Scottish stand up Fern Brady puts autism in the spotlight in this week's Star Read
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With a colourful life as a stand up, preceded by time as a stripper, a fascination with academic study and the constant awareness her responses to life are different and difficult, Fern Brady’s lifestory is an unputdownable read about survival and how you can become a star performer, even if – maybe especially if – you are autistic.
Recently, awareness of the problems neurodivergent women have even getting a diagnosis that helps them discover their true selves, has been spotlighted.
This week [on Thursday, April 27, details below] an event featuring ADHD females and diagnosis in Inverness highlights an awareness of lives spent coping with a condition most people still don’t understand.
Fern Brady, from Bathgate – now well-known from TV appearances on programmes such as Taskmaster and Live At The Apollo – gives a beautifully-written and frank account of her own experiences.
She writes early on: “The public perception of autistics is so heavily based on the stereotype of men who love trains or science that many women miss out on diagnosis and are thought of as studious instead.”
Self-harming and spending time in a psychiatric hospital is the dark side of Fern’s experiences. Plus the highest of highs, but the lowest of lows too. She spends time in a psychiatric unit, is chucked out by her parents from home, turns to Xanax to cope with the world, from a young age she researches her condition as rigorously as her Edinburgh University course which she strips to pay for initially.
Medicated, she talks to her mother and brother: “I told them I’d realised it was my life’s purpose to become a stand-up comedian. Their faces wrinkled with concern at how unwell I was.”
But she is right!
" ... the comedy circuit was somewhere I immediately felt at ease... Everything about my personality that made me a problem at university or in most jobs seemed to be treated as some sort of magical power in stand up."
And with time Fern learns to read herself, though the late diagnosis of autism brings regrets and a sense of 'what if' and a clear-eyed description of what it takes to manage a life-long condition like autism.
So is it a happy ending?
There is no big punchline to give away.
She writes: "I still have to half-mask at work. Still, the more I 'came out' as autistic ... the less I felt revolted at my odd posture or voice; and in turn, the more I stood up for myself the calmer I felt. The calmer I felt, the more the meltdowns reduced further. Learning how to cope with them came only in part from my therapist – mostly it came from the radical autism-acceptance movement that is growing online among the late-diagnosed women and non-binary folk ... It should not be the case that I'm having to learn how to cope as a newly-diagnosed person from 19-year-old girls on TikTok. Is it right that when I felt completely isolated in those first few months after diagnosis, my first source of information was podcasts created by other late-diagnosed autistic women who, like me, had been unable to tell anyone what was happening outside the four walls of their house and, finding a total vacuum where information should be, have gone searching for answers online?"
She – and we – certainly have a greater understanding as the book ends of why her responses to life are so different from neurotypical people.
And you have a sense by the end of the book of getting close to a strong female who can write like a dream, among many talents. Fern doesn’t seem in a bad place for her story to pause, in what is a fascinating, if challenging – and always creatively rich – life that takes courage and a lot of strength to live.
The book Strong Female Character (Octopus Books, £16.99) is out now.
The event referred to above is on Thursday, April 27 with ADHD As Females Podcast: The Too Much Tour at the Tooth & Claw, Inverness. TICKETS:
