writers into toeing this new party line. PEN’s current president, Jenny Finney Boylan, recently said that she had heard from “many, many authors who do not agree with those withdrawing from PEN events and who do not wish to withdraw from our events themselves but are afraid of the consequences if they speak up.”

Compelling speech — which is ultimately what PEN’s critics are demanding of it — is the tactic of commissars, not writers in a free society. Censorship, thought policing and bullying are antithetical to the spirit of literature, which is best understood as an intimate conversation between the author and individual readers.

PEN’s detractors aren’t helping the Palestinian people with their whitewashing of Hamas. They’re engaged in a hostile takeover of a noble organization committed to the defense of free expression in order to advance a sectarian and bigoted political agenda.

Neil Gaiman, Taylor Jenkins-Reid, Ms. Mandel and other hugely successful authors need not worry that being denounced as a Zionist will hurt their careers. But the blacklists and the boycotts are not targeted at them. The real targets of this crusade are lesser-known authors, budding novelists, aspiring poets and creative writing students — largely but not exclusively Jewish — who can feel a change in the air.

“I do now definitely have concern as a Jewish author — two years working on a novel that has absolutely nothing to do with Jews in any way, just because it says ‘National Jewish Book Award winner’ in my bio — that it may change the way readers see the work,” said a Jewish creative writing professor and novelist who spoke to me on the condition of being quoted anonymously.

No longer is being on the receiving end of a review bomb the worst fate that can befall a Jewish writer exploring Jewish themes; even getting such a book published is becoming increasingly difficult. “It’s very clear you have to have real courage to acquire and publish proudly Jewish voices and books about being Jewish,” a prominent literary agent told me. “When you are seen as genocidal, a moral insult to humanity because you believe in Israel’s right to exist, you are now seen as deserving of being canceled.”

There’s a distasteful irony in a literary community that has gone to the barricades fighting book “bans” now rallying to boycott authors based on their ethnoreligious identity. For a growing set of writers, declaring one’s belief that the world’s only Jewish state is a genocidal entity whose dismantlement is necessary for the advancement of humankind is a political fashion statement, a bauble one parades around in order to signify being on the right team. As was Stalinism for an earlier generation of left-wing literary intellectuals, so is antisemitism becoming the avant-garde.

James Kirchick is a contributing writer to Tablet magazine, a writer at large for Air Mail and the author of “Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington.”

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