Someone once said that my novel The Birdcatcher is just another version of the story of the Ugly Duckling, the duck who couldn’t be a duck no matter how hard it tried, until it finally found out that it was a swan
Well, yes, that’s exactly what it is. I’ve long believed that that fairy tale, first published in Denmark in 1843 by Hans Christian Andersen, was written especially for shy solitary/maybe on the spectrum people. Human ‘ugly ducklings’ have existed for a long time, maybe thousands of years.
Those of us who have felt like ugly ducklings as we grew up – told again and again that we should stop being different, that we should behave like everyone else, that we should abandon our quixotic hope to be ourselves (I’ve been told more than once that no one could really be like the central character in The Birdcatcher, Christopher Stone – who is much like me), have always needed the story of the ugly duckling to help us see who we really are.
The idea that the human species might not be a single species, that it might harbor many unidentified sub-species, unidentified races, or just unique people unlike most other people, has been latent in our culture for a long time, but it rarely comes to the surface.
In my book I’ve showed that you can learn to understand what it means to be an ugly duckling – to understand that you’re different, but you can learn how to function in this strange, turbulent, hypocritical, selfish, so often callous society, without denying who you are.
Unfortunately, oppressed by all the contrary advice and demands from society, we keep forgetting who we are. That’s why The Ugly Duckling, the story of the duck who wasn’t a duck, is a story that needs to be retold again and again. That’s why I wrote The Birdcatcher. Here is a link to a page where you can load a free PDF of the first 4 chapters:
Here is the book on Amazon:
Alan Conrad 