Introduction Summary and Analysis

This chapter opens with author Temple Grandin being invited to a class reunion at her former school, Mountain Country School located in Vermont. She is a little surprised to be invited, because she knows full well how "bizarre" she has been as a child, how she "hit the other kids on the head." She remembers that she was truly bizarre, not talking until almost four years old but instead making strange noises such as "peeping" and "humming," as well as screaming. Although she grows up during a time when autism is not commonly known about, later she receives the diagnosis of autistic. She acknowledges that common wisdom is wrong, because she is an autistic that has changed her behavior. She asks how a child who is most likely to be institutionalized can make her way in the real world.

She defines...