Fern Brady

'This is a book about how being a woman gets in the way of people's expectation of what autism should look like and, equally, how being autistic gets in the way of people's expectations of what a woman should look like.' Strong Female Character is a game-changing memoir on sexism and neurodiversity. Fern Brady will use her voice as a neurodivergent, working-class woman from Scotland to bring issues such as sex work, abusive relationships and her time spent in teenage mental health units to the page. It will take a sledgehammer to the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope which is mistakenly applied to neurodiverse women. It will also look at how her lack of regard for social expectations ultimately meant she surpassed any limitations of what a Scottish working-class woman can do.

Strong Female Character

Laura Dobie

If you've ever been on a night out where you got blackout drunk and have laughed the next day as your friends tell you all the stupid stuff you said, that's what being autistic feels like for me: one long blackout night of drinking except there's no socially sanctioned excuse for your gaffes and no one is laughing.

The length of the book combined with low literacy levels in the class meant reading The Hobbit took up the entire school year. Taking action on this theft of my reading time, I started sneaking my own books in to hide behind the cover of The Hobbit and drown out the guff about Middle Earth and Gandalf. I got caught one day and a discussion was had with my parents. I was given special permission to keep reading what I liked in class.

Gran always gave the impression of a Hollywood starlet who'd been dropped into our area and was being forced to method act by living in a council house with a drunk. Any time I didn't pronounce the t in 'butter' she'd lecture me on the importance of something called the glottal stop while Granda drooled on himself semi-conscious in the corner.

The othering of sex workers gives all the good girls a boost, something that helps them feel like their lives, their notions of behaving respectably, their gender performance, their church weddings and the subsequent thanklessness of unpaid childcare is somehow okay; rewarding, even. It's an elegant piece of stand-up that made me laugh in spite of myself but, as the #MeToo movement revealed, it's woefully inaccurate. Women do get groped in the workplace and are too ashamed to say anything 'cause normal workplaces keep up the pretence that women are equal to their male colleagues. The bind is this: I've never lost jobs in a strip club for speaking out about male harassment. We had no shame in calling men out in the clubs. Instead, we just had the offensive man immediately removed by a big Latvian bouncer on steroids.

(There's no big reveal down the line, where Jim is actually a rapist or a bad bastard. To this day I have no idea how he ended up in strip clubs and not running a Rotary Club.)

They'd decided to become strippers after taking a pole fitness class, which is the equivalent to becoming a sniper in the army because you played Call of Duty once.

For all her flaws, my mum never raised me with dysfunctional attitudes to food or made me think I was greedy or not thin enough. She was always clear she disliked me for me.

I've accepted I may never have lasting friendships or know how to maintain them. I feel despair at the thought of having another relationship and introducing someone new to this mess. Soon it’ll be menopause and the disruption to my hormones will send my oversensitive system madder than normal, just like any chemicals or drugs do. Then the increasing illness of middle age will mean navigating the minefield of dealing with doctors who misinterpret and misread autistic pain.

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