Somebody Somewhere

Somebody Somewhere is the second book in Donna Williams’ four-part autobiographical series. Donna takes up her story in 1994, in a world where most people don’t yet have email or Internet and the undiagnosed adults on the Autistic Spectrum born in the 1960s and earlier still don’t know that others with the condition exist, often believing they are the only ones in the entire world.

After a life of abuse, domestic prostitution, homelessness and poverty, Donna Williams has made her way back to Australia and finally found the answer to ‘what kind of mad’ she is. The words of her childhood – deaf, psychotic, disturbed – now get swept aside with a formal diagnosis of autism as she stumbles upon and enters into therapy with an eccentric and innovative psychologist, Theo Marek. They try to understand each other with astoundingly different language, concepts, realities and ‘normality’, viewing each other as one might view an alien. Having finally discovered the population she has been kept from all her life, Donna develops a small town dream and determines, with her IQ of under 70, to become a teacher, and change and advance the world of developmental disabilities, special education and beyond.

However, the manuscript of her first book, Nobody Nowhere, remains in a tea chest in England, a copy of it left with a stranger who, unknown to her, has forwarded it on to a literary agent. The book Donna wrote only for herself, filled with darkness and shame and surreal idiosyncrasy of her previously undiagnosed autistic world, is set to become an international bestseller and propel the woman terrified of being ‘known’ out of the shadows and straight into the limelight as one of the most famous people ever diagnosed with autism in the world.