The Spectrum of Holly Gibney

Written by Mark Wheaton

“He’ll grow out of it,” Jack said.
Edmonds blinked. “My very words,” he said. “Yes. Now I would guess that Danny was in a pretty good position to develop a full-fledged psychosis. Unhappy home life, a big imagination, the invisible friend who was so real to him that he nearly became real to you. Instead of ‘growing out of’ his childhood schizophrenia, he might well have grown into it.”
“And become autistic?” Wendy asked. She had read about autism. The word itself frightened her; it sounded like dread and white silence.
“Possibly but not necessarily. He might simply have entered Tony’s world someday and never come back to what he calls ‘real things.’”
“God,” Jack said. 
-          The Shining, Stephen King, 1977

“I hope that people have been able to relate to her and hopefully maybe be inspired or feel like there’s a voice? There are people with autism and who are on the spectrum and I feel like Holly is representative of how awesome those people can be and are. I hope that there are people who found a voice in her.”
-          Mr. Mercedes actress, Justine Lupe, discussing Holly Gibney with When Nerds Attack, 2018

“I love secrets,” Holly said truthfully.
-          The Outsider, Stephen King, 2018

Neurodiversity is everywhere in media these days. From Wednesday, Hannibal and The Good Doctor to Atypical, Bob’s Burgers and even Julia on Sesame Street, authentically neurodiverse or autism-coded characters have been written into television, movies, and countless books. Yay, representation! What often differentiates them from earlier neurodiverse characters is this effort toward credible and convincing presentations absent tropes from the past in which neurodiverse characters are shown as little more than a grab bag of their most pronounced or cinematic traits.

While yes, certain tropes remain such as the trope of a neurodiverse character having to redeem their atypical behavior by using their traits to solve a mystery, at least they’re more often in the driver’s seat now, instead of merely providing long-winded exposition or IT help to a neurotypical lead so they can solve the mystery. Thanks, Sherlock, Monk, and Lisbeth Salander!

The truth is, presenting neurodiversity is tricky. Employing a shorthand of harmful stereotypes an audience or readership is already familiar with is just simpler that digging into something that’s called a spectrum for a reason. There’s nothing monolithic about neurodiversity. There’s a wide variety of characteristics and traits neurodiverse people express that can be triggered by just as wide of a number of prompts or, conversely, masked, rendering a person’s neurodiversity invisible. On top of that, other neurobehavioral disorders share symptoms and traits with, say, autism or savantism and get lumped together under the too-wide umbrella term of neurodiversity, making it even more difficult to present a character with any real specificity to their impairment. But when it’s done well, even piece by piece, the result can be not only credible but also a great road map for building authentic, neurodiverse characters.

Like Stephen King’s late-career, crusader of a neurodivergent detective, Holly Gibney.

First introduced in 2014’s Mr. Mercedes, Holly subsequently appeared in its two sequels, Finders Keepers and End of Watch, followed by the standalone horror-crime novel, The Outsider, and its related novella, If It Bleeds. Across these stories, Holly has become King’s own Lisbeth Salander with her next adventure, Holly, arriving on September 5th. King himself has called her, “one of the most interesting characters in my entire lexicon of many, many characters.”

“I’ve never seen anything like her,” Cynthia Erivo, who played Holly on the HBO miniseries adaptation of The Outsider, said of Gibney in a behind-the-scenes featurette. “She’s incredibly intelligent. Her communication skills are very different to others. She’s not easily trusting.”

King has long used neurodivergent or intellectually impaired characters in his fiction, from Tom Cullen in The Stand (first described in the book by the deaf-mute Nick Andros as, “retarded…I can’t talk and he can’t read.”) to John Coffey in The Green Mile (“In his speech as in so many things, he was a mystery. Mostly it was his eyes that troubled me—a kind of peaceful absence in them, as if he were floating far, far away.”), to Duddits in Dreamcatcher (“Down’s syndrome had turned him into Peter Pan, and soon he would die in Never-Never Land.”). They tend to be side characters whose impairments allow them climactic payoffs—Cullen evading Flagg’s telepathy in Las Vegas, Duddits leveling the playing field against the aliens with his mind powers, and Coffey healing those who slowly realize they’re set to execute an innocent man.

Similarly, when Holly Gibney is introduced in Mr. Mercedes, a horror-crime novel about a retired police detective, Bill Hodges, attempting to solve an old case, she’s first described by a cousin who says, “she suffers from a certain amount of…emotional retardation, I guess you’d say.” Later, “Holly’s just weird” is added. Holly’s mother, who considers her daughter a burden (there are but few more prevalent tropes for neurodiverse characters than being a burden to their family), says, “As well as being mentally unstable, my daughter is very sensitive.” When she arrives in a scene even later, King writes, “Holly Gibney never speaks above a mutter and seems to have a problem making eye contact.” She described as pale and “wearing the same shapeless brown gunnysack” on consecutive days. We learn that in high school, she was given the nickname Jibba-Jibba due to her speech problems. For the same reason, Hodges, unkindly, dubs her Holly the Mumbler.

Soon, Hodges discovers that she understands computers and can provide insight to the case as the Mercedes of the title, used in a vehicular massacre, was stolen from Holly’s aunt (who was subsequently driven to suicide by the killer). To avenge her family, Holly teams up with Hodges to end the crime spree, going so far as to deliver the climactic blow to the villain’s head just as he’s about to slaughter more people. The Holly of the book’s early chapters couldn’t have pulled off this act of violence. Working with Hodges and, more importantly, having her neurodiversity be accepted by Hodges, causes her to flourish.

While this sort of activation can be a trope in and of itself, the reality is that there are plenty of those in the autism community who require or get along much easier in life with support from another. This can take many forms. Hodges, and his gardener, Jerome, provide this for Holly in the book, freeing her from an overbearing and infantilizing mother who doesn’t understand or doesn’t care to understand the limitations she’s inflicting on her child.

What’s interesting are the variations in how Hodges’s initial acceptance of Holly plays out in three different versions of their first scene alone together—in King’s text, in the audiobook, then in the TV adaptations. Due to the demands of the medium, each adds a further dimension to Holly’s expression of neurodivergence.

1). In the King novel, Hodges finds Holly taking a secret smoke break outside a funeral home, one of her aunts having just died. Holly is worried Hodges will tell her mother about the cigarette. Hodges agrees not to, though thinks Holly’s worry “about Mommy’s disapproval” is odd. They speak. They connect. Holly reels off several worries, including that her aunt will have an open casket funeral. This brings on the beginnings of a panic attack. Hodges holds her and calms her down. He intuits that she takes Lexapro (a medication for anxiety and depression). She confirms this. When he gets her a bottle of water so she can take a pill, she tells him, appreciatively, “I really do like you.” Hodges uses his “splendid, police-trained capacity for telling the convincing lie” to tell her that he likes her, too, though he really sees her as a new source of information.

2). The audiobook edition of Mr. Mercedes is performed by character actor, Will Patton, who feels torn straight from a Wyeth -painting. He’s narrated several Stephen King books in recent years including all five that feature Holly Gibney. The leap between page and audio comes in the atypical speech patterns he uses to voice Holly, ones not uncommon to people with autism which make her an open book to the listener. Patton renders her incapable of subterfuge. When Holly is strident, Patton raises her pitch. When embarrassed or filled with shame, her voice drops into a lower register, and she speaks quickly. When proud of herself, she enunciates every word with authority. Her voice shivers and quakes, flattens out or grows louder.

In this first scene with Hodges, her panic attack rises into an arpeggio of grief. After Hodges comforts her, Holly’s voice returns to a pitch that’s merely haunted. As the book goes on, Holly becomes more comfortable with Hodges and her vocal gymnastics ease to reflect this. Neurodivergent people can have a challenging time communicating with strangers. Hodges’s empathy, whether a tactic or not, allows her an opening. Patton’s vocal performance takes the listener through this evolution in a way the written word cannot.

3). Unlike some book-to-film adaptations, the TV version of Mr. Mercedes, made for AT&T’s now-defunct Audience Network, has several scenes that hew closely to the text, including this first scene between Hodges, played by Brendan Gleeson, and Holly, played by Justin Lupe. Hodges emerges from a building to find Holly sneaking a cigarette. Like Patton, the show introduces a new element here as well to highlight Holly’s neurodiversity in a way that King did not.

Following a minute or two of conversation while sitting on a bench, Holly admits she’s been turned and looking at Hodges to her left as she understands “how important eye contact is in social situations,” but that “the right side of my neck feels much longer than the left side of my neck, and my left side feels left out, so I’m gonna have to turn my head and look the other way for a while.” She turns away from him, her body language betraying her slight unease at having to admit this. After a second, Hodges rises, takes a seat at Holly’s right, and says, “Getting sort of tired sitting in the same place, anyway.”

Holly smiles, seemingly both at Hodges but also to herself. The audience is given to believe that, perhaps for the first time, a stranger isn’t confounded or repelled by her condition and instead, sees enough value in her to meet her halfway. In the same way Patton uses Holly’s voice to track her emotions through the scene, Lupe uses a kaleidoscope of facial expressions to do the same.

Justine Lupe has talked about the help she had in bringing the character to screen. “Once I got to know the character better before I started the series, I looked into ways that people deal with being on the spectrum, coping mechanisms, tics that people might have,” she explained in an interview on Emmys.com. “My mom has worked with people who have autism or are on the spectrum, have some of these sensory disorders, so she gave me some tips, and I read a lot about it.” In an interview with BUILD, she added, “The novel is really specific about who she is, so I had a really wonderful resource there. The way that Holly was written, which was [Mr. Mercedes staff writer] Sophie Bender, did a lot with that. She really developed Holly and the way that she talked. The way that she rode through sentences was really particular.”

There you have it - three versions of the same scene employing different traits and characteristics associated with autism that combine into an authentic whole. Yes, the character is recognizably neurodiverse, but as the book continues, she’s not a stereotype or someone reduced to the sum of her atypical attributes. Even better is watching her prosper through her relationship with Hodges.

Is this progress? Given what came before it—damn right, it is!

And yet, it might’ve ended with Mr. Mercedes. Holly could’ve been an interesting sidekick gone by the time Mr. Mercedes’s sequel, Finders Keepers, came along. Instead, King kept her aboard, allowing readers to watch her evolution continue while showing the limitations that remain.

In Finders Keepers, Holly now teamed up with Hodges in the titular private investigation firm, is re-introduced to readers by Hodges as he thinks, “little tics aside, this Holly Gibney is very different from the one he first met four years ago.” A little later on, these tics will be described as “Asperger’s-like” yet disappear “as they always do when she’s fully engaged. All that remains were her restlessly moving fingers, tapping her thighs as if she’s working an invisible keyboard.” Still later, King concedes that because of Jerome’s mother, Holly has “even developed something approximating clothes sense.”

Does that mean she has somehow magically put her neurodiversity behind her like in some aspirational movie-of-the-week? Not at all. She still has a tough time with eye contact. She still can spout random facts at random moments that she thinks are Very Important To Spout. She still hyper fixates and gets embarrassed by personal social interactions. She can still get over stimulated until “the light in her eyes” goes out and “she looks terribly downcast.”

This continues into Finders Keepers’s sequel, End of Watch, and, following the death of Bill Hodges, on into The Outsider and If It Bleeds. Hodges’s death forces her to stand on her own and take over the investigative firm, something she manages with aplomb. She misses Hodges but no longer needs Hodges. Her symptoms are the same, but she manages them through the establishment of routine, particularly at the beginning of If It Bleeds when she carefully counts down to three o’clock to watch her favorite show, unwrapping and lining up six Snickers Bites to eat, one for each of the program’s six commercial breaks. When a character suggests involving her in the case at the heart of The Outsider, he describes her as “eccentric, a little obsessive-compulsive, and she’s not big on personal contact, but she never misses a trick. Holly would have made one hell of a police detective.”

This is a long way from “emotional retardation” or “mentally unstable.”

King differentiates her most from other neurodivergent detectives by having her previous experiences make her a better investigator, not traits associated with her autism. “Yours won’t be the first strange story I’ve heard, believe me,” she says in The Outsider, the events of the Mr. Mercedes trilogy having given her a willingness to accept things beyond the comprehension of others. Her natural, outsized empathy also allows her to be a steady and unjudgmental interviewer of witnesses. By listening to those whose stories have been dismissed as too outlandish or counterfactual in the past, she’s able to bring down the book’s monstrous title character (“What made you believe?” it asks Holly, moments before its death, having operated in the shadows for decades. “How were you able to convince a party of modern men who probably don’t believe in anything beyond the range of their five senses to come down here?”).

“An outsider knows an outsider,” Holly, as played by Cynthia Erivo in the HBO adaptation of the book, succinctly puts it.

If the Holly of King’s The Outsider and If It Bleeds finds her at her most self-actualized on the page, it’s Erivo’s version that takes her a step further into a performance of neurodivergence rarely seen in media. Erivo’s Holly is on the spectrum, but it’s hardly her defining characteristic. She is curious and dogged, willing to accept things that others don’t as she is in the book, but her tics are gone and her atypical voice patterns are at a minimum. Her buttoned-up mode of dress remains, but it’s muted and she’s made several stylish additions. She has long braids. She doesn’t wear black, a choice Erivo made early on with the costume designer. She has multiple ear piercings, but all the earrings are identical (“I was trying to, wherever I could, put uniformity in her so you could see that that’s sort of her way of moving through the world,” Erivo told Gold Derby). She even has a healthy romantic/sexual relationship with a neurotypical character who isn’t presented as a hero for overlooking their partner’s neurodivergence.

It’s an embodiment of that old chestnut that a person may be autistic, but they are not their autism. Having Holly’s neurodivergence be the smallest, least important part of her is what a win looks like to me.

Erivo has said she didn’t watch Mr. Mercedes before taking on The Outsider, choosing to find her own way into Holly. “I sort of leant on some people that I know and the way in which they communicate and friends of mine who are on the spectrum,” Erivo told Gold Derby. “I knew I didn’t want to go too far away from what it is to be someone who is on the spectrum but is also highly functioning because I know those people exist and I’ve met those people and I’ve worked with those people, and I speak to those people and those people are my friends. I wanted to make sure that people understood that these people exist in this world and can communicate and aren’t so far away from communication. There are extreme cases but there are cases like her whose communication is just different to ours. And they have a hard time existing in this world just as everyone else does.”

Given how few adults with autism have formal diagnoses, one of the most realistic things King has done with Holly is to never explicitly state that she is autistic. The “Asperger’s-like tics” or “that’s OCD” statements in the books always come from other characters coming to their own conclusions. With Holly hitting bookstores soon, it’ll be interesting to see not only where King takes the character next but to see if he chooses to further explore her neurodiversity as those who have adapted her to screen, and audio have done.

Stephen King has not explicitly stated that Holly Gibney is autistic (her tics are “Asperger’s-like,” in Finders Keepers; in Mr. Mercedes, her mother “says that’s OCD” about her watching Casablanca seventy-three times—neither a diagnosis). This works fine on the page. Given the demands of different media, however, those tasked with bringing her to life on audio and screen have all committed to greater specificity resulting in dimensional, lived-in portrayals of autism. With Holly hitting bookstores soon, it will be intriguing to experience not only where King takes Holly next but also whether he chooses to explore her neurodiversity further. Interestingly, Will Patton will not be returning for the audiobook of Holly. His replacement? Justine Lupe.

I can’t wait to see where she takes Holly Gibney next, too.