“…Insights from a time when a young person with autism grew up in a world where nobody understood them!” – Temple Grandin, author, Thinking in Pictures

Barbara Moran has never known how to be good.

As a child, she made strange noises, fidgeted constantly, and licked her lips until they cracked. She had “upsets” that embarrassed and frustrated her family. Worse still, she developed friendships with inanimate objects―everything from roller skates to tables to an antique refrigerator―and became obsessed with images of cathedrals.

She was institutionalized, analyzed, and marginalized, cast aside as not trying hard enough to fit in.

But after almost forty years, Barbara was given an answer for her inability to be like, and to connect with, other people: autism.

Hello, Stranger is the story of a misunderstood life that serves as an eye-opening call for compassion. Bracingly honest, Barbara describes the profound loneliness of being abandoned and judged while also expressing her deep yearning simply to be loved and to give love.

Hello, Stranger is a challenge to every reader to see the beauty and the humanity present in every individual.

About the Author

Barbara Moran is a graphic artist from Topeka, Kansas, who was diagnosed with autism in her early 40s. She has spoken at a variety of conferences about autism, and her artwork has been exhibited through Visionaries + Voices, Bryn Mawr's annual Art Ability show, and the MIND Institute at the University of California-Davis. Moran's art often focuses on objects such as locomotives, stoplights, and cathedrals. She shares her home with her companion of 40 years, Rooney, a 1934 Monitor Top GE refrigerator.

Karl Williams writes songs, books, stories, and poems of all kinds and is particularly passionate about the self-advocacy movement―the civil rights work of people with cognitive disabilities. His previous books are Lost in a Desert World: The Autobiography of Roland Johnson and If Your Dreams Are Big Enough, the Facts Don't Count!: The Michael S. Long Story. Learn more about him at KarlWilliams.com.

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