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Norm is completing a historical novel titled Sally: Mistress of Monticello, an episodic account of the relationship between the widower Thomas Jefferson and his beautiful slave, Sally Hemings.

Each chapter, marked by a date and place, contains reference to a verifiable event. Jefferson left records of his whereabouts and associations nearly every day of his adult life—a life of achievement accompanied by frequent turbulence and loss. As author of the nonfiction Diagnosing Jefferson, Norm was able to compose dialogue and reasoned narrative based on his knowledge of Jefferson’s complex personality and day-to-day activities.

Sally, half-sister to Thomas’s late wife, is elevated from others’ portrayals as a passive and brooding victim to a self-educated, lively, and often assertive person. She bore eight children by Jefferson, four of whom survived and went free. She was a helpmate who became Monticello housemistress and was often in conflict with his daughter (and her niece) Martha Randolph.

When their affair began in Paris, Sally was a free woman, for France did not acknowledge slavery.  Pregnant with their first child from what Norm describes as a romance consummated between exceptional equals, Sally chose Thomas over freedom and returned willingly to enslavement in Virginia.

Norm contends Jefferson would not have spent 38 years faithfully—in a relationship he defended uncompromisingly and quietly—with a woman of any less character and commitment.

Asperger's and Self-Esteem:

Insight and Hope Through Famous Role Models

 

Walter Isaacson, in his 2007 biography, Einstein, took issue with Norm’s placing Time magazine’s Person of the Century on the autism/Asperger’s continuum in Asperger’s and Self-Esteem, published in 2002. Isaacson’s explanation, aimed also in opposition to British scientist Dr. Simon Baron-Cohen (and others who agreed with Norm), was that Albert Einstein had “close friends.” In other words, the social deficit that is one of Asperger’s Syndrome’s most recognizable symptoms was not applicable to Einstein.

Norm explains that Isaacson failed to take into account an American Psychiatric Association “text revision” of 2000 to its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, originally published in 1994.  In that revision the APA acknowledged that some characteristics of persons with Asperger’s may evolve over time.  But in the matter of developing social liaisons, according to the APA, those friendships are very likely to be “one-sided.”

The one-sidedness of such friendships was first raised by Norm in Diagnosing Jefferson in 2000.  In that book he explained that charismatic people with Asperger’s traits will attract others but will rarely reciprocate features of friendship with balanced consideration.  Norm believes that point in his book was an uncredited basis for the APA’s revision, because several months earlier he had shared his conclusions about Thomas Jefferson with the Association.

Other historical figures cited in Asperger’s and Self-Esteem—all associated with the arts and sciences—are Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Marie Curie, Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, Bela Bartok, Glenn Gould, Orson Welles, Paul Robeson, Carl Sagan, Oscar Levant, and the folk musician and composer John Hartford. Norm cites major accomplishments by each in spite of difficulties he believes are traceable to the neurological condition we now know as Asperger’s Syndrome. Only one of those individuals had ever been “diagnosed”—pianist Glenn Gould, whose psychiatrist was his biographer as well but whose 1997 diagnosis was also posthumous. In 2008 a French publisher translated and released Asperger’s and Self-Esteem under the title Ces autistes qui changent le monde, or “Autistics who changed the world,” a title Norm wishes he had suggested from the start.