In his acclaimed memoir, Diary of a Young Naturalist (published last year in the UK and forthcoming in the US from Milkweed Editions), Dara McAnulty, an autistic teenager and environmental advocate from Northern Ireland, inspires questions around what it truly means to be in love with the earth. The answer readers learn along the way: a lifetime of heartbreak. But also, delight on a scale many of us have forgotten—or never discovered in the first place.

To be led among the UK’s flora and fauna by a neurodivergent guide is to consider what is “normal” and why those things bear that label. We follow McAnulty’s inquisitive mind as it alights upon this and that and peeks under rocks and hedges. He shares with us the simple beauty of birds, plants, and butterflies, but also helps us realize how we treat and categorize those creatures—and one another.

Reading Diary, Temple Grandin and Greta Thunberg come to mind—autistic activists who not only help lead the crusade for animal rights and climate action but also normalize the neurodiversity spectrum. McAnulty joins the ranks of those whose work seeks acceptance of non-neurotypical thought and demonstrates that people with autism contribute singularly authentic, and essential, human perspectives. In the case of McAnulty, it is a perspective of unfettered adoration for plants and animals that rebuts a status quo of marginalization and suppression. 

Much of the book involves McAnulty’s family—four of five of whom are neurodivergent—probing suburbia for its final scraps of wildlands and native habitat. The book takes place during a year in which they move from their home in County Fermanagh to the far side of Northern Ireland in County Down. They observe ospreys, woodlice, and garden spiders, and yearn keenly to see a rare hen harrier by the lake in Big Dog Forest. McAnulty writes of his unfailingly supportive family in prose nuanced and tender—sincere, jubilant, and loving. Describing the act of peering into a bucket of rainwater they’ve left in their garden, he writes, “We added a cupful of murkiness from the pond at Dad’s work, some native oxygenators, and the magic brew grew life. Water fleas first. Within a week, snails. Water beetles followed. Then dragonfly nymph and the holy grail: tadpoles.... Squiggly squirming teardrops, eating algae from the sides of our potion pot.”

McAnulty’s candor about his autism—in particular, his struggle to manage emotions and bend his mind to societal expectations, especially at school, where he’s been bullied—offers a powerful companion to his observations about the natural world. It highlights the monochrome state we’ve created, both in our physical surroundings and the way we perceive them. “I stand outside and cock my head to the sky and there it is. A screech. A swift! The first of their hundred-day residency. They’re here! All the way from Africa,” McAnulty writes of some birds’ harrowing, annual migration. But then he goes on, tempering the euphoria with another reality: “People like my neighbours sterilise their gardens and put plastic or metal spears down the middle of their eaves. This attitude prevails everywhere. It’s the norm to stop wildlife thriving in the gaps of our homes and office buildings.”  

McAnulty, too, feels imperiled and rejected by today’s conventional world. Exhausted from conforming, he turns to our increasingly crowded and spare natural spaces to regulate his mood and process his experiences. These moments in the book poignantly illustrate that the depletion of these natural places leaves humans just as fragmented and diminished as so many other species.

The narrative—McAnulty’s year—holds the collection together like a seed husk or nutshell. You can read the diary entries all at once, in order, or dip in and out, hop around, and enjoy each one for what it is. The big-picture rewards are McAnulty’s arc from bullied to embraced, his journey to amplify his voice, and the lesson that change is hard but necessary. Just as rewarding are the smaller moments on every page when he finds joy, amazement, and serenity in nature and lets us share those moments with him.

Therein lies one of the book’s pleasant dichotomies. McAnulty seeks isolation in nature to process the noise of civilization, but in so doing, connects with a deep universality. The chiffchaffs, the whirligig beetles, the bats. Him, me, you. We’re all of the same earthling community. We all lose home places. We are all sometimes anxious, doubtful, and embattled against emotions. There is so much we know and don’t know about what it is to be “normal,” but in wishing nature could wash over him and flow around him unencumbered, McAnulty cuts through our stock perceptions of what is “acceptable” or “typical” with intense, intimate clarity. 

Of his time working with scientists satellite-tagging goshawks in Scotland, he writes, “As I bring [the goshawk] close to my chest its body heat illuminates me. I start to fill with something visceral. This is who I am. This is who we all could be. I am not like these birds but neither am I separate from them. Perhaps it’s a feeling of love, or a longing. I don’t know for certain. It is a rare feeling, a sensation that most of my life (full of school and homework) doesn’t have the space for.” 

Over and over again, McAnulty reminds us that our most immediate environment lies within our own minds—and that between each one of us is the same cherished diversity we can also find by leaving a bucket of murky water in the yard and seeing what arrives.