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So I guess this is kind of related:
A few weeks ago I was looking at an old thread* that went a number of places, but specifically it included people pointing out that spectrum and ADHD behavior isn’t some new thing, it just gets more press now because there are words and diagnostic criteria, etc. And somebody mentioned in passing that if you read Agatha Christie’s memoirs (which I did, when I was eleven), her description of her older brother is, like, classic ADHD (brilliant but “never lived up to his potential,” very focused when things interested him, very not-focused when they didn’t, wildly inconsistent marks at school, etc); poster also thought Christie’s mother showed ADHD traits as well – that, I don’t recall as well from the memoir, although I remember Christie’s view of her parents as devoted to, but bemused by, each other, because her father could quite happily think about nothing at all and her mother was usually thinking of three things at once. Her father, by the sound of it, was likeable but opaque; I think she mentions that he suffered from the belief that one ought to think things over carefully before making a decision – suffered, because his first impulse was usually correct, and his second was at least understandable, but once he’d turned a matter over in his mind and second-guessed himself for a few hours, he’d usually come to a conclusion that was completely wrong.
Anyway, Christie was apparently considered “the slow one,” in her family, and only realized once she grew up a bit that she was not especially so, it was just that her mother and siblings had minds that went a mile a minute. She does make an argument for herself in the book that she was the more creative problem-solver: “nobody else in my family would have thought to attach a bent pin and a sticky-pellet of mashed bread to the end of a broomstick in order to retrieve my mother’s false teeth, when they fell out the window onto the roof.”
I was thinking about all this on Monday when Andrew and I watched some Poirot, and Ariadne Oliver took a moment to recall the chain of links in her mind that led from “meringue stuck in her teeth” to “elephants,” and it occurred to me that Oliver would probably be considered now to have mild ADHD – there’s another scene in which she’s trying to come up with a reason for a character to keep back some info that the plot can’t afford to spill, but which he has no need to hide – and concludes that she can plausibly describe him being distracted by something outside the window and so completely forget to mention it until later in the book. Lady Angkatell in The Hollow shows even more symptoms.
So I figured it was worth googling “Agatha Christie” and “ADHD,” but the results all turned out to be sites claiming Christie herself as a famous-person-with-ADHD, but frustratingly not specifying anything more (when they did say something instead of just putting her name on a list, they described her dysgraphia**.) I mean, I’m not disagreeing (she certainly seemed to have a good handle on the mindset), I’d just like some more details.
* ETA -- it was this thread, the one that made me decide to follow recessional's DW.
**She’d learned to read on her own, but had a lifelong trouble with spelling because, as she put it, she’d learned to recognize the look of words without focusing on the individual letters. Math, otoh, she quite liked as a child.
A few weeks ago I was looking at an old thread* that went a number of places, but specifically it included people pointing out that spectrum and ADHD behavior isn’t some new thing, it just gets more press now because there are words and diagnostic criteria, etc. And somebody mentioned in passing that if you read Agatha Christie’s memoirs (which I did, when I was eleven), her description of her older brother is, like, classic ADHD (brilliant but “never lived up to his potential,” very focused when things interested him, very not-focused when they didn’t, wildly inconsistent marks at school, etc); poster also thought Christie’s mother showed ADHD traits as well – that, I don’t recall as well from the memoir, although I remember Christie’s view of her parents as devoted to, but bemused by, each other, because her father could quite happily think about nothing at all and her mother was usually thinking of three things at once. Her father, by the sound of it, was likeable but opaque; I think she mentions that he suffered from the belief that one ought to think things over carefully before making a decision – suffered, because his first impulse was usually correct, and his second was at least understandable, but once he’d turned a matter over in his mind and second-guessed himself for a few hours, he’d usually come to a conclusion that was completely wrong.
Anyway, Christie was apparently considered “the slow one,” in her family, and only realized once she grew up a bit that she was not especially so, it was just that her mother and siblings had minds that went a mile a minute. She does make an argument for herself in the book that she was the more creative problem-solver: “nobody else in my family would have thought to attach a bent pin and a sticky-pellet of mashed bread to the end of a broomstick in order to retrieve my mother’s false teeth, when they fell out the window onto the roof.”
I was thinking about all this on Monday when Andrew and I watched some Poirot, and Ariadne Oliver took a moment to recall the chain of links in her mind that led from “meringue stuck in her teeth” to “elephants,” and it occurred to me that Oliver would probably be considered now to have mild ADHD – there’s another scene in which she’s trying to come up with a reason for a character to keep back some info that the plot can’t afford to spill, but which he has no need to hide – and concludes that she can plausibly describe him being distracted by something outside the window and so completely forget to mention it until later in the book. Lady Angkatell in The Hollow shows even more symptoms.
So I figured it was worth googling “Agatha Christie” and “ADHD,” but the results all turned out to be sites claiming Christie herself as a famous-person-with-ADHD, but frustratingly not specifying anything more (when they did say something instead of just putting her name on a list, they described her dysgraphia**.) I mean, I’m not disagreeing (she certainly seemed to have a good handle on the mindset), I’d just like some more details.
* ETA -- it was this thread, the one that made me decide to follow recessional's DW.
**She’d learned to read on her own, but had a lifelong trouble with spelling because, as she put it, she’d learned to recognize the look of words without focusing on the individual letters. Math, otoh, she quite liked as a child.
