Review of the comedian's memoir about her undiagnosed autism

It will come as little surprise to those who know Fern Brady’s comedy that her memoir is brutally, sometimes uncomfortably, honest. Her autism means she doesn’t cope well with subtext or euphemism, compelling her to tell it like it is. She’s unflinching in calling out those who have failed her  – of whom there are many – and bluntly frank about how her condition can manifest itself, despite her fears that such candour might make her unemployable or unloveable.

Her autism was diagnosed later in life, and it’s shocking how many clues were missed. Sensory overloads would – and still do – lead to violent meltdowns, which led her to being branded as troublesome – even though academically she was a straight-A student.

‘You can’t be autistic,’ one supposed expert told her as a teenager. ‘You’re making eye contact  and you have a boyfriend.’

The condition is often missed in women, she explains – and cites the research to prove it. That's normally attributed to women being better at ‘masking’ behaviour than men. She tells of aping social cues, without necessarily understanding them, to fit in more – ‘reading and studying humans like a Martian,’ she explains ‘None of it is intuitive’. Meanwhile, her girlhood obsession with academic study was not as obvious a flag as a boy’s fixation on trains, for instance, might be.

Her working-class Catholic parents in the West Lothian backwater of Bathgate didn’t know how to give her support. There, ‘children were not the longed-for IVF children of the middle-aged middle class – pampered investments that you needed to see a return on – but something dealt to you in life that you just had to come with, like a cancer or a chronic illness’.

As the overwhelming sensations of a noisy house and rowdy school days led to depression, she turned to self-harm – an episode she can now recall with jet-black humour as she remembers trying to carve ‘FUCK’ in her leg, but messing it up and ending up with the ‘much cheerier "A-OK"’ instead.

She was sent to a mental health unit for teenagers, but it was no help. There she recalls one fellow pupil talking about being raped, only to be chastised for swearing when describing her attacker. In fact, Brady is failed by health professionals at every turn, most of them failing to even try to understand her behaviours, dismissing her with poor advice and thoughtless misdiagnoses. But there’s no denying her behaviour could be extreme. At its worse, Brady attacked a woman at a party with a wine bottle, leaving her victim needing stitches and her with a criminal record.

Later in life, Brady turned to stripping, which is, apparently, not uncommon for autistic women. The clear social rules in Edinburgh’s clubs – with transgressors thrown out  by bouncers – were easier to accept than the uncrackable secret codes of office interactions.

She found another home in stand-up, after first giving it a go for a newspaper feature she was writing. It’s a scene generally more accepting of neurodiversity… if not always so welcoming of women. With typical directness, Brady addresses the stereotypes she’s often expected to play to, especially on panel shows, as a working-class Scottish woman. That her ‘almost constant overwhelming anxiety’ was seen as aloofness or anger reinforced that image.

Nonetheless, the casual structure of the comedy industry, with Blurred Lines between socialising and work, does not suit her autistic brain. Nor do the euphemisms deployed when getting turned down for a job, or the unspoken expectation that women have to look good (for which, read 'thin') to be on TV. But despite all this, it beats the fluorescent lights and unaccommodating, petty rules of a 9-5.

By being so frank about her experiences, Brady opens up the world of autism to the allistic – as people who don’t have the condition are known. Even more crucially, Strong Female Character will reassure fellow autistic folk that they are not alone. She was crying out for this sort of information as a youngster, and even today she finds most of the literature aimed at the parents of autistic children, as if they do not grow up to be autistic adults.

Her diagnosis does not, however bring things to a neat conclusion. She still suffers meltdowns – indeed the emotions raised by the bidding war for this very book triggered more – but she’s figuring out how to reduce them, but trial and error. She has a rapprochement, of sorts, with her mother,  but the scars in the relationship are not healed.

Addressing the reader at the end of the book, she concludes: ’I’ve spared you nothing because I know that if I’d kept anything back or secret I’d inadvertently be giving the message that it’s shameful… I’m not keeping quiet about it but maybe I should. All I can do is keep talking about it and hope you’ll then go and make things better for the next autistic or misfit girl you meet.’

• Strong Female Character  by Fern Brady is published by Brazen at £16.99. It is available from Amazon at £15.54 in hardback, or £8.99 on Kindle, or below from Bookshop.org, which helps support local retailers.

Review date: 27 Feb 2023
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett