2024/013: Strong Female Character — Fern Brady

[tamaranth]

2024/013: Strong Female Character — Fern Brady

My mum and teen brother came through to Edinburgh and took me out for Japanese food as there was no other way in our culture of saying, ‘Sorry you’ve gone mad again.’ [loc. 2601]

Comedian Fern Brady's account of growing up in a working-class environment with undiagnosed autism: being treated as 'bad' or 'difficult' as a child, a spell in the local psychiatric unit, feeling -- and being -- excluded at school and university... Brady (whose comedy work I wasn't familiar with) is scathingly and refreshingly honest. She illustrates facts and misconceptions about autism with anecdata from her own experience, and leavens the grimness with humour. I'm (probably) not autistic but can relate to quite a few of her experiences. It did strike me that the combination of Brady's autism and her working-class background was a toxic synergy: her struggle to function at university, and her ongoing difficulties with social subtext and white lies, felt like class issues as much as autism issues. ("Why did everyone go around speaking in code then getting angry at me because I didn’t have the glossary for their secret language?" [loc. 876])

This book has given me more insight into the ways in which autistic people can struggle to make sense of allistic society. At some points it made me weepy: I definitely laughed out loud more than once. Frank and feminist and funny and angry.

Fulfils the ‘honest’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge. "Our autistic honesty is described as blunt or brutal or too much..."

Comments

[dalmeny]

dmw introduced me to Fern Brady a few years ago, through clips online, and then we went to see her at the 2019 Adelaide Fringe. This year she's returning for the first time since then, so I need to book tickets.

I hadn't heard that she'd written a book or about her autism. I did just finish Hannah Gadsby's autobiography about growing up autistic, queer and working-class in Tasmania.