The Outside in View of Uncommon Bostonian

A book that shows the blog posts, essays, and art of an autistic Black woman that reveals in an unconventional memoir. It also reveals her personal struggles with employment and emotional abuse (bullying at school and her own family).

The Outside In View of Uncommon Bostonian: What an Autistic Black Woman Sees is the creative non-fiction book that shows the writings and art of Yvonne Christian, a Black woman who was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome in 2002. A few years after her diagnosis, she became a volunteer blogger of a daily newspaper that often published her posts in their printed editions. Unfortunately, the newspaper folded after their investors decided not to keep it going. Then, Yvonne decided to put all her blog posts in a book with her essays and paintings. The result displays her talents as a writer and artist as well as telling her story about her struggles with employment and emotional abuse. It also shows her love of pop culture.

Yvonne Christian was born in Washington, DC, in the mid-1960s and grew up in suburban Maryland, just outside of our nation’s capital. After attending public school, she moved to Boston, Massachusetts, to attend college at Emerson in 1982 for the next four years. When she graduated, Yvonne opted to live in Boston as a disc jockey, which lasted only a few months before the radio station was shut down. Afterward, she became a temp and then a cashier at the legendary Filene’s Basement for several months in 1987 before joining the Internal Revenue Service as a telephone representative. In 2000, she quit the IRS and became a temp for several years before finding a permanent job in the financial industry in 2004. In 2002, she was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome and nonverbal learning disorder. In July 2005, a few weeks after she learned that she also has sleep apnea (a sleep disorder), she started her first blog, Outside In, where she started using the pen name Uncommon Bostonian. In August 2007, she became a volunteer blogger at the Boston Now newspaper and named her newspaper blog after her pen name, Uncommon Bostonian. Unfortunately, the Boston Now newspaper ended in April 2008. In December 2008, Yvonne joined a writers group called Writers Anonymous that later published a book called Seven at the Sevens (seven word memoirs written under their pen names). Later, she submitted her writing and artwork along with that of other autistic persons of color writers for the All the Weight of Our Dreams: On Living Racialized Autism, which will be published in 2016.