Up All Night not only grips readers in unrelenting humor, but it offers a fresh voice embracing readers with graphic injuries, tender recollections, big surprises, and love. Posing nuanced psychological questions while never losing its heart, Up All Night traces the challenges of living with undiagnosed Asperger’s syndrome before the social disorder became known in 1992.

The memoir recaptures the integration of two families–Trout and Caspers–while showing how impactful a married couple can be despite their incapacity to see the obvious. Richie Trout was the boy who’d never have a girlfriend, said classmate Michelle West, whose rule as one of the three queens in Mr. Kucera’s sixth-grade class intimidated every male student. Almost every chapter is hysterical. Some are poignant. The tale also offers a warning to young people who recently suffered the loss of a first love–or who may face that future trauma.