Title: Earthlove – Theorising Neurodivergent Reader Love of A Room Called Earth

ABSTRACT This paper is a neuroqueer reading of the novel A Room Called Earth (2020) by Madeleine Ryan. In the paper, we explore and theorise a neuroqueer reading practice. Ryan’s novel depicts a neurodivergent experience of life and the world, through a neurodivergent literary form and style. Reading as neurodivergents, the content and the form melt together – it is more than ‘literary style’, it is a way of existing. This reading, and our writing about our reading, is not neutral. It is an engaged and personal reading, where we let our reading subjects fuse with the text. Important in our neuroqueer reading practice is the context of reading and writing. In the article, we explore how sharing our readings in a neurodivergent collective opens up an understanding of the world, the text, and ourselves, which works both as a healing process and sharing of experiences of sensory desires. We argue that the neurodivergent experience is different when experiences as a collective rather than individual experience – the feelings of reading, becomes when shared, something more and other. Earthlove is, through our reading, an experience of sensory/textual desire, and neurodivergent collective acts of love and self-love. Reading it feels like love.


Loving eartlove
I love the world more than I have ever loved a person.I love being alive.(That doesn't mean I don't sometimes want to die.) (One of us) Earlier this evening I couldn't figure out hove to connect the new speaker system, so I'm listening to a Spice Girls CD, and relishing in the sound of the first album I ever bought, while dressing up like the kid I was when I bought it.I loved wearing Mum's kimonos and dancing in the mirror when I was a child.It's like I knew I would be this person eventually and tonight she's so much fun.Oh my goddess, I can't think of anything better.It's the moment before the moment and I can breathe.Anything can happen from here, and I'm in love with myself.(Ryan, A Room 33-4)   In the novel, A Room Called Earth Madeleine Ryan provides a first-person narrative of a nameless female neurodivergent (ND) I, who prepares to go to a party, attends the party, and leaves with a man.In between the telling of the one-night event, the narrator relates other relationships she's been in.She tells about her living situation, her cat Porkchop, her plants, and her thoughts about Australia (where she lives) and the rest of the world.
Yergeau defines the neuroqueer as 'a lurching toward a future that […] is inherently relational in that it defies, reclaims, and embraces the expansiveness that [neurodivergent] countersocialities can potentially embody'. 1 Nick Walker, who first coined the term 'neuroqueer' in 2008, refers to it rather as 'neuroqueering', a verb more than an adjective, pointing at the doing of neurological queernesswhile also addressing that an authoritative definition of the term would be ridiculous and counterproductive since part of it aims specifically at the subverting of definition.The queering practice means subverting, sirupting and defying, in this case, both neuronormative and heteronormative processes. 2In this paper we explore and suggest what a neuroqueer reading could be like, taking Ryan's novel as a case.We read Ryan's novel as a neuroqueer novel.By this we mean it is not only written by a neurodivergent author, but written in a 'neuroqueer way' and with a neurodivergent audience in mind, thus the neuroqueering refers more to the practice of the text, and the readerin our case, the reading collective.We define our reading of Ryan's novel as a collective neuroqueer reading practice.This is not only a matter of experienced-based standpoints. 3This is something we do automatically while we are doing the reading together, as an exploration of the novel between three neurodivergent academics. 4Some of us identify as Autistic.Some of us identify as Autistic with ADHD traits.Referring to ourselves as neurodivergent is also a way of not (only) referring to a medical term.Our neuroqueer reading is based on different things.Firstly, it is a matter of recognition and sensory/textual desire, through ways of experiencing and looking at the content and structure of the novel and Ryan's way of writing.As sensory/textual desire, a neuroqueer reading includes our sensory desiring the text/reading as sensory pleasure.Reading with recognition includes experiences of what Christa Mullis has referred to in the context of Autistic audiences of TV series with autistic characters, the audiences' experiences of characters that 'move' like us. 5 As neurodivergent readers and writers, we experience the content and way of writing as moving/writing 'like us'.Secondly, we will discuss our readings with the use of different expressions of neurodivergent theorising.Thirdly, we explore the 'way of writing' not only in the novel but also in our way of writing about the novel.Referring to this reading practice as a neuroqueer rather than (but also overlapping with) neurodivergent means highlighting the processes of desire and subversion that underline the reading.We argue, that the love for the text as well as sharing the experiences of that love with each other during our reading and writing, can be read as a practice of sensory/textual desire in itself.
In the context of reading and writing practices, this allows us to discard previous interpretative frameworks in search for new meanings and interpretations, which do away with notions of neuronormativity, paternalism, and age-old stereotypes which lurk in even the most 'progressive' discussions of neurodivergence and literary representation. 6s we will see, the idea of relationality is an organising discourse in the novel, as it centres on themes of morality, care, interconnectedness, and affectivitytraits that we neurodivergent people are commonly presumed to lack. 7aking our reader feelings seriously seems extremely important.Our reading of the novel is a reading with the grain, a friendly reading, that takes the themes and languages, and impulses from the text and follow them.We write in line with what feminist researchers Francis and Hey have referred to as 'joint action'. 8Throughout, we mingle our autoethnographic reader accounts (referring to 'one of us') and writing to each other (referring to 'extracts from our writing to each other'), in relation to citations from A Room Called Earth (referring to it as Earthlove), research accounts and theories, as a way of illustrating the work with the text as thinking about Earthlove and neuroqueer reading practices with each other, as a 'neurodivergent togetherness' 9 or a textual neuroqueer relationality in itself.We will refer to the texts we work in and with as textual spaces.

Neuroqueer reading practices
Among expressions of neurodivergent theorising we have found useful in our reading is the theory of monotrophism. 10In this context, we think of a monotrophic reading and us as monotrophic readers and writers as intensely interested reading and writing 'charged with feeling'. 11Therefore, care and mutual affectivity (a by-product of empathy), manifest on the level of plot and discourse.On one level, there is the narrator, whose love, care, and empathy for all living beings but also a strong moral propels the narrative forward.On the other, there is the love, care, and empathy we as readers feel towards the narrator, as well as for each other.Combining these feelings creates an affective force that is emancipatory, as it challenges and interrogates neurotypically-imbued narratives about autistic 'solipsism', asociality, apathy, 'mindblindne and lack of enjoyment of fiction. 12This 'affective charge' created by a neurodivergent-authored text, we argue, is where the power of literature to change cultural attitudes lies.
We read Ryan charged with feeling, and at the same time, our reading is charged with interest.The monotropic is a concentration.A monotropic presence is a concentration.It gets intense/it is intense writing.We write intensely.Ryan's style of writing is intense.The I of the novel is the eye of the novel, focusing monotropically on her presence, which becomes an analysis of the situation charged with feeling.Separating thoughts and feelings becomes impossible.This reading is made collectivelythrough sharing our readings in writing.We are writing mosaic, associative, and bottom-up.From our different detailed readings, and close readings, we are gradually, during the process of writing together putting together a mosaic picture from our readings of a mosaic novel.We place Ryan's novel as part of a new way of contemporary autistic fiction, setting a trend for others to follow.Part of this new way is to stage new ways of picturing neurodivergent characters and envisioning neurodivergent readers, with a strong sense of love and care.
Love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love.
I think what I like about Earthlove is that there are no traits of disability.The I is never to be seen as disabled, and the environment is never seen as disabling.There is just: this is.Life is.There is a sort of radical embracement of the world and of the self.I like how the I, unlike Stella (The kiss quotient, 2018) or Anna (The Heart Principle, 2021), in Helen Hoang's novels, 13 is completely confident and loves herselfthat doesn't mean that is easy for her, she has difficulties, and she uses affirmations, but I feel like deep down, she loves herself.And with that said, she also embraces the world she is in, and the party she's at.I think about my reading of DIVA (1998) by Monika Fagerholm, 14 where I read the sort of almightiness of the thirteen-year-old Diva and the way she uses language as a neurodivergent way of being in the world.And I think about Hannah Emerson's chapbook You Are Helping This Great World Explode, 15 which repeats yes yesyesyesyesyes, as an almost erotic way to relate to the whole world.This makes me think that there really is a HUNGER in the world for neurodivergent stories that are not kind and cute for a neurotypical audience, but that are aggressively affirmative of a neurodivergent life-loving existence.
I read the 'room' that is her earth as an alternative realitynot with monsters or aliens or centaursbut a parallel world in which we are all kinder to ourselves.For me, A Room Called Earth is a mantra for the possibility of ND self-love.There is this popular saying in feminist circles, a quote by Gail Dines, which is 'if tomorrow, women woke up and decided they really liked their bodies, just think how many industries would go out of business.'I kept thinking of a ND version of this quote when reading, something like, 'if tomorrow, neurodivergent women woke up and decided they really liked their minds, just think of how many narratives like Ryan's would appear.'This is more possible than it first seems.We need to develop the tools to release ND people from neurotypical conventions and reading practices, to unlearn the NT gaze, so that our counter perspectivesfull of possibility, optimism, and self-lovecan flourish.I think our work together will be a modest contribution.
(Extracts from our writing to each other) We read Earthlove as both a monotrophic presence and a monologic embracement.Miele Rodas lists 'monologism' as one of the autistic literary characteristics, which means: people have called autistic literature monological, and, therefore this narrative strategy can and should be used as a counter-narrative (Miele Rodas, 2018, 6).Then I can be seen as a sort of collective curiousness including both herself and the surroundings.Törnvall writes in her book Autisterna.Om kvinnor på spektrat (2021, eng: The Autistics.About women on the spectrum) about Simone Weil and Weil's writing: to love a stranger as oneself implies the reverse: to love oneself as a stranger.Törnvall interprets this as a way of being autistic in the world since the I in the autistic experience might not be perfectly nonstrange, but the autistic knows that they can never fully know themselves and do not care to do that but keep surprising themselves.Similarly, Monika Fagerholm uses the same quote from Weil, in her novel Vem dödade bambi? 16as a way of exploring the I as a collective being, an I told through quotes and borrowed language.Similarly, we read with a sense of a sort of collective curiousness including both ourselves and the book.
I wonder if we could sort of 'mimic' the earthlove the narrator feelsher profound love and appreciation for herself and her belief that everything is interconnectedon the level of discourse?That is if we could incorporate this interconnection and care in our writing practices, by channelling a 'collective voice'?(One of us)

Praising the neurodivergent author
Early on in our readings, we stopped by, at the quotes written on the cover and inside A Room Called Earth.The novel is here praised for being 'unique' but also 'humane'.

A reader writes:
A Room Called Earth offers a strikingly unique look at intimacy, identity, and time itself.From now on I want every novel to be this fiercely autistic, this assured, this untethered from the status quo.Madeleine Ryan is a wholly original writer; this debut announces a tremendous talent.

Another reader writes:
In prose filled with humor and warm light, Madeleine Ryan unearths the bright, luminous soul of each animate and inanimate being she encounters.Instead, remarkably, it is the self shaped by and against social norms that is met as other.The result is an intelligence that feels not only totally refreshing and original but wonderfully humane.
Reading the praise for the book we, as neurodivergent academics, wonder: What does it mean for a novel to be 'fiercely autistic?'In what way does the narrator 'other' the (social normative) self' and how come is this 'remarkable'?Our readings of the reviews are suspicious readings, 17 a reading charged with neuroqueer disidentification (Egner, 2019). 18We feel the othering of the neurotypical gazes on another neurodivergent self, on someone who moves like us.In a literary market that benefits financially from casting a type of spectatorship or gaze on the neurodivergent subject, our critical remarks are both merited and overdue.We feel there is a sort of 'positive' abuse going on in the appreciation of the book, which points to broader issues within the publishing industry, revealing troubling power dynamics between different neurotypes.This has already been observed in the case of memoir or 'autiebiography', where autistic critics 19 have argued that the introduction or prefacing of autistic-authored memoirs by doctors, psychiatrists, and other medical professionals (for example, Bernard Rimland in Donna Williams's memoirs or Oliver Sacks in Tito Mukhopadhyay's) reinforce notions of fascination, spectatorship, and pathology associated with what Catherine McDermott 20 has theorised as the neurotypical gaze (NT gaze).Here, we argue that there is a similar power imbalance at play in the reviews of Ryan's novel.
I was a bit put off by reading the quotes and praise on the back.I wrote to [author 1] about it.Like "Why does this book need to be called "humane" or "authentic"?Aren't all books humane (I also think about books as humans, that means, all books).I do not understand how the NT reviewers could read the book as they did.It is as if the book itself is a ND dissection of NT life and exactly the type of voices that the NT reviewers express.I think it must have been very confusing for them to read Earthlove.
Haha, yes, the radical dissection of NT weirdness maybe forced the NT reviewers to disarm the text the way they do.
It is so completely the opposite of what they're used to in ND popular fiction: a female, hyperempathetic, earth lover, who loves other humans, and whose diagnosis has nothing to do with the plot.Contrast this with the male, asocial, 'mind blind' young man who cannot touch another (let alone have any form of sexual contact), and whose diagnosis is the basis of the story.It's subversive because it takes the narrative so completely out of their hands.To Ryan: thank you, thank you, thank you! (Extracts from our writing to each other) Neurodivergent space times: moving autistically in that space The Collins dictionary defines 'autistically', as 'in an autistic manner or the manner of a person who has autism'.Playing with the word, we think about moving autistically in different spacetimes.Neurodivergent spacetimes, cartographies, and modes of navigation are never linear.The citation above is a nice symbol/anecdote which represents that, moving autistically in that space.We read Earthlove as a mosaic, nonlinear storyingbased on neurodivergent ways of associative communication taking a textual form as associative writing, a language weaving.I read the 'mosaic storying' as the incorporation of various perspectives, both human and nonhuman, which merge to make a whole 'worldly' perspective.I like how Porkchop's opinion is as important as the narrator's (and the reader's).I like the gentle and tentative curiosity through which she navigates the world.
(One of us) The mosaic storying is central in what we have started to refer to as a sense of sharing a (wordless) moment of intense feeling with each other.And with Ryan.
Millions of us are feeling the exact same way, right now, and we are united because of it.(Ryan, A Room, 65) In Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology 21 Astrida Neimanis uses water to explore our inter-relationality and responsibility, towards one another, as we are basically a 'collective body'.Neimanis links ideas of environmental collectivism to subjective collectivism, paving a new ethics of care.Neimanis positions water as a life-sustaining phenomenon that connects us all despite our different subject positions, identities, geophysical locations, and embodiments: '[our] bodies are differentin their physical properties and hybridisations, as well as in political, cultural, and historical termsbut they're differing from one another, their differentiation, is a collective worlding' (29).Drawing on Adrienne Rich's 1986 essay, 'Notes Toward a Politics of Location', Neimanis shows how underscoring the various identities and embodiments under a collective, watery 'we' allow us to form better relations with both human and nonhuman others.It involves 'being responsible and responsive to our others, despite (or even because of) this ever-changing landscape of continuous interplay, intra-action, emergence, and risk' (21).This echoes the approach that Ryan's narrator takes to the more-than-human world, and also serves as a useful framework for our monotropic reading practice, as we forge an ethics of care, collaboration, and mutual responsibility, both between ourselves and to a broader readership: '[a]s bodies of water, we are always, at some level, implicated' (38).
Nothing precedes the encounter.Humans can't exist in a vacuum.All of the stuff that is usually thought of as being in the 'background'the lake, the voices of the city walkers, the musicis, in this moment of intense feeling, 'foregrounded'. 22Without the surrounding environment, we cannot perceive or feel anything, meaning that the environment shapes us as we shape it.It is a dance of reciprocity.We think that is what Ryan expresses in her novel.We think that is what earthlove (loving the earth) means.Neimanis draws connections between our biological status as watery bodies and our collective existence, writing: As bodies of water, we leak and seethe, our borders are always vulnerable to rupture and renegotiation.With a drop of cliché, I could remind you that our human bodies are at least two-thirds water, but more interesting than this ontological maths is what this water doeswhere it comes from, where it goes, and what it means along the way.Our wet matters are in a constant process of intake, transformation, and exchangedrinking, peeing, sweating, sponging, and weeping.Discrete individualism is a rather dry, if convenient, myth.(Neimanis, Bodies of Water, 2) She continues: Our watery relations within (or more accurately: as) a more-than-human hydrocommons thus present a challenge to anthropocentrism, and the privileging of the human as the sole or primary site of embodiment.(Neimanis, Bodies of Water, 2) If we are no longer the individuals we thought we were, how does this affect our responsibility and care towards one another?Can we continue to assert the validity of some forms of humanity or neurotypes over others?Ryanproviding an alternative model to what Jim Sinclair has referred to as the 'sole autist', 23 the autistic individual closed off from the worlddoes not think so.The narrator may have different relational conventions, but they are now able to be seen not as relational deficits, but as adding to the vast and complex network of human-nonhuman relations.This, by extension, adds another dimensiona new layer of meaning and significanceto how we relate to one another, opening relationality to new possibilities which are inherently neuroqueer.
I have an extraordinary capacity to be taken way out of my depth by the desires of others.(Ryan, A Room, 10) I also have this terrible habit of becoming so focused on what's frightening me and making me nervous that I can't comprehend anything else.I become mesmerised by it.(Ryan, A Room, 77) I'm not really wired to care for other people unless they ask me directly because, in any given situation, I'm either completely immersed in myself, or completely immersed in someone else.There's no in-between.(Ryan, A Room, 3) Similar to the monotrophic I, we are being 'taken way out of [our] depth by the desires of others', 'mesmerised', and getting 'completely immersed', both in Earthlove and in the writing of this text about Earthlove.Building upon Miller and Eller-Miller (1989), Stephen Shore notes in Beyond the Wall: Personal Experiences with Autism and Asperger Syndrome: 24 Whenever I get a very strong emotion and I am not clear as to where it comes from, I have to consider whether someone I am in communication with is displaying a similar emotion, which I am picking up from them.Sometimes I feel as if I am fused with that other person´s emotions and can´t separate myself.(Shore, Beyond the Wall, 37) The neurotypical Ralph Savarese translates/transfers the idea of fusing into the context of autistic reading, noting that the autistic reader easily is 'fusing with another's suffering, whether real or imagined' in their readings.Savarese writes in See it Feelingly 25 about taking his autistic son, DJ Savarese, out of a, in Ralph's view, self-destructive, too intensely focused (monotrophic) reading.DJ is, in Ralph's view, 'trapped' in the text, which is a scary experience and makes him harm himself.While we understand Ralph's parental feelings, the urge to 'save' his child, we also think this 'saving' is destructive in its own way.After that experience, Ralph 'teaches' DJ to read in a non-harmful, that is, a non-autistic, non-monotropic, emotionally distant, and academically analytical way.Similarly, our neurodivergent reader feelings have been taught by neurotypical teachers to hide.I remember having the book taken away from me when I refused to eat and thought I could read instead of eat.
(One of us) Our ways of reading have, similarly to DJ Savarese, been trained into academic modes.Reading Ryan's novel, together in our textual space, but in separate editions (2020, 2021), time and geographical locations, we find a way to restore the reader feelingsboth as a method to understand the novel, as a means to share the intensity, and as a goal in itself.Of course, read/writing is another kind of fusing than bodily connection, yet, we feel the reading in our bodies, as a way of being in our neurodivergent bodyminds. 26What we do when we experience Ryan's novel, is a sharing of reader feelings, a fusing with the I.
The intensity in our reader feelings also points to the importance of creating a sanctuary for oneself, away from a world dominated by ways of neurotypicals.Not long before she leaves for the party, the narrator says, 'I'm officially one step closer to leaving the sanctity of my sacred space to join my fellow human beings in the mortal realm' (30).
It reminds me of how much I love my space (which I keep religiously clean and tidy).I always add small touches to make it more cozy and warm and safe.Candles, wax melts, clean sheets, pillow spray, a salt lamp, essential oils, fresh pyjamas, and fluffy socks after a bath.I can't relax until everything's just so.My diagnostic papers call it OCD, but I see it as self-care.The outside world is so unpredictable, and functioning day to day is hard, so taking control over my space by making it my sanctuary is the best way I can reward myself and let myself go to sleep safely (c.f.Ryan, 258).The narrator seems to be doing the same.While she might come across as self-indulgent or idle, I see her as someone who is unapologetically gentle on herself.I think it's a good lesson for us all, to be more in love with ourselves.It's time to unlearn the NT gaze.
(One of us) I love and accept myself exactly as I am.I love and accept myself exactly as I am.I love and accept myself exactly as I am.I love and accept myself exactly as I am.I love and accept myself exactly as I am.I love and accept myself exactly as I am.I love and accept myself exactly as I am.I love and accept myself exactly as I am.(Ryan, A Room, 28) Reading Ryan's novel means sharing the experiences of the I, in a way that through the monotropic reading situation mostly means being the I, feeling our reader-I fusing with the narrator-I.Amelia Hill 27 writes in an article in The Guardian about the autistic therapist Steph Jones, who: Jokes that she used to think she was psychic.The psychotherapist says she can often tell instinctively what a client's issue is before they've even sat down.'I can say to them: 'All of a sudden my throat is tightening,' or: 'I feel dizzy,' or: 'I can see a particular imagedoes this mean anything to you?' she says.This is because Jones has the ability, she explains, to experience not just other people's emotions but their physical sensations in her own body.
Similarly, reading Ryan's novel, we read as feeling the narrator's sensations in our bodies.This is a 'psychic' feeling, we read like psychicswhich fits perfectly with Ryan's I's interest in the spiritual.The fusing, we argue, is part of a neuroqueer reading.It is linked to the practice of reacting physicallystimming, jumping, dancing, hand-waving, singing, crying, screaming, screeching, smiling, giggling, and laughing, in response to what we are reading.This response to the reading can be seen as what Yergeau defines as an 'interbodily invention' 28 , as they argue that autistic embodiment is constantly moving towards new sites of meaning-making, always encompassing physicality.We think of the different textual pleasures in the ways of writing; the rhythm of the text, the sense of a particular textual texture (the density of the text/writing), and the pleasures of repetitions: Here we are here we are here we are (Ryan, A Room, 16-17).We notice the nonlinear associative storying, where you may suddenly end up somewhere unexpected.This is a pattern we read as autistic; Miele Rodas lists 'abrupt […] irrelevant • labyrinth • labyrinthine' (2018, 4) as autistic traits in literature, as traits that can be used by neurotypicals to criticise the autistic text, or as traits to fondly recognise as 'our language'.Our recognition of our language can be viewed as what Christa Mullis has referred to as 'autistic coding', or characters (or with our interpretation, ways of writing) which we as autistic readers code as 'moving like us', regardless of the author's intention. 29But in the case of Earthlove, it feels like the way of writing is highly intentionally neurodivergent.It is not something which 'neurodivergence' is made to happen, but the neurodivergent. 30 Heath Ledger's nearly illegible signature is sprawled across the center of a large poster of him as Ned Kelly, and the tagline of the poster reads, "You Can Kill a Man, But Not a Legend."It's sealed behind glass and held by a frame, which is made of stone, and when I sit before it at a certain time of day and gaze into its dark eyes in a certain kind of light, I can see my reflection.(Ryan, A Room, 17) I recently watched a documentary that said relishing in the scent of a flowerany floweris essentially relishing in the scent of a sex organ.How hot is that?(Ryan, A Room, 40) … I can see a handwritten note on the front door that reads, "walk around the side/no throwing cigarette butts over the fence like last time/merry xmas biatches/we're watching," and I do not do as I'm told.(Ryan, A Room, 50) That makes me giggle, but I feel like I and the author giggle with each other, not from an outsider's perspective of someone who "behaves strangely".Moving autistically in that space is something I identify with, take pleasure in the author´s sharing of that moving.The little giggle with the author (when she makes me think that we are on our way to something certain and then turn around/we end up somewhere completely different and I get like a feeling of giggling in my stomach, the roller coaster feeling).
(One of us) I like the dialogues so much without saying xx meant yy.It is just about experiencing the text voices without an outsider's view.
(One of us) I like the insider/from the inside-storying so much.I get to look out through the narrator's body and experience what she experiences.It is not a God-eye perspective where the author tells a story at a distance, but I get to experience the story and be with/share experiences with the author/narrator.
(One of us) Yes, I think this text doesn't need or have room for a third person-narrator because the I is a bit like God's eyes herself.She incorporates the divine, in a new age-y way, she is monotropically interested in herself and karma and listening to the things happening in the world.
(One of us) The shared feeling carries the collective voice.Yergeau talks of an 'embodied communication' 31 where words are one componentrather than the centrepiece ofcommunication and language.What if conceptualising communication as purely 'rhetorical, symbolic intent' prevented a deeper, more direct engagement with novels?In a scene of the seminal video of the autistic self-advocacy movement, In My Language (2007), Mel Baggs 32 holds up an open book and presses their face to it, while humming and rocking back and forth.Cognitivist interpretations would suppose that Baggs is interacting with the book the 'wrong' way: after all, to properly comprehend it, the words must be engaged with visually before being processed using logic.Smelling and touching the book, Baggs would be thought of as in their 'own world'; not cognisant of, or bothered about, the contents of the pages or what is taking place around them: '[t]he way I naturally think and respond to things/looks and feels so different from standard concepts', Baggs writes, 'that some people do not consider it thought at all.' Yet, they write, '[f]ar from being purposeless, the way that I move/is an ongoing response to what is around me.' Baggs' movements challenge beliefs that all humans share a relational emphasis, that objects have a singular 'use,' and that literature can only be engaged with using the brain.
There's something very decadent and straight-to-the-point about a vodka martini with olives.There's no yeast or citrus or bubbles to be used as a distraction.And I like to experience life directly and intimately so, naturally, I like to drink alcohol that is direct and intimate.Drinking vodka in this way, you get to feel every bit of it.There's no hiding from a vodka martini with olives.(Ryan, A Room, 7-8) I google vodka martini and do not understand the difference between stirred versus shake but no matter, I do not think it seems to taste good.But I like (and can identify with) the idea of "experiencing life directly and intimately." After finishing reading Earthlove I get hungry for more Ryan.I google whether she has written any more novels, and I find a Spotify list by Ryan for Earthlove.I text both [2nd author] and [3rd author] about the Spotify list.Now I will soon have a disco with a room called earth.
To dance with a book.There is nothing more poetic (and intimate).
And I respond with a heart.I think about me taking my everyday walks, physically on my own, at the shores of lake Mälaren (a big lake meeting the sea in the central part of Stockholm where I live).And I walk there among all the other city walkers.Listening to the A room called earth-Spotify list.And I like to experience that shared moment with the author.And with you.
(Extracts from our writing to each other)

Concluding reflections
We have read Earthlove as a novel that tells us something about our own experience of the earth and of writing, written with a sense of loving care.The I of Ryan's story takes us to a single night, that includes a world of reflections and a world of emotions, where being in this world means caring for the more-than-human because the humans inhabiting the space are sometimes unbearable and impossible to understand.Still, the loving care concerns also the humans, but not as superior subjects.Earthlove is, through our reading, a neurodivergent act of love and self-love.Reading it feels like love.Reading it makes us love the world.Anna Stenning offers a way of understanding neurodivergent ethics as a more inclusive morality than a neurotypical one. 33We read Earthlove as in line with this.It is because of their neurodivergence that the novel's I love like they do.
We read the praise for Ryan's novel as coming from an outsider, neurotypical, readership.Reading the neurodivergent acts of love as directed towards the neurotypical society necessarily reduces the novel's premises, acts, and stylistics.Ryan's way of writing is not 'humane', because its humanity should never be a topic in question.Of course, the novel is humanbut it is pushing the boundaries of this humanity, including politics, climate, plants, and animals in the human sphere of valuable things.This points to a special kind of ethics and a special kind of care.We read the book as radical because of the way it portrays the relationship between the I and its surroundings.
This article is written through a collective way of reading and writing.Starting with individual reading diaries, after sharing and commenting on our different experiences of the novel as expressed in the diaries, our readings and experiences of the novel were soon entangled in each other.Reading the novel with this method is an intimate and collective work.Sharing our feelings filtered through the novel has deepened our understanding of our ethical beings.We have read love as a radical act.Being neurodivergent means being put in a position where neurotypical people write about you and teach you about yourself.Therefore, putting oneself in a position of understanding, explaining, and experiencing in a neurodivergent togetherness means resisting the violence being done to you.That is a loving resistance.It is a radical care.Notes 1. Remi

I
'm going to lie down on the grass and roll in the mud.Fuck me.I lie on this lawn every day and it always feels different.(Ryan, A Room, 265) Tick, tock, tick, tock.(Ryan,ARoom, 35) It would have been rude to go, he said.It would've been rude.(Ryan,ARoom, 35) I'm very into gold, and I'm very into stars, and I'm very into things that are of value to other people.(Ryan,ARoom, 21)Lunging, and parlaying, and lunging, and parlaying (Ryan, A Room, 141)The shared giggle.I experience Earthlove as oscillating between some friendly joking with the neurodivergent reader.Like the author says, 'I know you will like this.I am giving this to you because I know it will make you smile, giggle, laugh, just as it made me smile, giggle, laugh when I wrote it.' (One of us) Yergeau, Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness (Duke University Press, 2018), 18. 2. Nick Walker, Neuroqueer Heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities (Autonomous Press, 2021).