Fern Brady (2023) Strong Female Character.

Fern Brady is a well-known comedian. I didn’t know that before I read her autobiography, Strong Female Character. She comes from Bathgate and planned to kill herself before she left school if she didn’t get the grades she needed to go to university. Call that overkill. That’s normal for her in a world of hypervigilance in which there’s no such thing as normal.

For convenience all the information the reader needs is on the cover.

‘Fern Brady is a woman. She is also autistic with no presets for being a ‘good woman’—she never hated her body or indulged in messy millennium shame. Her bluntness was always misdiagnosed; first with medication and then a trip to a psych unit. She now lives out of wedlock in London. She has zero children’.

The back cover offers a summary of The Sunday Times bestseller.

1. I’m diagnosed with autism 20 years after telling a doctor I had it.

2. My terrible Catholic childhood.

3. My friendship with an elderly [Asian] man who runs the corner shop and is definitely not trying to groom me. [He definitely is, but she’s so blinkered she thinks he’s being kind.]

4. Homelessness.

5. Stripping. [Which has nothing to do with sex or low-self-esteem and everything to do with autistic women, in particular, making a rational choice to do something that pays better than the shitty jobs on offer.]

6. More stripping but with more nervous breakdowns.

7. I hate everybody in Edinburgh uni etc. [Middle and upper-class girls police each other’s eating, I never realised that. Watch Mean Girls!]

8. REDACTED as too spicy. [I didn’t notice it was spicy! I must be autistic?]

9. After everyone tells me I don’t look autistic, I try to cure my autism and get addicted to Xanax.

10. REDACTED as too embarrassing. [I figured if I could make enough money before I was forty and had the career-ending nervous breakdown I seemed to be heading towards [over getting her nails cut too short] I could retire and go and live as a hermit in Scotland.’

Seems perfectly reasonable to me. Read on.

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