E726 - Eleanor Vincent - Disconnected, Portrait of a Neurodiverse Marriage

EPISODE 726 - Eleanor Vincent - Disconnected, Portrait of a Neurodiverse Marriage

Author and memoirist Eleanor Vincent joins Dave from her home in the San Francisco Bay Area, reflecting on a life shaped by place, creativity, grief, and late-life love. She traces her journey from snowy Midwestern roots to California, where a long career in journalism taught her the discipline of daily writing and the power of working alongside other writers. That early newsroom experience became the foundation for her later work as a creative writer and memoirist, and she now champions community and “hive energy” as essential antidotes to the loneliness of writing.

Eleanor describes how a childhood steeped in books, theater, and nightly reading aloud opened the door to literature and showed her that a life in the arts was possible. Stories became both inspiration and survival tool in an emotionally unstable home, teaching her early on that reading and writing could be forms of healing, escape, and hope. That understanding would prove crucial decades later when tragedy struck.

Her first memoir, Swimming with Maya, grew out of the devastating loss of her nineteen-year-old daughter after a horse-riding accident. Rather than simply recording events, she spent a decade shaping her grief into a crafted narrative that others could enter, emphasizing that memoir is an art, not just catharsis. Writing was only one strand of her healing; therapy, spiritual practice, movement, friendship, and time all played vital roles. The book ultimately became both a tribute to Maya’s life and a testament to organ donation, showing how her daughter’s death helped save and transform other lives.

Eleanor’s new memoir, Disconnected, reflects a more seasoned writer grappling with a very different kind of heartbreak: a late-life marriage to an undiagnosed autistic partner and the unraveling of that relationship during the pressure cooker of Covid lockdown. She explains how neurodiverse couples often live inside what therapists call the “double empathy problem,” where both partners are trying hard yet neither feels safe or understood. Shutdowns, masking, and associated traits like alexithymia and demand avoidance created a tragic dance of miscommunication that conventional couples therapy could not repair. Ultimately, Eleanor chose to leave the marriage, drawing on hard-won resources and support that many partners in similar situations lack.

Throughout the conversation, she returns to her core motivation as a writer: to transform difficult experience into page-turning stories that genuinely help people. Whether writing about child loss, organ donation, or neurodiverse relationships, she aims to give readers language, context, and companionship for situations that can feel isolating and impossible.

Key takeaway: Memoir becomes most powerful when it combines emotional truth with craft, transforming raw pain into a story that offers understanding, companionship, and practical hope to others walking through their own seasons of loss, love, and change.

https://www.eleanorvincent.com/

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