Pierre Novellie’s Big Book of Hands

The Clearing with Katherine May

Host Katherine May interviews comedian Pierre Novellie to explore the intersection of neurodivergence, identity, and the search for rest. Th

Key takeaways

• Pierre Novellie discusses his autism diagnosis which was prompted by a heckler during a stand-up set.
• The removal of the term 'Asperger's' has created a communication gap between medical researchers and the general public.

Main topics

• Neurodivergent identity and late diagnosis
• The evolution of autism terminology

Notable quotes

It's sort of exposure therapy for rejection sensitivity, to be on honest.

Conclusion

A deeply empathetic exploration of how neurodivergent perspectives sha

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:08) Hello, this is Catherine May here. Welcome to the clearing. I am currently finding a little clearing in my day by doing a jigsaw. I don't think I'd have done it actually, but my son suggested it. He saw one in a Halloween display in the window. of our local shop and was like can we buy it and I mean I'm always looking for opportunities to hang out with him now that he's 14. You can hear the good box noise. I think other parents of teenagers might recognise that like you know used to do things together and now it's really hard to find stuff that he wants to do with me. Speaker 1 (0:59) somewhat heartbreakingly. So yeah, so I jumped at the chance. I was like, yeah, yeah, absolutely. We'll do a jigsaw. And I mean, of course, I'm now completely obsessed with it and I'm never going to get anything done again, right? It's on my dining table. It's in full view all the time. It can't be moved until it's done. Although in all fairness, I do have one of those kind of cool Speaker 1 (1:22) well, I'm using the term cool very expansively there. Cool to me, like big jigsaw folders that you can like make your jigsaw and then fold it up and move it so that you can actually move it off the table. But nevertheless, I'm sort of, I'm fully committed. And so it's on the dining table. We can't eat again. Sorry, that's it now, family, until the jigsaw's done. Anyway, I'm massively into it. It's a really good one. It's got like a, it's got an armchair in the foreground and some shelves with, I would say, kind of curios from around the world as if it's the sort of bookshelves of a global traveller. And there's a really good black cat on the chair that looks just like my cat, Bebe, which I think is why we both really wanted to do it. So yeah, so I am jigsawing today. While I'm talking to you, I hope you don't mind. Anyway, how are you? I hope you are very well indeed and you are taking some breaks in this extremely hectic world. September's always really busy for me. They seem to be the moment in the year. It's like everybody forgets I exist and I'm quite happy with that all through the summer. But in September, the world wakes up again. They're like, oh, wait. isn't there that woman who wrote a book about winter? We must get in contact with her. And just the, I don't know, it all just starts up and I start kind of feeling quite overwhelmed and having to say no to things and feeling guilty about it, which I must learn not to do, but there you go. That's how the world finds me. And just in general, everything feels quite a lot. And it's my birthday. this week as I record this, which is extremely exciting for me. I am still basically a child and look forward to these moments. So yeah, it's a lot. But one of the reasons why things are stepping up for me this year, which if you're on my social feeds, you may have noticed, but I'm going to let you know about this in case you're not, is that we have launched the covers of my latest book, which is coming out, well, next. March. I keep saying May. That's wrong. If you hear me say May, just ignore me. I can't do numbers and I can't do months, but there we go. That's just how it is. But yeah, if you haven't caught the news, do take a look either on my Instagram or on my Substack, which, you know, there's loads of which you can read for free, including this. And it's called Tending. And it is a book about caregiving, about taking care. I wrote it. just after the time when my husband had lung cancer, not the lung cancer, a lung cancer, as I keep saying. And, you know, I had to drop everything to look after him. And in the aftermath of that, I really, really wanted to talk about what it is to be a carer and what it means, because for me. A whole load of sort of assumptions dropped into my mind about what a good carer looks like and how I had to be very sort of saintly and self-sacrificing. And of course, they were, as many carers will jump up to tell me now, they were just impossible standards for me to follow. And I really had to sort of break myself before I could understand. Speaker 1 (5:12) what it actually is to give care and how it has to be integrated into normal life. Anyway, I sort of wanted to write a book about the inside of my head during a period of caring, like what the sort of mind of the carer looks and feels like, or of me as a carer, because of course that's one of the things about writing from life is that... It's not, it doesn't look exactly like everybody, but it does look like one person. And we can, as readers, generalise from that, but also... I relate, relate in loads of different ways. And I, yeah, that's, that's how I write. That's what I always do. I'm always looking for not the universal, but the specifics. And I often find that when I write about the specifics, that's when people relate to my work the most. So, yeah, do have a little look. We'll put some links in the bio so that you can. check it out and just read what I've written about writing, tending. And also you can have a look at the really beautiful covers, which are different for the US and the UK. They're always different. We kind of, I don't know. They don't, the sort of two territories don't quite match up in what they want and need. So I have these two really beautiful covers that I honestly could not tell you which is my favourite between the two of them. They're both absolutely gorgeous. And so, yeah, do have a look at those if you haven't already. Anyway, I'm not here to talk about that today or about jigsaws. I'm here to talk about this week's guest, which is the British, or who is? I'm sure he'd correct me. The British comedian, Piano Velli. Pierre is just, I mean, an absolutely hilarious person, obviously, as you would expect from a comedian. He's also autistic and he was diagnosed like me late in life, except he's kind of a bit more than 10 years younger than me. And so he's had a really different experience of learning he was autistic and sort of. coming out, if you will, as autistic in the world. And I was really curious to talk to him about that after reading his book, which is called Why Can't You Just Enjoy Things? It's a kind of, like in many ways, a very practical guide to understanding autism. And of course, as he's like very keen to own. Every autistic person is different and so there is no one way of kind of explaining or making sense of autism or understanding what autistic people need. But it's really important that lots of different people talk about exactly what their experience is of being autistic because there's always something that we learn from it, either by understanding that we're different to that or thinking, yes, I'm exactly the same as that. Nobody else has ever said this before. I just think the cultural moment we're having around autism is so, so important. And so having admired his Radio 4 show, which you can check out on BBC Sounds, which is absolutely hilarious, and having also been to see him in Edinburgh this year, I really wanted to get a conversation with Pierre and I think you're going to really, really enjoy it. It, for me, helped me to think, about other autistic people I know as well as myself but we also talk about what it's like being a sort of representative of autism out in the world which can be as you can imagine particularly in this wonderful age of delightful online communication quite a challenging thing to talk about and quite a challenging way to present yourself out in the world. So I commend the conversation to you and I hope you very much enjoy it. Pierre also offers us a sort of very characteristic vision of rest that I think many, many people will think, oh, Speaker 2 (9:27) yes, yes, please. Speaker 1 (9:29) Anyway, I'll leave you to have a listen. Take care. Speaker 2 (9:34) Hi, Pierre. Speaker 1 (9:35) Welcome to The Clearing. Speaker 2 (9:36) Hi, thank you for having me. Speaker 1 (9:38) It's lovely to have you. I was just saying that I had a very embarrassing situation with you a couple of weeks ago when after booking you for the podcast, I found myself sitting next to you in a cafe and didn't know whether to say hello or not. Speaker 2 (9:49) I don't think it was embarrassing. I think it was serendipitous and quite cool. I was very pleased. I like that kind of thing. I think that kind of thing probably happens more than we think. Speaker 1 (10:00) I think so. I mean, I... I think I got all up in my head because I recognized your voice, but I'm so terrible at faces. And I was like, oh, I think it's him. But is it enough to recognize someone speaking? Was Speaker 2 (10:11) it Speaker 1 (10:11) by voice? Speaker 2 (10:12) That's cool. By voice, Speaker 1 (10:13) yeah. Oh, that's Speaker 2 (10:14) cool. Speaker 1 (10:14) You have got quite a distinctive voice, haven't you? Speaker 2 (10:17) Do you think? That's the first time that's happened to me, though, by voice. Speaker 1 (10:21) I can only recognize people by voice and by the movement of their face rather than the features of their face. So everyone's... face has like a distinctive way of, I don't know, holding itself. And particularly when people are speaking, like mouths are very, very distinctive. There's a very distinct pattern to everyone's like lips, essentially. Speaker 2 (10:43) They can tell. Speaker 2 (10:46) I think it's fully ethnically Japanese people who grew up speaking Portuguese instead of Japanese have different facial structure to people who grew up speaking Japanese. Speaker 1 (10:55) Really? Yeah, that doesn't surprise me at all. Speaker 2 (10:57) Yeah, even though it's not like a kind of bone structure difference across ethnicities. It's the same ethnicity, but yeah, just different muscles. Musculature. Speaker 1 (11:04) Yeah. I mean, you can always tell a French speaker, for example, I think, by the way their mouths move. Like, you know, that's very distinctive to me. They Speaker 2 (11:14) drop down a bit. Speaker 1 (11:15) Yeah, but also like quite a relaxed top lip. Speaker 2 (11:19) Yeah. And Speaker 1 (11:22) when I try and speak French, I also relax my top lip just to, you know, just for the authenticity. Speaker 2 (11:28) Yes, do you know the thing about the Russians and their tongue? Speaker 1 (11:31) No. Speaker 2 (11:32) It's the only European language group where their tongue rests in the basin of their lower jaw. It doesn't suction to their mouth roof at rest like ours does. Speaker 1 (11:44) And it makes Speaker 2 (11:45) sense if you leave it in the basin of your jaw and you try to say, you know, like other sort of Russian sounds. I think it fits. Speaker 1 (11:55) It does. It does. And then also you get that chin movement that I would think, oh, yeah, you looked quite Russian then. Yeah. Speaker 2 (12:02) This Speaker 1 (12:02) is the point where my son would tell me I'm being racist, so I probably better stop. I don't know. Speaker 2 (12:06) No, that's at worst xenophobic. They're not a different race, the Russians, and race is made up anyway. It's Speaker 1 (12:13) fine. Good. Well, it is lovely to have you here. I am essentially investigating with this podcast. not just the rest that people dream of taking, but the rest they actually take. And I think that creative people, and we always interview loads of neurodivergent people on this podcast too, have a weird relationship to rest. I think we find it very hard to do, but I'm curious as to whether that applies to you. Are you someone that is able to take a break or even wants to? Speaker 2 (12:47) I'm not very good at taking a break. I'm not good at going on holiday. Speaker 1 (12:52) So would you ever go on holiday if nobody else wanted to go with you? Speaker 2 (12:58) Probably not. There would always be like a reason. Yeah. If you're counting a holiday as something where you set it up, you're going because you want to go. Speaker 1 (13:11) Yeah. Speaker 2 (13:12) Then I didn't go on a holiday until. Speaker 2 (13:18) Like from during uni all the way through till when I was 29, maybe. Speaker 1 (13:24) Wow. Okay. Speaker 2 (13:25) I went on a couple of stag do's and I went to go see my family in South Africa. Stag do's are not fun. They can vary. No, I didn't go on holiday. I was gigging. I was trying to do stand-up, you know. And that made it harder being freelance where you go, oh, I lose money if I go away. I'm not around. Yeah. I'm not very good at it. No. Speaker 1 (13:49) So how are you going to find imagining a sort of dream retreat from the world? Is that going to be unappealing? Speaker 2 (13:58) No, it's incredibly appealing is the strange thing. I just, I can't quite. Speaker 2 (14:05) picture the parameters I can't quite make it fit as a realistic idea that's the part that's difficult I think but I want to I mean I actively would like to but the trouble is I all the versions of it where I imagine doing it still involve me doing things yeah Speaker 1 (14:21) yeah that's fine I mean I well it'll be your book's called why can't I just enjoy things which seems very pertinent to the conversation but And it's about your experience of like learning you're autistic as an adult after being basically called out by a heckler on stage, which I think is marvellous. I do think the kind of adult diagnosed autistics quite often recruit quite aggressively, like you're one and you're one and you're one. Speaker 2 (14:49) Yeah, I've bitten a few people. Speaker 1 (14:51) Have you? Yeah, it is. I mean, it's maybe not vampiric, but it's interesting, isn't it, that you... I don't know, you learn to see a certain set of needs and behaviors, I think. And it is a bit like a new lens being put over the world. And you suddenly like, oh, I see why I get on with the people that are closest to me. That was one of the things for me. The Speaker 2 (15:14) social clustering. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, Speaker 1 (15:16) definitely. But that. That makes me wonder about autistic people in particular and holidays, because I do think that we, or breaks altogether, like I do think we struggle with, you know, all of the things like newness and like not knowing what the hotel is going to smell like and different pillows and all of that kind of stuff. But also, I mean, what would normally be called breaks from routine, but I'm not sure that's what bothers me so much. It's more like... not being able to do my stuff that I love to do every day. You know, I'm not sure that a break from my work seems all that appealing to me. Yeah. Speaker 2 (16:01) Well, then again, I say that, but I'm very good at doing nothing if by doing nothing we include video games and scrolling and just kind of lying down and sleeping. I mean... Sleeping Speaker 1 (16:14) is good. Speaker 2 (16:15) Yeah, reading. But there always has to be something intense going on to distract my brain. It's like a constantly chewing mouth. It just needs either food or gum, but it needs something. Speaker 1 (16:28) Yeah, no, I do know what you mean. I mean, I think boredom is one of our defining experiences, actually. Speaker 2 (16:33) Yeah. Speaker 1 (16:35) constant roaming boredom unless I'm completely occupied by something and the need to be like deep into something for a lot of my day if I'm going to be awake I would like to be asleep quite a lot as well yes but Speaker 2 (16:50) if awake then yeah something has to be sort of happening ideally yeah Speaker 1 (16:54) and also those those deep interests too that I mean you are a massive history buff nerd geek I don't know what you'd enthusiast Speaker 2 (17:04) nerd yeah yeah Speaker 1 (17:06) i'm not sure what the lines are between those things i Speaker 2 (17:10) think there is a dork is someone who is as unpopular and socially awkward as a nerd but doesn't have the accompanying academic excellence interesting Speaker 1 (17:19) and dork initially was slang for vagina ah Speaker 2 (17:22) i Speaker 1 (17:23) think Speaker 2 (17:24) everything starts that way yeah Speaker 1 (17:25) yes that is the key insult we like to throw around um you know i just wondered how much that is a need in your everyday life though this kind of contact with the sort of historical data and detail yes Speaker 2 (17:38) yeah Speaker 1 (17:39) absolutely Speaker 2 (17:39) yeah i i can't really enjoy i i have to know about the history of if somewhere i visit or go yeah i can't be contextless i i Speaker 1 (17:48) i cannot believe people Speaker 2 (17:50) who are willing to go i i've heard of people who go on holiday to the same town every year for 10 years and they don't know anything about the town, the history of the town. And I can't... It's almost