51 pages • 1 hour read
John Elder RobisonLook Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger’s
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 4-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “A Trickster Is Born”
As he gets older, Robison develops a new coping mechanism: humor. He becomes the class clown because his peers “laughed with me, not at me” (35). He is also a voracious reader, and he retains much of what he reads. Adults begin to view him with respect, almost seeing him as a kind of prodigy. He discovers he can use this respect as a ploy. He begins concocting elaborate lies to fool his family, seeing each successful con job as an excuse to take the next one a step further. He starts innocently: pointing to a star in the night sky and telling his grandfather, “And that one there, that’s Bovinius, the Cow Star” (36). He’s earned a degree of trust because of his studious habits, and he finds that adults usually take him at his word.
Over time the pranks become more elaborate. While at a petting zoo with his younger brother, Robison convinces him to hide from their mother while she’s in the bathroom. When she returns and asks, “John Elder, where is your brother?” (37), he feigns ignorance and eventually makes up a story about his brother going off with a fictional person named Paul. Panicked, his mother calls the police. Only then does Robison own up to his prank. Rather than feel guilt over his mother’s panic, he views his trick as “successful” because she believed the lie.
He also takes revenge on a teacher by ordering pornographic material in his name and by arranging for “two loads of crushed stone” (41) to be dumped in his driveway.
Chapter 5 Summary: “I Find a Porsche”
Chapter 5 describes Robison’s burgeoning relationship with cars. When Robison is 11, his father becomes a tenured professor, and the family moves to Shutesbury, Massachusetts, population 273. Their new house, one of only five in that area, borders woods and hills. He befriends a neighbor one year older, Ken, and together they explore the woods and paths that run through Shutesbury (including some restricted areas). One day Robison discovers an abandoned Porsche without an engine. He is familiar with many makes and models of cars from reading Hot Rod and Road and Track magazines. Ken theorizes that the car was left there by the police to lure potential car thieves. Robison fantasizes about driving it at Le Mans Raceway. The city tows it away a few days later, but therein begins Robison’s love affair with Porsches.
Several years later, when he is old enough to drive, Robison visits his grandparents in Georgia. His grandfather buys a Porsche at an estate sale in Alabama and wants his grandson to drive it back with him. By now, Robison knows all the Porsche models and engine types. He hopes his grandfather will eventually tire of the car and give it to him (he instead gives it to Robison’s uncle, who crashes it into a tree).
Over the years Robison owns 17 Porsches. He buys them used, fixes them, and resells them. He begins to see himself as “a craftsman. An artist working in automotive steel” (49).
Chapter 6 Summary: “The Nightmare Years”
After Robison’s family moves to Shutesbury, his father’s drinking becomes chronic, and he verbally and physically abuses his son, even slamming him into the wall and cracking the plaster. Robison remembers the smell of alcohol and his father beating him with a belt. He watches his father extinguish a cigarette on his brother’s forehead. He fantasizes about killing his father. Despite the chaos at home, Robison excels at school. He wins several academic awards, and his father tells him he’s proud. His behavior swings erratically from abusive to affectionate, and his health also begins to fail. He suffers from psoriasis and arthritis. He is only 35.
Around this time, Robison’s mother begins having psychotic episodes. She hallucinates, seeing demons and ghosts. She tells her son that his father wants to kill them. The family seeks therapy from Dr. Finch (not his real name), an odd and unconventional psychiatrist. He tells Robison that he is allowed to call his parents anything he likes, and that his father is forbidden from hitting his children (he stops beating them after that). Robison calls his parents “Slave” (mother) and “Stupid” (father). He distrusts Dr. Finch, but he is the first therapist Robison’s had a positive experience with.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Assembly Required”
For his 13th Christmas, Robison’s parents give him a Radio Shack electronics kit (assembly required). He figures out the complicated assembly procedure by reading books. He becomes fascinated with how things work, and, while still in junior high, he aces high school Electronics I and II. His mother’s friend then introduces him to an electrical engineering professor at the University of Massachusetts, and the engineering staff there “adopts” him. He spends most of his free days on the UMass campus and studies electronics at night. He disassembles old radios at home, and his father, whom he distinguishes between daytime father (nice and helpful) and nighttime father (ugly), builds him a workshop in the basement.
As self-sufficient as he becomes, Robison still has trouble understanding electronics theory as explained in the textbooks. He soon solves that problem by combining his dual interests in electronics and music. While he doesn’t have much musical talent, he finds a niche modifying amplifiers. He begins servicing and repairing equipment for musicians, and he discovers he has an aptitude for translating musicians’ musical requirements into the appropriate electronic language. He describes his process of creative visualization, which allows him to “see” the “complex calculus functions that describe the behavior of electronic circuits in time” (65). He hangs out at clubs and befriends local musicians. They respect him, and he finds that many of them are “misfits” too. He feels he is fitting in, which gives him great solace as his father’s drinking worsens and he suffers from depression. To make matters worse, his mother has a “psychotic break,” disappears for a few days, and finally returns after Dr. Finch medicates her.
Robison works in the audio-visual department at school, fixing old record players and tape decks. There he meets Mary Trompke, whom he calls “Little Bear” and who is also a “shy, damaged kid” (67). She eventually becomes his first wife. They work together in the AV lab, and he walks her home from school. He is “smitten” with her, but he can’t tell her how he feels.
Chapters 4-7 Analysis
As Robison reaches adolescence, his social skills improve, although not consistently. He still describes his teenage self as “dirty, loud, vulgar” (67). While he does make friends, his ability to relate to them is still tenuous. He does, however, become remarkably self-sufficient, a product of living in his own mind for so long. In these chapters Robison describes some of the foundational experiences that shape the man he eventually becomes.
After struggling to make friends in his early years, he overcomes that obstacle well enough to move on to other challenges. He discovers an enduring love of cars—Porsches, specifically—and his fascination with electronics. To an outside observer, Robison’s ability to look at an assemblage of tubes, wires, transistors, and circuits, and understand how they work may seem mysterious and savant-like, but Robison takes the reader into the complexities of his mind to make those mental processes accessible.
He is fortunate to make these self-discoveries because they become a necessary refuge from increasing turmoil at home. Chapter 6 details frightening physical and emotional abuse at the hands of his father, and the only asylum he finds is an inward retreat into his own mind. This trauma gives rise to some particularly dark speculations. Marveling that his younger brother survived the abuse at such a young age, he ponders the fate of other boys not so fortunate: “He [Christopher] could easily have ended his days with a little squeal, in a furnace or an unmarked hole in the ground. I’m sure quite a few unwanted three-year-olds end up that way” (52). It’s doubtful that such morose thoughts would arise from a happy childhood, and perhaps Robison’s emotional disconnect gives him the freedom to articulate these kinds of thoughts.
Robison’s journey from “misfit” to functional society member is a work in progress. While the path is often rocky—hindered by his cognitive differences as well as abuse at home—he is a quick learner; while his learning process is largely trial and error, it works for him. The title of Chapter 7, “Assembly Required,” is an apt metaphor for Robison’s life. As he learns to dissect and modify steel and electronic machines, he is doing the same with his own brain, the most complex machine of all.
