Between that [time] and my mother’s death, three years later, I was just trying to hold her and hold myself together. Joanne related the stories of each of these women to her own very well and it made me feel quite seen; there's other women out there just like me. i had never properly examined autistic womanhood until i saw spelled out in many examples and experiences ways autistic women appear to defy and 'fail', in the eyes of the patriarchy, to be women. But my assumption was: we’ve always been here, even if we haven’t been included in the traditional autism framework.

Letters To My Weird Sisters by Joanne Limburg | Waterstones

She says she learnt to “play the funny card very early on in life”, because humour is a way of letting uncomfortable truths slip into a room. I’ve been told that somebody with a profile like mine ought to have dropped out of university,” she says. By ‘Autism mums’ I mean non-autistic mothers of autistic children, many of which are wonderful (thankfully mine included), but they (‘autism parents’, not just the mums of course) often overshadow autistic voices, attempting to speak for us instead.We are, all of us, striving constantly to pass those normality exams, to take our raw and boundless selves and squash them into the forms of neater and nicer girls. In this book Limburg explores women that have been similarly marked ‘outsiders’ through history, and through writing personal letters from she to them, humanises their differences and compassionately explores what made them ‘weird’. The author did an awesome job explaining how it feels to have autism rather than explaining what autism is. When I stand back and look at it all together - I can see all the ways in which autism, gender and invalidation trauma twine around each other.

Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism - Goodreads

It's possible to save these lives—all we need to do is get everyone to agree that it's worth the effort. Limburg describes movingly her own struggles as a new mother and the pressure of society's expectations.

So I’m afraid I went ahead and did all those things, as if I were – shock horror – an ACTUAL PERSON. This book was so well-conceived and so well-written, and just overall super genuine and thoughtful—I was kind of surprised to find that I actually have no notes for this one. Kepler’s famous son came to her defence, explaining that she preferred to use words and not gestures to express herself. The book touches upon eugenics, psychodynamics, nazism, mum-shaming, being weird and different, social isolation, and of course, not dressing well.