She’d won a place at Edinburgh University. “Funnily enough,” she notes in her punchy memoir Strong Female Character, “none of them had boyfriends because they were eight-year-old boys in pre-war Vienna.” Back in 2002, that psychiatrist didn’t think clever Brady’s fanatical studying of languages and music bore comparison with the little boys’ train obsessions. So no, you don’t fit the criteria.” Two decades later – when Brady had become a hugely successful comedian who regularly smashed up her apartment – she realised that the criteria by which her doctor had assessed her were almost entirely based on Hans Asperger’s research into autistic males. Her chaotic, nonlinear journey-from stripping to getting arrested to finding a lifeline in comedy to her breakout appearance on the Taskmaster TV show as her full, unmasked self-is both a remarkable coming-of-age tale and a dark but poignant tribute to life at the intersection of womanhood and neurodiversity.“You can’t be autistic,” a psychiatrist assured the teenage Fern Brady. In a memoir as hilarious as it is heartbreaking, Fern leaves no stone unturned while detailing her futile attempts at employment, her increasingly destructive coping mechanisms, and the meltdowns that left her mind (and apartment) in ruins. With the piercing clarity and wit that has put her at the top of the British comedy scene, she now reflects on the ways her undiagnosed autism influenced her youth, from the tree that functioned as her childhood best friend to the psychiatric facility where she ended up when neither her parents nor school knew what to do with her.
Coming from a working-class Scottish Catholic family, Fern wasn't exactly poised to receive an open-minded acceptance of her neurodivergence. Strong Female Character is about the years in between, and the unique combination of sexism and ableism that so often prevents autistic women from getting diagnosed until adulthood. But it took until she was thirty-four for her to get diagnosed. After reading about autism in her teens, Fern Brady knew instinctively that she had it-autism explained her sensory issues, her meltdowns, her inability to pick up on social cues-and she told her doctor as much. In this frank and surreal memoir, she delivers a sharp and often hilarious portrait of neurodivergence and living unmasked. ouldn't be autistic because she'd had loads of boyfriends and is good at eye contact. INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER * "Witty, dry, and gimlet-eyed, this is a necessary corrective in a world where Autistic women are all either written off as quiet and docile, or erased entirely." -Devon Price, Ph.D., author of Unmasking Autism Scottish comedian Fern Brady was told she c.
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