Book Review: Normal Is Just a Setting on Your Dryer

Title: Normal Is Just a Setting on Your Dryer

Author: Patsy Clairmont

Date: 1993

Publisher: Guideposts

Length: 140 pages

Quote: “Normal is just a setting on your clothes dryer and has nothing to do with people. Try as we might, we remain peculiar people with distinct differences.”

Though her Christian compilations came out after my formative years were over, Patsy Clairmont has become one of the most helpful Christian writers in my collection. In her very first book she achieved something I’d started to believe impossible. Namely, among her other lighthearted reflections on the difference between her and her family’s healthy quirkiness and their struggles with the bland suburban church-family aspects of the Deadly Sins, she demonstrates how the kind of verbal abuse that caused me to cancel the only church membership I’ve ever had actually seems to work among extroverts.

Or: these people have mild brain damage in any case, so there may actually be times when they need the idiotic advice, find the insanely obvious “insights” useful, hear the hateful presuppositions embedded in their vaps as valid words of edification...

Patsy Clairmont was agoraphobic. For her, spiritual growth led her out of the house to become a Christian comedian, sharing funny family stories to invite people to laugh about and talk through their emotional problems.

She did some harm—inadvertently—when people who didn’t understand the concept of hereditary temperament traits pointed her out to introverts as (in their brain-damaged thinking) a role model. “She was even more afraid of people than you are, and God helped her to become a real ‘people-person’...”

Wrong. Clairmont describes how she developed panic attacks as a physical symptom and agoraphobia as an emotional reaction. She didn’t want to be alone in order to do things or think through things, as real introverts do. She superficially looked like an introvert because she was ill.

Introverts can superficially look like extroverts, too, and when we do, that also is probably because we are ill. Introverts are not meant to be “people-people.” Since genuine introversion is an effect of one or more healthy permanent physical traits, an obvious analogy might be “By the transforming power of God you too should be able to develop at least one blue eye,” but as evidence mounts up that extroversion is merely an effect of incomplete neurological development, telling nice, quiet, efficient “task-people” to “become people-people” is like telling athletes that with a little effort they too can become wheelchair dwellers.

Clairmont did good when nice, healthy introverts were able to read her stories as showing just how, well, bizarre the extrovert families we don’t have can be. We can’t take them as role models. We can cultivate compassion.

When Clairmont (and her husband) sustained physical injuries from doing ordinary work, instead of taking the injuries as warning to maintain strength, balance, and flexibility through exercise, they took them as warnings to “accept their limitations” and be even lazier couch potatoes than they were before.

When Clairmont counted the arts and crafts projects she’d abandoned, she took that as a warning to give up trying to express herself through any medium but chatter.

When she felt understandably averse to sitting in the middle of a row of three seats, she decided to take it out on the unfortunates on either side of her by chattering loudly at them, even though one of them was reading a book. (Tip: If you have a choice between interrupting someone reading a book and someone smooching, on the whole it’s probably less obnoxious to interrupt the smooching. Or, if someone isn’t looking at you, don’t chatter.)

When she bought a false-economy-size bottle of aspirin (two healthy children won’t use 500 baby aspirins before both are old enough to vote) and the baby took an almost fatal overdose of aspirin, the lesson Clairmont draws is not “Don’t have enough baby aspirins in the house that even a baby could OD on them” but “When people don’t hold eye contact, there’s a reason.”

(How unfortunate that nobody ever explained to her one of the main reasons why people don’t make eye contact: we don’t want to talk to you. By the same token, the reason why introverts don’t really want to hang out with extroverts is not that we’re afraid they’re going to hurt our fragile feelings, but that we have at least forty other things we’d rather do. Between dental surgery and a party with a mob of extroverts, there’s no comparison whatsoever—of the two boring experiences, any rational introvert would pick the one that relieves the toothache, any day.)

When Clairmont’s husband came home from the hospital with bandages over his eyes, and his friend led him around the yard, both of the fun-loving forty-or-fifty-year-old boys thought it was hilarious for the sighted boy to lead the temporarily-blind boy in circles and point out “steps” that weren’t there. (Introverts could probably lead our friends through our front yards while blindfolded, since most of us naturally tend to know how many steps we take across the yard, which flowers are in which positions in the borders, and how many steps to take between the top step and our favorite chair on the porch...and most of us probably agree that misleading anyone is not funny. Would introverts have joked to lighten the emotional stress as one led the other home from the hospital? Yes; an introvert friend might even have brought along a recording of a comedy show.)

For extroverts, Clairmont’s stories are “everyday events.” For introverts, they’re more like “Tales from the Far Side.” I may have been in a house like the Clairmonts’; if so I didn’t (and don’t) want to know.

People really do survive at this level of thoughtlessness and chaos.

Serious Christians should give thanks that there is, for us, a better way.