THE ELECTRICITY OF EVERY LIVING THING

A vital chronicle of a rocky journey.

In 2015, nearly 38, English essayist and fiction writer May decided to walk the “difficult, craggy and bloody-minded” South West Coast Path in England, a 630-mile trek. Sometimes accompanied by her husband, their toddler son, or a friend, she aimed to cover 25 miles per month for 18 months, spending nights at home. The trip, she hoped, would allow an escape from daily constraints, a space for her mind to soar, and also a chance to make sense of herself. (In this vein, readers may recall Raynor Winn’s 2019 book, The Salt Path.) In her candid, intimate memoir, May recounts two challenging journeys: one, a physical crossing of rugged terrain; the other, a sensitive probing into the reality of an atypical mind. Hypersensitive to noise, crowds, and “unruly movement,” May has always been beset by a sense that people “carry electricity,” transmitting “a current that surges around my body until I’m exhausted.” She sees the world as if “through a fairground mirror, where the signals get warped and mangled so that they’re sickening.” Feeling she was different, even as a child, she “watched, carefully, the way that other people behaved, and mimicked it precisely.” She was “addicted to passing,” and she found relief when she was alone on the trail. “Perhaps walking,” she thinks, “is the only place where I don’t have to pass.” Her efforts “to construct an acceptable personality,” though, left her feeling disconnected from her “real self.” Then one day, three months into her journey, listening to a radio talk about symptoms of Asperger’s, May felt a shock of recognition—and an explanation for the behaviors and emotions that had long confused and troubled her. “The truth is,” she writes, “that the label of ASD helps me to make a better account of myself, and to finally find a mirror in which I can recognise my own face.”

A graceful memoir of startling self-discovery.