Strong female character by Fern Brady: a review with a clinical perspective
The comedian's memoir of undiagnosed autism is a brilliant, angry gem. But I have quibbles.
Fern Brady is funny. That much is clear from the briefest acquaintance with her stand up material. So when I started Strong female character, her memoir of discovering and coming to terms with her autism, I was expecting dry observations, and a narrative of self discovery and healing. What I got was so, so much better. Because Fern Brady is also angry.
She's angry at institutions that dismiss the distress of autistic women because they can 'seem normal'. She's angry at being dismissed and made to feel stupid by boyfriends, doctors and comedy promoters. She has more nuanced feelings about parents who, in retrospect, were mainly doing their best, but the prevailing feel of the book is a controlled, precise anger.
Which isn't to say it's a rant. The remarkable thing is how a writer as gifted as Brady resists the temptation of rhetoric, either to whip up fury or hilarity. She simply lays out, in lucid and punchy prose, the things that have happened to her. There are flourishes- when lured into a threesome by an older couple, she notices that the naked woman's flesh resembles the Spam she is frying as a post-coital snack. But the narrative hits home mainly because of the lack of ornamentation. When her boyfriend tries to suffocate her, the straightforward description makes it hit all the deeper. Her description and discussion of strip clubs, where she supplemented her student finances, is thought-provoking and original simply because she refuses to buy into the usual narratives.
And she's right about so much here: we have let down autistic women for too long. By 'we' I mean the medical profession, schools, society generally. The dismissal of her problems, and her turning this dismissal on herself as self-harm, is a magnified version of many young women's experience, but sharpened by how unbearable quite mundane interactions have been for her.
Two examples of professional neglect stand out, for me. One, which she spotlights herself, is the doctor who confidently said she couldn't be autistic because she had boyfriends. This is obviously wrong, and reflects harmful stereotyping of autistic people. But it also reflects a deeper problem with the way we assess autism- the tools and criteria are too focused on external behaviours and impairment, and frequently ignore the person's subjective experience.
The second one surprised me with how affecting I found it. While attending a mental health unit, she found her language policed by the officious staff. They stopped her swearing, which is patronising, but what really upset me what that they wouldn't allow her to pronounce Tagliatelle correctly. This combines the petty language policing which is a recognisable feature of healthcare services, with another recurrent theme: so many people in Brady's life simply don't want her to be clever, or well educated.
So much plays into this prejudice: her working class Scottish roots, leading to jokes about deep fried Mars bars on panel shows, her status as a 'mental patient' at various points, her work as a stripper. The way she is consistently patronised combines the experience of young women and of autistic people to toxic effect. Throughout the book (with the heartwarming exception of a spell on Taskmaster) she expresses a feeling of alienation, of feeling decidedly, radically different from those around her.
It's at this point that I need to add a caveat to my admiration. There are two reasons why I might hesitate to make this book one that I want to press onto passers-by, the better to promote understanding of neurodiversity.
The first is factual: there is clear evidence that the behaviours and cognitions that define autism exist on a continuum from typical to atypical. For some people, these traits become troublesome (a process intimately involving their environments) and these people are diagnosable as autistic. One implication of this is that there is no 'clear blue water' between autistic and allistic (non-autistic) people. The distinction is muddy, particularly in the early years, and the categories are to some extent arbitrary.
Unfortunately, this leads some people to dismissively say 'we're all a bit autistic' in a way that minimises both the distress and wonder of autism. This, in turn, leads many autistic people, including Fern Brady, to reject the muddy reality of the autistic spectrum in favour of a clear delineation between 'us' and 'them'. There are two problems with this view.
Firstly it's factually incorrect, which matters when for example considering the very shades-of-grey, complex business of assessment. If there isn’t this ‘clear blue water’, then the people who didn’t diagnose Fern when she was a child may not have been wrong, or neglectful- the situation just may not have been clear-cut.
Secondly, it misses an opportunity for empathy, in both directions. Of course an allistic person cannot claim to understand autistic experience fully, but if they have some watered-down version in their own history, and the imagination to put themselves in the position of someone who has these experiences at full strength, constantly, then you have a chance at understanding.
Empathy the other way, exercised by autistic people towards the allistic, is harder to talk about. But it's the other thing that slightly tripped me up in this book. This is Fern Brady's story, and to an extent she is the only real character in it. The other people exist only in their interactions with her. We learn nothing of their inner lives. It's really important that we don't jump to the conclusion that therefore she doesn't care about them- one of the most insidious myths about autistic people is that they lack empathy for others. Instead, I think the other people's inner lives are missing because Brady wants to stick to the reality of the narrative, without speculation or adornment. For me as an allistic reader, this can feel like an omission, but it strikes me that it's partly an extension of her style, and partly a reflection of her anger at the allistic world.
Ultimately, for society to embrace and nurture neurodivergent people will require mutual understanding and two-way conversation.There is a need for bridge-building books which seek to bring autistics and allistics together. Strong Female Character is not building bridges. It is, however, a brilliantly expressed narrative of the marginalisation of autistic experience. And to be cherished, like its author, in its own right and on its own terms.