Posted January 31, 2025 by Alice Wong Guest Blog Posts

Rain Man for Millennials and Other Adventures in Ableism with Sally Rooney

Aisling Walsh

Rain Man, the 1988 hit movie directed by Barry Levinson, brought autism into the media mainstream for the first time ever. The movie stars Tom Cruise, at peak post-Top Gun fame, and Dustin Hoffman as two estranged brothers, Charlie and Raymond Babbitt, who are brought together following the death of their father. Charlie finds Raymond, his older autistic brother, at the psychiatric institution where he has spent most of his adult life. Charlie abducts Raymond, drives him cross country and then uses his prodigal math skills to win a lot of money in Vegas, while learning some important life lessons along the way.

Rain Man set an enduring stereotype of autism as the white, male savant and math genius who also experiences extreme social awkwardness that has, in the preceding 36 years, been incredibly hard to shift. Since then, we have had offerings like The Curious Incident of the Dog and the Night Time, Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory and the Good Doctor, to further reinforce this stereotype. And now we have Sally Rooney’s 2024 bestseller Intermezzo.

Published last September with unprecedented fanfare for a literary fiction novel, Intermezzo follows the parallel narratives of two estranged brothers brought together following the death of their father. Oh wait, doesn’t that sound just a little too familiar?

Rooney, whether consciously or not, has taken the basic premise of Rain Man and transposed it into a contemporary Irish setting where the brothers’ ages are inverted. Ivan, the supposed autistic, is 22 and a socially awkward, but extremely clever, chess master. His brother Peter, 32, is a charismatic human rights lawyer, rather than a second hand car dealer, and extremely popular with women. Instead of a road trip to Vegas where the brothers engage in high-stakes blackjack, we get a few jaunts on public transport into the Irish midlands for some low-stakes chess tournaments.

As Ivan and Peter navigate their relationship with each other in the aftermath of their loss, we meet the women who, literally and metaphorically, hold their hands through their grief. We soon discover that Peter’s situationship with two women, Naomi and Sylvia, is largely propelled by Sylvia’s unnamed and unspecified physical affliction and chronic pain which mean she is incapable of penetrative sex.

I’m neither a Rooney devotee nor a hater. I’m a skeptic who has, for the last three novels, mostly been watching from the sidelines. As a recently diagnosed autistic woman, who also lives with multiple chronic illnesses, the time had come to finally dip my toe in the Rooney waters.

We are only a few pages into Intermezzo when Rooney drops the A-bomb. I’m, of course, referring to autistic rather than atomic:

Peter – Yeah, he’s a complete oddball. Really not your type. I think he’s kind of autistic, although I guess you can’t say that now.

Naomi – You can, if he actually is.

This character assessment is based on Ivan’s apparent social awkwardness and difficulties interacting with women. We are later told that a formal diagnosis has, for unexplained reasons, never been forthcoming. With this non-diagnosis positioned from the very outset of the novel, Ivan’s potential neurodivergence becomes the lens with which we judge all his behaviour. And once positioned, Rooney leaves many crumbs along the way to support that bias.

Taking things too literally? Check! Problems regulating eye contact? Check! Sensory sensitivities? Check! Lack of empathy? Check! Problems making and sustaining relationships? Check! Monotone voice? Check! Intense special interests? Check!

The narrative emphasis on his logical mind, “unusual” thought patterns, ruminations and over-analysis of social situations as well as Ivan’s info-dumping in long monologues, are so heavy handed, that they feel like they could have been written to fit clinical descriptions of autism. Ivan has other experiences that set him apart from characters like Raymond Babbitt or Sheldon Cooper, such as the fact that he has never been institutionalised, he has lots of friends within and outside of the chess world and he falls seamlessly into a relationship with an older woman with whom he always seems to know what to do and say in and out of bed.

In trying to figure out what is going on with Ivan, I wondered if Rooney is trying to challenge autistic stereotypes by showing us that a Rain Man like character can also fuck and have friends? If this is the case, she could have dumped the Rain Man stereotype altogether and given us something completely different. The idea that autistic people must be somehow exceptional – math or chess geniuses – in order to find acceptance is as damaging as the continued predominance of the white, male, savant stereotype. This actively prevents many people who do not fit these categories from getting a diagnosis. Women, people of colour, gender nonconforming and queer people, are regularly told by clinicians that they don’t look autistic (eg. white, male, young) enough or “can make eye contact”, “have friends” or “have a job”, and so can’t be autistic. These are the main reason I never even considered I might be autistic until I turned 37!

I can also see how Rooney might want the reader to question what we perceive as “normal” or “abnormal” in terms of human behaviour, social norms and expectations or the utility of labels to categorise individuals. But, if this is the case, she could have left out the A-bomb to begin with. As a 22 year old, cis-hetero, white, male who went to school and university in the 2010s/2020s, Ivan is among a cohort of people that are most likely to receive an early diagnosis, especially if there is the slightest suspicion from family or school that he might be autistic.

The endless speculation about Ivan’s neurotype, in the absence of a diagnosis, feels as if Rooney is happy to play with the idea of labels and perceptions of normality without ever having to commit herself to grappling with the complexities and diversity of the neurodivergent experience, especially the experience of self-diagnosis which is valid when so many do not have the resources for a medical diagnosis. Ivan’s girlfriend remarks that “the problems you’re talking about – feeling left out, and thinking people don’t like you. Those aren’t serious problems at your age, even if they feel that way.” This feels like the kind of gaslighting neurodivergent people encounter all their lives when our social struggles are minimised or we encounter comments like “well we’re all a little bit on the spectrum, aren’t we?” This approach treats autism as a collection of readily identifiable “traits” or “symptoms” rather than a way of thinking-being-existing in the world that diverges from the accepted norm.

Ivan seems to reach an uneasy acceptance of himself and his unusual brain by the end of the narrative accompanied by a marked passivity regarding his non-diagnosis:.

“They look at him as a weird unnerving person, in need of some explanatory neurological or cognitive diagnosis, which for some reason never seemed to be forthcoming. But he does not have to look at himself in that same way. And with the sense that, on the contrary, there is nothing really wrong with him (…) He even begins to suspect that he might be the normal one.”

And it’s true, not everyone wants a neurodivergent diagnosis nor feels the need to align themselves with a specific identity. But, many adults do feel compelled to actively seek out a diagnosis or self-identify because knowing and understanding how your brain and body work, when these are different to the majority, is an incredibly empowering experience. More importantly, it can open access to information, support, workplace accommodations, and community which can be vital for navigating the demands of a neurotypical world.

The ambiguity around Ivan’s neurotype, rather than questioning the utility or otherwise of labels, invites readers and critics alike to project a multitude of erroneous and outdated stereotypes of autism onto Ivan, and ultimately decide whether they believe his character is sufficiently autistic or not. Ivan’s gradual “adjustment” to the world around him belies the struggles many autistic people have in finding acceptance, making friends or getting a job in a world which continues to pathologize many autistic behaviours and forms of expression. The ambiguity reinforces the idea that labels like autism are limiting to individuals, where the label and not the systemic discrimination, social exclusion, and marginalisation that neurodivergent people face in a deeply ableist society, is the actual problem.

Or perhaps I am not giving Rooney enough credit, and she is actually playing a game of 4D chess where Peter is also autistic and Ivan’s stereotypical presentation is a diversion, meant to throw us off the scent? Autism is understood to be largely hereditary and where there is one autistic in a family there are usually more. In fact, I found Peter’s chaotic internal monologue much closer to my own internal state of near constant existential crises prior to my autism diagnosis than Ivan’s experience of the world. If this is the case, Peter is a classic example of someone who has learned to mask and people please to a much greater extent than Ivan, and his mental breakdown over the course of the novel could be read as a sign of the mask finally slipping. But if this is Rooney’s aim, I would have hoped for a much greater payoff than Peter simply coming round to the idea of flouting convention by dating two women at once.

On that note, let’s return to Sylvia, who’s main characteristic, other than a prodigious career in academia, is her broken vagina. This is, we are told, the result of a devastating car accident that occurred in her 20s. We never learn the nature or extent of her injuries, their long term impact nor specificities of a disability that make penetrative sex impossible. Apart from severe pain, seemingly concentrated in her vagina, Sylvia’s accident places few other limits on her life and career. She does not, as far as we know, use mobility aids. She can walk all around Dublin with ease and stand for hours at the top of a lecture hall. Yet she claims that the accident has destroyed her life, ended her relationship with Peter and, by extension, ruined any possibility of having a fulfilling sex life.

Though Peter tries, on a couple of occasions, to rekindle the relationship, Sylvia calls a firm halt to anything sexual. She demonstrates a profound inability to articulate what she can and can’t do, the kind of sex acts she may or may not wish to engage in, with a person she has had sex with countless times before. She describes, but cannot bring herself to say, masturbation. She will give Peter a handjob but cannot let herself be touched:

“Lowering her eyes, speaking in a shy humorous voice. ‘I mean, I have the full range of sensations, she says. On my own, I can still— you know’.”

As an elder millennial, I recognise the timidity and reticence to openly express desire. Yet, at eight years her senior, I grew up in an arguably more repressive Irish context when it came to talking about sex. And, like many people of my generation, I have done the work of finding the words to express desires and needs for which our parent’s generation often had no language. The Irish sexual revolution came very late, but between the marriage equality (2014) and the abortion rights (2018) referendums, Sylvia would have been in the thick of it and it’s a shame her character could not have benefited from it.

Rooney is lauded for her sex writing and yet she cannot seem to imagine the possibilities for intimacy beyond a tremendously limited number of penis-in-vagina configurations, with minimal foreplay. It made me wonder if Peter has ever gone down on one of his partners? I wanted to shout at Sylvia to go find the lesbians, there are plenty roaming around the streets of Dublin these days, and we could teach her a thing or two about the possibilities of fingers, tongues and battery operated devices!

Sylvia is portrayed as an almost saintly, self-sacrificing woman who, at 32, has simply come to accept she will never again have sex:

“You know, if I can’t do something properly, I don’t want to do it at all. (…) I think I would find it humiliating, having to negotiate all that with another person. I would feel I was offering something very inferior.”

It’s the only reason that Peter is willing to consider polyamory, rather than happily ever after, with Sylvia. This is an inexplicable and incredibly conservative conclusion for a novel published in 2024. It contributes to the pernicious myth that disabled and/or chronically ill people, especially women, are sex-less or de-sexed individuals whose physical impairments have ruined their lives and destroyed all possibilities for intimate connection and pleasure. Sylvia says: “I just want you to remember me the way I was.”

I found myself thinking of Frida Kahlo, a Rooney foremother you could argue, by merit of her communist activism and career in art. Kahlo, who lived through the first tumultuous half of the 20th century, experienced a devastating accident on a bus in her late teens where a metal rod literally pierced her vagina. The years of surgeries, invasive therapies, chronic pain and pregnancy loss did not, however, stop her from painting, dancing or having lots of enjoyable sex and affairs with men and women while married to Diego Rivera.

I also found myself thinking of the documentaries like ‘Yes We Fuck’ (2014) and ‘Crip Camp’ (2020) which show disabled people enjoying fulfilling sex lives that often stray far beyond the limits of the able-bodied, hetero imagination of acceptable or possible sex. I returned to Alice Wong’s recent writings on the expansive possibilities for intimacy and pleasure of disabled bodies as a necessary counter-narrative to the ableism of the novel. The limited imagination regarding the possibilities for pleasure, eroticism and sexuality is, in my opinion, Intermezzo’s greatest failing.

Rooney, an ostensibly neurotypical and able bodied author, is arguably the most popular literary fiction writer of the moment, achieving a kind of fame most writers only ever dream of. Her politics, particularly the use of her platform for many years to speak out about Palestine, are necessary and important. And while her class and gender analysis are often on-point, any interrogation of privilege will remain wanting, if intersectional questions of race, sexuality and ability are absent. Rooney is unusually concerned among fiction writers for citing her sources, many of which are included at the end of the book, but there is a marked absence of citations relating to disability and neurodivergence. Just as Rooney seems to ignore three decades of queer theory and crip theory, which challenge the notion of acceptable and possible sex beyond hetero-able bodied norms, she seems to ignore, or is ignorant of the revolution in how we understand neurodivergence or the existence of the neurodiversity movement which, among other things, is intent on challenging the persistence of the Rain Man stereotype.

There has been plenty written over the last few months about the literary merit, or not, of Intermezzo but, frankly, I don’t really feel qualified to comment on this. Rather, the inclusion of disability in Intermezzo as a mere plot point is a sad indication of the state of disabled representation in publishing. Not only did the ableist tropes in Intermezzo make it through the editing process, but so few critics have noticed, never mind challenged, their presence in the biggest fiction release of 2024, with one notable exception in The Cut. In an effort to find some critiques, somewhere about the ableism of the text I resorted to Goodreads reviews and did a keyword search for “autism”, “neurodivergence”, “disability” and “ableism”. And there, on the site that writers love to hate, I saw many disabled readers flag the same issues and call out the silence of critics.

Rooney is heralded as the voice of a generation and yet, Intermezzo feels deeply out of step with the expansive conversations and experiments of younger and elder Millennials, as well as Gen-Z, on sexuality, disability, queerness and non-monogamy in its many guises. I worry that the popularity of the novel, and the fact that the apparent ableism has gone largely unchallenged, will make the autistic Rain Man stereotype even harder to shift and that popular culture will continue to treat people with physical disabilities as sexless or de-sexed beings. Intermezzo is a missed opportunity to interrogate a culture dominated by neurotypical and heterosexual norms, with a radical exploration of the possibilities for intimacy of people of all abilities.

ABOUT

A photo of a white woman against a grey wall, her head is tilted slightly to the right, looking away from the camera. She has curly hair, dyed magenta, uses greenish glasses and is wearing a black shirt.

Aisling Walsh (she/her) is a queer and neurodivergent writer and researcher based in Ireland. She writes a regular newsletter, AutCasts, exploring neurodivergence through popular movies. You can find her on BlueSky at @aislingwalsh.bsky.social.

Rain Man for Millennials and Other Adventures in Ableism with Sally Rooney