/lit/ - Literature

>>19808621
Severe female Jewish autism. No one could have saved her, nothing could be done.

>>16605318
What went wrong?

>In middle school she found herself uncharacteristically intrigued by another student, a seemingly intelligent girl who was also popular—a contradiction in the Rand cosmology. Hoping to solve the mystery, and possibly even make a friend, Rand approached her. “Would you tell me what is the most important thing in life to you?” she asked, showing once again her flair for smooth opening lines. “My mother,” the girl answered. Rand turned away, disgusted. As an adult, she called this exchange “the first most important event in my life socially” and analyzed it as follows: “I had thought she was a serious girl and that she was after serious things, but she was just conventional and ordinary, a mediocrity, and she didn’t mean anything as a person.”

>>15313160
Ayn Rand

>As a child, she was solitary, opinionated, possessive, and intense—a willful and brilliant loner with literally zero friends. At 9, she decided to become a writer; by 11 she’d written four novels, each of which revolved around a heroine exactly her age but blonde, blue-eyed, tall, and leggy. (Rand was—by her own standards—unheroically dark, short, and square.) At 13, she declared herself an atheist. It’s hard not to suspect, based on many of these childhood anecdotes, that Rand suffered from some kind of undiagnosed personality disorder. Once, when a teacher asked her to write an essay about the joys of childhood, she wrote a diatribe condemning childhood as a cognitive wasteland—a joyless limbo in which adult rationality had yet to fully develop. (It was possibly a good thing that she never had children.) In middle school she found herself uncharacteristically intrigued by another student, a seemingly intelligent girl who was also popular—a contradiction in the Rand cosmology. Hoping to solve the mystery, and possibly even make a friend, Rand approached her. “Would you tell me what is the most important thing in life to you?” she asked, showing once again her flair for smooth opening lines. “My mother,” the girl answered. Rand turned away, disgusted. As an adult, she called this exchange “the first most important event in my life socially” and analyzed it as follows: “I had thought she was a serious girl and that she was after serious things, but she was just conventional and ordinary, a mediocrity, and she didn’t mean anything as a person.”