The letter to Virginia Woolf explores internalized ableism and the depiction of outcast femme characters in literature with examples pulled from Woolf’s biographical writings and Mrs.

Letters To My Weird Sisters by Joanne Limburg | Waterstones Letters To My Weird Sisters by Joanne Limburg | Waterstones

I think my less awestruck second read goes to show how much i've learned between now and my first read which is pretty cool. Her bold, unique exploration of autism reflects centuries of prejudice and more recent and shameful care scandals involving autistic people.But Limburg has found “reassurance and real joy” in reaching back through history to find connections with women who also struggled to conform. I imagine this book would have been a thousand times more compelling if it was a memoir of the author's experience as a late-diagnosed autistic Jewish mother.

Letters To My Weird Sisters: On Autism, Feminism and Letters To My Weird Sisters: On Autism, Feminism and

Because of my own experience of miscarriage, I wanted a way to explore the subject without its feeling too close and too raw. When Alice is sent out to the office, “eyes watch her thudding damply to the door,/ the dumbest Alice-lump they ever saw. She reminds readers that the author of Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927) was a woman whose “uncanny” mannerisms and offbeat dress sense also drew comment. I was also grateful for the nuance she brought to the topic of “autism mothers” and felt both understood and rightly challenged by her words.

Diagnosed with autism in midlife, Joanne Limburg finally felt she could make sense of what marked her as an outsider. As a teenager in the 1980s, she couldn’t find a corner to claim for herself in the shiny pop culture. Her friend said she had Asperger Syndrome, an autism spectrum diagnosis then (less now) applied to people who might experience some challenges but who displayed high intelligence and unimpaired language skills. How as women we are held to certain expectations of how we act and behave and are constantly reminded and policed on that.