Books by Donna Williams

This music CD features poems written or co-written by Donna Williams set to music which she has composed. The poems provide a personal insight, revealing to the non-autistic how the world appears to the autistic person.

Exposure anxiety is increasingly understood as a crippling condition affecting a high proportion of people on the autism spectrum. Based on personal experience, this book describes the condition and its underlying physiological causes, and presents approaches and strategies that can be used to combat it.

This book, written by an autistic person for people with autism and related disorders, carers, and the professionals who work with them, is a practical handbook to understanding, living with and working with autism. It shows clearly how the behaviours associated with autism can have a range of different causes.

In Donna's relationship with Ian, a man with difficulties related to her own, we watch the two of them break through their rock-solid emotional barriers and dare to defy all the rules imposed by the autistic condition of 'exposure anxiety'. Their struggle is told with Donna's characteristic humour, insight and sense of fragility.

This book takes us deeper into Williams' journey. She recounts the funny, sometimes harrowing awakenings arising from sessions with a cognitive psychologist. We travel with her in her breakthroughs in working with autistic children and adults like her, as she finally finds a way of 'simply being' among others, without selling out who she really is.

Donna takes you on a poetic adventure into places past, present and beyond. Often intertwined with the world of autistic experience, her writings divulge with immediacy, a person in the grip of overload and shutdowns, of extreme sensory and emotional highs and passions, of alienation from self, from body and fear of the intensity of emotion.

This is the fourth installment in Williams' series of autobiographies about her life with autism. A humorous, riveting, roller-coaster of a book, Everyday Heaven covers the monumental nine years from the time Ian left their accidental, 'autistic marriage', to finally knowing what life was like without the invisible cage of her 'Exposure Anxiety'.