No. 2: A memoir
Strong female character / Fern Brady
As a teenager Fern read about autism and it made her realize that she had a lot in common with the description. When she told her doctor, he laughed it off, told her she “just” had OCD and depression instead, and prescribed her medication.
Twenty years, several misdiagnoses and a lot of unnecessary suffering later, she gets diagnosed with autism after all. I felt angry and frustrated on the author’s behalf.
Autism expresses differently in girls and women than it does in boys and men.
One of the incidents described in the book, is when the author expresses her suspicions about being autistic to the psychiatrist she’s seeing, he wrongfully concludes she’s not autistic because she’s making eye-contact and has always had boyfriends, rationalizing that an autistic person would be incapable of that. Fern knows he’s wrong, just as she knows the others were wrong, but because she’s not able to express herself and shuts down when a conversation goes different from what she’s prepared for, she keeps stuck in the loop of misdiagnoses. The inability to communicate what is happening or how she experiences a situation, left me feeling almost claustrophobic at times. Being forced to sit through the wrong diagnosis, spending time at a psychiatric hospital, or finding yourself in a stressful situation only because you didn’t know how to say no, or otherwise express your feelings about it, is nightmare inducing.
I learned about meltdowns and shut downs (not the same), and masking. I also recognized certain traits and for a second thought, maybe I’m a little bit of that as well. But then learned that we’re in fact “not all a little bit on the spectrum”, and that either you are, or you are not. And this is not just the author’s opinion. She’s done her research and there are footnotes with sources listed.
These footnotes, by the way, are the only thing I had a problem with. And not the notes themselves of course, but the layout: the symbols used to indicate the footnotes are light and tiny. Especially when the symbol follows a quotation mark, it’s easy to miss. Then I’d spot the footnote at the bottom of the page, and I’d wonder what it relates to, and had to scan the page back to find spot. It might sound petty, but as I said: the author has done her research and there are footnotes throughout the book, and missing the indications, kept pulling me out of the story. Thankfully the book is so well written, that I kept with it and picked up easily again.
This book is insightful, and I learned a lot. It’s also funny, and dark, and very real. I laughed, and I cried.
Something different than usual: instead of a cover shot, one of the back of the book. It was the summary on the back cover that pulled me into this book and I wanted to share that as well because it is a far better summation than I can ever provide you with:
Bookworm in the City 