## Strong Female Character highlights 🔹 *parent* [[❞ Strong Female Character|Strong Female Character]] 🔸 *author* [[Fern Brady]] > [!caption-left] >> (thumb:: ) >> Strong Female Character ### Metadata **title**:: Strong Female Character highlights **author**:: Fern Brady **category**:: books/highlights **image_url**:: "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/91Qcm2V7jXL._SY160.jpg" **cover**:: [cover](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/91Qcm2V7jXL._SY160.jpg) **modified**:: Sep 15, 2024 ### Highlights **Added November 16, 2024 at 11:58 PM** [Location 157](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BSWCL8H9&location=157) 🟦 > *A guy had called me a ‘gorgeous weirdo’ once and I knew instinctively that was good – that the ‘gorgeous’ part would help cancel out any potential discomfort with the ‘weirdo’ part, even if only for a little while. When I told all this to the doctor who finally diagnosed me almost 20 years later she rolled her eyes in despair before I finished my sentence. ‘You wouldn’t believe how often we hear this from women,’ she said.* ^755460625 [Location 180](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BSWCL8H9&location=180) 🟦 > *My mum visited for two days once and immediately after she left I pulled a cupboard door off its hinges and bruised my hand from punching through it. No one was in the house. As I tidied up the mess in silence I thought, That’s weird. Maybe I found Mum staying stressful?* ^755460626 [Location 217](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BSWCL8H9&location=217) > *Gradually I came to understand that I was supposed to engage in a social game of pretending I wanted to meet the person not for work purposes, but for a coffee. I understood this was called ‘building relationships’ and it’s where you pretend you want to be friends with someone in order to obtain the thing that you want. Sometimes you had to keep these games up for years at a time to get to work with them. It seemed nuts but I’d learned the world wasn’t going to change to accommodate me so I started practising it.* ^755460627 [Location 228](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BSWCL8H9&location=228) 🟥 > *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.* ^755460628 [Location 263](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BSWCL8H9&location=263) 🟧 > *‘So that means they…are being nice by lying to you?’ I was appalled this deception was considered a kindness. He sighed heavily. ‘Well, no, Fern, because you call a lot of things “lying”. You call some of my jokes “lies”. Sometimes people say things because they find it uncomfortable to say what they mean. And…I guess they see it as kinder to not say what they think.’* ^755460629 [Location 297](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BSWCL8H9&location=297) 🟦 > *I didn’t know how to say that this wasn’t a tiredness I could sleep off. It was one that required me to sit at home alone quietly for maybe a month. Maybe six months. That was all I needed.* ^755460630 [Location 322](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BSWCL8H9&location=322) 🟥 > *Meanwhile, the meltdowns continued to worsen at home. Autistic women are chameleons and can become brilliant at masking, but doing so is like having a computer that should only be running one or two programmes at once and forcing it to run up to ten. The computer will do it but eventually it’ll overheat and shut down – and that was what was happening the second I got home and shut the front door behind me.* ^755460631 [Location 406](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BSWCL8H9&location=406) > *Autistic women speak out of turn a lot – that their direct honesty is jarring and unacceptable is a problem for all women, especially when we look at how \#MeToo played out with so many women feeling unable to communicate consent clearly. Autistic women pursue their own interests obsessively – I come from a part of Scotland where women mostly exist as secondary characters in their husbands’ lives. Autistic women have an almost childlike sense of injustice, meaning they are also often ahead of the curve in pushing feminist interests forward.* ^755460632 [Location 410](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BSWCL8H9&location=410) 🟥 > *Honesty is powerful but it’s not something that comes easily to allistic people because they’re so driven to fit in with others that they prize collective values over truth. This is doubly so when it comes to women. Our autistic honesty is described as blunt or brutal or too much when really, at our best, we exist like the child in ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’,[*11] pointing out what is false or hypocritical or a collective delusion.* ^755460633 [Location 447](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BSWCL8H9&location=447) 🟧 > *‘By degrees I made a discovery of still greater moment. I found that these people possessed a method of communicating their experience and feelings to one another by articulate sounds. I perceived that the words they spoke sometimes produced pleasure or pain, smiles or sadness, in the minds and countenances of the hearers. This was indeed a godlike science, and I ardently desired to become acquainted with it.’ —Mary Shelley, Frankenstein* ^755460634 [Location 473](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BSWCL8H9&location=473) > *For most autistics existing in a world not built for them, anxiety is the baseline and constant background hum that their daily life has to play over.* ^755460635 [Location 503](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BSWCL8H9&location=503) 🟦 > *It felt like there was a cleverness in my head but a slowness when it came to replying to insults. When someone insulted me, the Politeness and Nice Normal Girl programmes that I had to run every day in order to rub along with everyone overrode the other bit in the back of my brain that quietly said, That’s not okay.* ^755460636 [Location 522](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BSWCL8H9&location=522) 🟧 > *I wrote letters to her that had an anxious, instructional quality to them: Abby, please let’s write letters to each other every week and let’s say how many boyfriends we have. How many boyfriends do you have? I have eight.* ^755460637 [Location 527](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BSWCL8H9&location=527) 🟦 > *Scripting is crucial for autistics. When you have no social intuition, you can use scripts to interact more effectively.* ^755460638 [Location 660](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BSWCL8H9&location=660) 🟦 > *For someone who was a passionate defender of the unborn, Toodaloo seemed to hate children as soon as they were no longer foetuses.* ^755750114 [Location 837](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BSWCL8H9&location=837) 🟦 > *She sobbed harder. ‘You could have just kissed him!’ Jeez. Sometimes it felt like we were characters in wildly different novels: Mum a wide-eyed schoolgirl in an Enid Blyton story and me a city slicker in a Jackie Collins bonkbuster. I shook my head no, thinking I couldn’t tell someone like her about bodies being on fire and getting wet and hot lust.* ^756132462 [Location 1177](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BSWCL8H9&location=1177) > *I’ve discovered that one of the most hurtful aspects of crossed wires in a lifetime of dealing with allistic people is that they tend to look for and assume there’s an unspoken agenda in your behaviour.* ^757743529 [Location 1759](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BSWCL8H9&location=1759) 🟦 > *We all went on a flatmates’ day trip to the STD clinic. I had no STDs whatsoever. One of the other girls had chlamydia from her so-called loving relationship. I was secretly smug all the way home, knowing the connection between virtue and virus was a scam.* ^758480074 [Location 1766](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BSWCL8H9&location=1766) 🟦 > *Autism is so insular and self-contained that for us, asking for help sometimes feels like going against our nature.* ^758480075 [Location 2142](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BSWCL8H9&location=2142) 🟦 > *In a strip club, groups of men are in a safe space where they’re encouraged to play up to hypermasculine ideals – and because they believe no one in power is watching them they project all their shame and irregular feelings about women onto the strippers, who they believe exist in a vacuum and won’t ever speak out about their behaviour or, say, write about it in a tell-all memoir.* ^764538546 [Location 2327](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BSWCL8H9&location=2327) > *I couldn’t find another job where I didn’t get the sack when I was rude to the customers. Further, there was no other role that’d allow me to drag a guy on stage, tie a belt around his neck and make him bark like a dog while I kicked and throttled him.* ^796992346 [Location 2369](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BSWCL8H9&location=2369) 🟥 > *I’ve still to see a realistic portrayal of a strip club on TV. For me, it was a disco ball illuminating an empty room with a handful of girls sitting watching telly in PVC nurse costumes while two disabled men walked around shouting greetings at them.* ^796992347 [Location 2412](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BSWCL8H9&location=2412) 🟧 > *And yet, to anyone versed in how female autism presents, the autistic interviewee’s story shines through regardless. At one point she tells her confused-looking interviewer: ‘No one wants to be around me for who I am. People want to be around me for what I can give to them. And, like, for most men what I can give to them is sex.’* ^796992348 [Location 2491](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BSWCL8H9&location=2491) > *The way Catholics deal with dying is remarkably similar to the way they deal with sex in that they seem to find both things very embarrassing and prefer not to acknowledge their existence.* ^796992349 [Location 2591](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BSWCL8H9&location=2591) 🟦 > *It was my final year of university and things weren’t going great with my latest boyfriend, Josh. We were walking home from a night out when he said, ‘You really love to tell the same stories over and over again.’* ^796992350 [Location 2680](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BSWCL8H9&location=2680) > *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.* ^796992351 [Location 2829](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BSWCL8H9&location=2829) > *Just you wait, I thought. I’ll think of something really clever to reply to you in about a decade, just as soon as I replay this scenario in my head dozens of times.* ^796992352 [Location 2937](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BSWCL8H9&location=2937) 🟦 > *‘We love you but we thought you didn’t have enough screen time under your belt.’ This was confusing as the only way of getting more screen time was for them to put me on screen more.* ^796992353 [Location 3244](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BSWCL8H9&location=3244) > *The following day I went in to have my makeup done by a new makeup artist. In a way, I like meeting new people as it means every day is a new opportunity to redeem yourself, to make a fresh start at being seen as a normal woman and practise at it. It’s when people get to know you that they realize something’s seriously off and that’s harder to rectify.* ^796992354 [Location 3265](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BSWCL8H9&location=3265) 🟦 > *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 late-diagnosed women and non-binary folk.* ^796992355 > *Note: ==Why non-binary people? That does that have to do with autism?==* [Location 3366](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BSWCL8H9&location=3366) > *It’s uncomfortable that this isn’t all good or all bad or a happy ending or a sad ending, but just a mess that everyone muddled through. It’s very painful to start loving someone when holding on to the idea of hating them keeps you safe.* ^796992356