In Brief
- Voice: Mark Deakins stands in for the author across nine hours of a memoir about failing to hold a gaze, and not one reviewer weighs the substitution.
- Big ideas: growing up before the diagnosis existed, two brothers eight years apart, radios and dark comedy, a life spent being misread.
- Atmosphere: Wry, unsentimental, intermittently alarming.
- Worth it?: Strong enough to outlive its own 2007 vocabulary, though the page tells you nothing about the reading you would be buying.
Karen Vitantonio opens a review of this audiobook by writing the title out in full: "Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's was written by John Elder Robison and was published in 2007." That subtitle is exactly the part the listing itself leaves off. The title field on this page says Look Me in the Eye and stops, which converts a memoir with a stated subject into a phrase that could belong to almost anything. A reader in the comments has quietly done the cataloging the page skipped.
The Label He Collected Was Social Deviant
John Elder Robison was three or four years old when he worked out that he was not like other people. He could not make eye contact or connect with other children. By his teens the habits had piled up: blurting out non-sequiturs, obsessively dismantling radios, digging five-foot holes and depositing his younger brother in them. The label he collected for all of that was "social deviant." At home, the description adds without pausing over it, his mother conversed with light fixtures and his father spent his evenings pickling himself in sherry.
Asperger's syndrome is the frame the book puts around that childhood, and the copy is careful about the chronology: this was a diagnosis that "simply didn't exist" while Robison was growing up. So the memoir performs two jobs at once. It narrates a life, and it retrofits an explanation onto a life that was lived without one. The reviewers respond to the second job more than the first. B. Case, who had been following the syndrome for over fifteen years, describes finding academic colleagues in its pages.
Not One Syllable About the Voice
Mark Deakins reads it, and that is the choice worth pausing over. This is a first-person memoir whose subject is substantially the mechanics of speech and social signaling: the non-sequiturs, the gaze that will not hold, the wiring other people file as rudeness. Handing all of that to a professional actor rather than to the man it happened to is a defensible decision and a consequential one. Five reviews, four countries, seventeen years of accumulated enthusiasm, and not one syllable about the voice.
The Brother Who Became Augusten Burroughs
Robison's other credential is a family one. The two brothers were born eight years apart and were devoted to each other, and the younger of them, called Chris in the description, grew up to become the bestselling author Augusten Burroughs. Rose Balvins, reviewing from Australia, makes the link explicit and points out that the dysfunctional household is already known in detail from the other brother's autobiography. Two accounts of one childhood, written from two different positions inside it, is a rare thing for a reader to have.
Bought on a whim, Rose Balvins says, and that is more or less how this book travels. It is not a clinical text and never pretends to be one. The description promises a fusion of inspiration, dark comedy and insight into the workings of the human mind, and the dark comedy is load-bearing rather than decorative: the five-foot holes, the light fixtures and the sherry all land somewhere between horror and farce. Victoria moore, writing in from Germany, says the book explained after the fact a great deal that had gone unrecognized at the time.
Nine hours and sixteen minutes is short for a memoir with this much incident in it, and the compression is part of why it moves. Random House Audio issued the recording on September 25, 2007, the same year as the print edition Karen Vitantonio cites, so this is a first-wave production rather than a reissue chasing a later surge of interest. B. Case's review landed five weeks after that release date, which makes it one of the few responses here that plausibly belongs to the edition it sits beneath.
Two Stars Short of a Clean Sweep
Four votes support the 4.5 badge, and that particular pairing happens to be unusually informative. Four whole-star ballots averaging 4.5 have to add up to exactly eighteen points out of a possible twenty, which puts the book two stars short of a clean sweep, however those two stars are distributed among the four. It is a small verifiable fact, and it is more than most rating displays let you establish. It also describes enthusiasm that is close to unanimous and very thinly sampled at the same time.
Two decades have gone by since publication, and the vocabulary on this page is visibly of its moment. The description calls Asperger's syndrome "a form of autism." The listing tag reads People with Disabilities. The reviewers reach variously for the autism spectrum, for Aspergian, for Aspergians, and B. Case for colleagues who were "brilliant, but decidedly weird." Those are four different registers, and a listener arriving now will hear a book describing itself in terms that have shifted since it was written.
Rose Balvins bought the ebook. Karen Vitantonio read it for a Special Education course. Victoria moore read it in Germany, and Fernando Brondani wrote in from Brazil in a language that is not the one this recording uses. Four countries, responses dated from 2007 through to 2024, and a column assessing a text rather than a performance throughout. The stars are genuine. Guidance about whether this specific nine-hour reading will suit you is simply not on the page.
Wrong If You Need the Author's Own Voice
Memoir listeners who want an interior account rather than an advocacy argument should take this one seriously. So is anybody who works alongside, teaches, or is related to someone this book would describe, which is precisely the seat B. Case, Karen Vitantonio and Victoria moore are all writing from. And anyone who arrived through Augusten Burroughs will get the other half of that household, complete with the light fixtures and the sherry viewed from a second angle. Reading the two accounts back to back is the sort of thing that changes what you think you knew about both.
This is not the right entry point if you want current clinical language or a survey of autism as it is understood today, because it is one life, told from inside, in the terms available in 2007. It is also wrong for listeners who need an author's own voice to trust a memoir, since a professional reader stands in throughout. Come for the childhood, the radios and the brother. Mark Deakins gets nine hours to voice someone who spent decades being misread, and that tension is the reason to press play.
Who narrates the Look Me in the Eye audiobook?
Mark Deakins, the only reader credited on the listing. Robison does not perform his own memoir here, which is worth knowing for a first-person book whose subject includes speech patterns, eye contact and the way other people misread the person speaking. No review on the page comments on the reading in either direction.
How long is the Look Me in the Eye audiobook?
Nine hours and sixteen minutes, issued by Random House Audio on September 25, 2007, the same year the print edition appeared. The listing carries no abridgment statement. That is a compact running time for a memoir spanning early childhood through adulthood, and the compression is a large part of why it moves.
Is the subtitle missing from this listing?
It seems to be. The title field reads Look Me in the Eye and nothing further, while Karen Vitantonio's review supplies the full form, Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's. Without that second half, the title tells a browser nothing about the subject, which is odd for a memoir this specific.
