Oof. What a vital read. Limburg explores autism, parenting, feminism, disability rights and society’s relationship with difference through four letters to her “weird sisters” from history. Her letter to Frau V, the (possibly autistic) mother to Fritz, one of Hans Asperger’s autistic patients, reaches far into the culture of motherhood over the past decades and I found it very affecting. 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. 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. Dalloway, Stephen King’s Carrie, and Margaret Drabble’s novels. The letter to Adelheid Bloch speaks to Limburg’s experience as a Jewish and disabled woman. The letter to Frau V speaks to Limburg’s experience as a disabled mother and the child of a mother who did her best to advocate for her daughter in a society that offered absolutely no recourse to the kind of help and support she and her child needed. The letter to Katharina Kepler focused on the traumatic and literally life-threatening effects of social isolation and stigmatization of disabled people. And finally, the letter to the late Caron Freeborn is an emotional and moving “thank you” from the author to a fellow Autistic writer, inspiration, and friend. Then there is the unique structure of the book. I thought at some point I would get used to the second-person letters to various "weird sisters" in history, but I never did. I think it ended up being an impersonal attempt at combining personal stories with those of the people Limburg wrote to. 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. So much to dive into there, and this simply scratched the surface. Forfatteren er selv autistisk og frem for at prøve at diagnostisere disse kvinder så fortæller hun om deres liv og oplevelser og hvordan hun tolker det gennem en autistisk linse. Samtidig deler hun refleksion fra sit eget liv og der hvor hun kan se sig selv i deres liv.

Limburg is endearing, she writes with humour, and doesn’t shy away from her own experiences. I can’t wait to read more of her books. this is my account, written under my name, and I'm not going to describe myself in someone else's terms…” Whether they were women who went against the grain, or women whose identities and behaviours clashed with wider society (Jews and people with mental illness during the time of the Nazis, women behaving 'erratically' during a time of witch purges), Limburg's letters to these women feel like both an apology for how they were treated, and an attempt to find commonality with them. As part of this, Limburg weaves in her own stories and experiences, and, in doing so, makes an often beautiful and heartbreaking plea for understanding and action. In her sixth decade, Limburg reflects that “there is cultural space for outspoken older women. We still get vilified. But nobody knows what to do with you when you’re 22 and you think you have a speaking part. Being a girl is about looking cool or looking accommodating. It’s not about speech.” Because she experiences other people’s distress quite acutely, Limburg has developed a stereotypically female tendency to “smooth the room because I can’t cope with the jaggedness”. My personal favourites were the letter to Virginia Woolf, Adelheid Bloch, and Katharina Kepler - although every letter is exceptional.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. MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—Autism, epistolary memoir, disability awareness, disability history, adult diagnoses, solidarity with the experiences of historical figures, intersectional feminism, patriarchal oppression & weaponized misogyny, nazis & eugenics, state-sanctioned murder, institutionalization, ableism, bullying, pregnancy & parenthood as a disabled person, social isolation, disability rights movement Limburg was 30 when she published her debut poetry collection, Femenismo, shortlisted for the Forward Prize Best First Collection in 2000. A second collection, Paraphernalia, followed in 2007. Although the cliched, Rain Man-fuelled perception of autism suggests that autistic people are only capable of excelling in maths and science, Limburg says: “Making art is not a remotely neurotypical thing to do! I’m not going to name names. But if you think about how certain very well-known music producers have been described as obsessive and eccentric and so on, with an ability to hear things other people can’t hear… well. What is that?”

Overall, an interesting book that covered topics that I have not read about before. I would definitely recommend. I love the premise of this book, I love the letters from Limburg that make these historical women current and therefore bringing their differences and ‘weird’-ness into the modern day where perhaps they would have been better understood. I think it's a wonderful read for anyone interested in disability and gender, regardless of whether they're autistic. Limburg is a talented writer and each letter was cleverly crafted. I really like the choice to frame each chapter as a letter to an individual. This worked for a variety of reasons, I think in the case of Woolf in particular that while she is not typically connected to the experiences of autism, it helped that it was a letter as it gave the sense of here are the ways that you and I connect. While I am sure it could have been done otherwise, I feel it helped to make clear that Limburg is not attempting to diagnose Woolf. It also served one of Limburg's concerns which was not to repeat what has historically been done to disabled people which is to talk about them, assuming their experiences without really engaging with the individual. This is particularly important for the second letter to Adelheid Bloch who was non-verbal. Then an old friend of Limburg’s from Cambridge shifted her understanding of those criteria. 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. “She wasn’t the stereotype at all!” says Limburg, still sounding surprised. “She was very sociable, empathetic… a very good actor. Then I typed ‘Aspergers’ and ‘women’ into Google. I’d never put the two words together before. And there I was, very recognisably, at the intersection.”Limburg describes movingly her own struggles as a new mother and the pressure of society’s expectations…Through such delicately intertwined experiences, Limburg quietly shouts for change.’ Times Literary Supplement CW // the holocaust, eugenics, state-sanctioned murder of disabled people, suicide, bullying, miscarriage, pregnancy (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics!) In Letters To My Weird Sisters: On Autism, Feminism and Motherhood, Joanne Limburg writes a series of letters to different women in history from Virginia Woolf to Katherina Kepler. In writing to these various weird women, Limburg is not saying that these women were necessarily autistic but looks at them through the lens of autism and how aspects such as their bluntness, non-conformity, and other aspects that relate to being "different" and autistic. Through the story of Frau V, Limburg reflects on the relationship between motherhood and autism, which is encapsulated by the infamous Refrigerator Mother theory popularised by Austrian-US psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim (e.g. Bettelheim 1967). Bettelheim’s heavily-refuted theory, which erroneously suggested that autism results from a mother’s cold and distant attitude towards her child, had and continues to have a destructive impact on many mothers of autistic children. Further, Frau V’s similarities to her son could not be read in the same way because autism was – and in part still is – understood as a ‘male’ condition. Thus, Frau V’s story represents the ways that autistic women have historically been invisible to psychiatrists and other clinicians. Psychiatry has consistently overlooked autistic women and the intersection between autism and gender oppression, with the consequences of this invisibilisation continuing to influence women’s lives. Autism has historically been considered a predominantly male condition, with discussions of autism often revolving around its manifestations during childhood, especially in middle-class white boys. Discussing Frau V’s experience brings to the fore the difficulties of being an autistic woman, but also the difficulties of being an autistic mother. Diagnosed with autism in midlife, Joanne Limburg finally felt she could make sense of what marked her as an outsider. In this book Limburg explores women that have been similarly marked ‘outsiders’ through history, and through writing personal letters from she to them, humanises their differences and compassionately explores what made them ‘weird’.

I had a duty to bear witness… to remember, to make sure that your memories and names would never be erased as your living bodies and minds had been.”Letters to My Weird Sisters is a book where the author writes to four women in history who she identifies as her weird sisters. They are women that were outcasted from society and judged for their ‘not normal’ behaviour. I unsettle people. I'm uncanny. Being around me doesn't always feel like being around a fellow human being, and that discomfort rarely brings out the best in people. If you don't register someone as a fellow human being, you are less inclined to treat them like one.”