Joanne Limburg

An autistic feminist author looks at women's history, in search of her 'weird sisters'.

It seemed to me that many of the moments when my autism had caused problems, or at least marked me out as different, were those moments when I had come up against some unspoken law about how a girl or a woman should be, and failed to meet it.

An autism diagnosis in midlife enabled Joanne Limburg to finally make sense of why her emotional expression, social discomfort and presentation had always marked her as an outsider.

Eager to discover other women who had been misunderstood in their time, she writes a series of wide-ranging letters to four 'weird sisters' from history, addressing topics including autistic parenting, social isolation, feminism, the movement for disability rights and the appalling punishments that have been meted out over centuries to those deemed to fall short of the norm.

This heartfelt, deeply compassionate and wholly original work humanizes women who have so often been dismissed for their differences, and will be celebrated by 'weird sisters' everywhere.

On Autism and Feminism

Letters to My Weird Sisters

Joanne Limburg wears comic camouflage to stalk serious subjects, from envy and guilt to bereavement and its tangled aftermath. Her often boisterous poems celebrate the deﬁant vulnerability of modern women, exploring their lives as daughters, mothers, friends and rivals, as well as the never-ending struggle to keep body and soul on speaking terms, while under attack from within and without - whether by boredom, depression, insomnia, indigestion, oppression, mirrors, misogyny or just other people. Her poems address the experience of being a Jew in the West at this point in history, with an awareness of the debt she owes to stubborn and resilient ancestors. This sense of a rich inheritance is reflected in her voice, which draws on English-language poetry but also on nursery rhymes and everyday speech, on hymns remembered from school and the cadences of synagogue and Jewish household ritual. Shortlisted for the Forward Prize Best First Collection.

Femenismo

This memoir of one woman's life as a sufferer of obsessive-compulsive disorder follows her quest to understand her predicament and to manage her symptoms, taking the reader with her on a journey through consulting rooms, libraries and internet sites.

A Memoir

The Woman Who Thought Too Much

There are two acts of recovery in this book - one of a lost brother, and another of a lost self. Joanne Limburg commemorates both in her third collection, The Autistic Alice. In its title-sequence she uses Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass to explore her own experiences as a girl and young woman. Growing up with undiagnosed Asperger's, she often identified with Alice, a logical and curious child adrift in an arbitrary world. Collaging lines and phrases drawn from the two Alice books, she creates a disturbingly effective language to express the nature, discomfort and alienation of autistic experiences. In her neurodiverse verse, a text can become a rabbit-hole to another world, or a mirror. The poems that make up the book's opening sequence, The Oxygen Man, originally published as a pamphlet, were written in response to the death of Limburg's younger brother, a brilliant chemist who took his own life in 2008. They follow her as she visits the mid-Western town where he lived, worked and died; range back over their shared childhood; and look ahead as she tries to work out what it means to be the one who stays behind.

The Autistic Alice

Longlisted for the Historical Writers Association debut novel award 2016. Every time I see the King and the Queen, I am reminded of what it is I have done, and then I am afraid, I am beyond all expression afraid. The wicked, bawdy Restoration court is no place for a child princess. Ten-year-old Anne cuts an odd figure: a sickly child, she is drawn towards improper pursuits. Cards, sweetmeats, scandal and gossip with her Ladies of the Bedchamber figure large in her life. But as King Charles's niece, Anne is also a political pawn, who will be forced to play her part in the troubled Stuart dynasty. As Anne grows to maturity, she is transformed from overlooked Princess to the heiress of England. Forced to overcome grief for her lost children, the political manoeuvrings of her sister and her closest friends and her own betrayal of her father, she becomes one of the most complex and fascinating figures of English history.

A Novel of Queen Anne

A Want of Kindness

SHORTLISTED FOR THE JQ WINGATE, 2017 My mother, my family and Judaism are nested inside each other. I am Jewish and always Jewish; it's analogous with family, however hard it is, and however strained, it can never be disavowed... I remain, as my therapist put it, 'enmeshed', all tangled up in the family hoard. This book has been both a continuation of my conversations with them, and an attempt to untangle myself. This is Joanne's account of coming to terms with her brother's suicide and through that process, the entirety of her family life. In Small Pieces Joanne explores her childhood, her Jewishness and her mother's death as well as that of her brother. The life and family Joanne describes is a complex combination of conflicting influences - both scientific and literary; Jewish and humanist impulses; and middle America and North London settings. Small Pieces is a beautiful and searingly honest meditation on family and faith.

A Book of Lamentations

Small Pieces

Joanne Limburg thinks things she doesn't want to think, and does things she doesn't want to do. As a young woman, obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviours had come to completely dominate her life. She knew that something was wrong, but it would take many painful years of searching to find someone who could explain her symptoms. The Woman Who Thought Too Much is a vividly honest, beautifully told and darkly witty memoir about the quest to understand and manage a life with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

Joanne Limburg

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