Autistic Reader Interview: Caitlin Starling
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
Caitlin Starling is the nationally bestselling author of The Death of Jane Lawrence, as well as the Bram Stoker-nominated and LOHF award-winning The Luminous Dead. Her other works include Yellow Jessamine, a novella in Vampire: The Masquerade: Walk Among Us, and the upcoming Last To Leave The Room. Her nonfiction has appeared in Nightmare, Uncanny, and Tor Nightfire. Caitlin also works in narrative design, and has been paid to invent body parts. Find her work at www.caitlinstarling.com and follow her at @see_starling on Twitter.
Tell me a little bit about yourself. Is there anything you've written or made recently that you'd like other readers to know about? Other than what's in your bio, is there anything about your connection to autism, books, and reading that you'd like to share?
I’m an autistic, queer author of horror and speculative fiction (and a fair amount of fanfiction). I have a new novel coming out in October, Last To Leave The Room, which is a contemporary horror-thriller about an ambitious scientist, her sinking basement, and her doppelganger that appears through a mysterious, impossible door. My last novel, The Death of Jane Lawrence, is a gothic horror novel about an autistic young woman who gets in over her head in a marriage of convenience. It’s full of Victorian surgical horror, mathematics, and magic, and was my first time writing an intentionally autistic protagonist (which you can read a little more about here), and I still have dreams of writing a sequel one day…
I also knit!
What are you reading right now? What are you looking forward to reading soon?
I’ve just started Meet Me In The Margins, a romance novel by Melissa Ferguson, and A Restless Truth, a fantasy-alt history-romance by Freya Marske! I’m just off an accidental post-apocalyptic reading streak followed by some heavy nonfiction, and it’s a delightful break. My TBR is vast and what’s right at the top if always in flux, but a few things on the horizon are My Heart is a Chainsaw, horror by Stephen Graham Jones, and The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daugher, alt-history/fantasy by Theodora Goss.
What are some of your favorite works of fiction? What makes them your favorites?
I usually blank on this sort of question, but luckily I’ve started keeping a list! Recent favorites:
Several People Are Typing by Calvin Kasulke - Imagine you got sucked into your work’s Slack server. It’s told entirely in chat logs, and just goes for it.
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke - phantasmagoric in the best way.
Vita Nostra, by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko - I can’t get over the deeply weird and intense magic system in this one, and I’m so excited for its sequel, Assassin of Reality.
The Library at Mount Char, by Scott Hawkins - yet another “I didn’t know you could do that in a book!” entry. Bizarre, immersive, intoxicating.
Evidence suggests my favorite books tend to be genre-bending and risk-taking, with unexpected plot structures and/or some formal fuckery.
What are some of the characters in fiction that you find most relatable? Some autistic readers love autistic representation, and others prefer aliens, robots, or characters who they relate to in a subtler way; do you notice any patterns in the kinds of characters that resonate for you?
Subject matter experts! I love any book (fiction or non) with a narrator/protagonist who really knows their stuff, and where the author has also taken a clear delight in researching and writing about the topic. This is how I ended up writing a farming memoir… from the perspective of a vampire (part of Walk Among Us, a collection of Vampire: The Masquerade novellas). Some of recent favorites are A Shepherd’s Life by James Rebanks, The Grief of Stones by Katherine Addison, and Leech by Hiron Ennes. The Ancillary Justice series by Ann Leckie also qualifies!
What makes a book difficult for you to read? What, if anything, helps make books accessible to you?
My brain does not handle distant narrators and large casts well - I bounce right off. I much prefer a tightly written main POV (with a mild preference for third person) that lets me really get to know that narrator well. Or, at the very least, I need to feel that the writer really cares about the characters, that they aren’t just necessities of the plot or puppets on a stage.
This month at Everything Is True, we’re interviewing a wide variety of autistic readers with questions like these! You can find a schedule with the rest of the interviews here.