I wanted to confront a tendency that I’d seen emerging in my creative practice over the last ten years. This exclusion has never sat comfortably with me and this discomfort became the foundation for the novel. I’ve recognised certain traits that match up, but Jenny’s version of autism eludes (or, perhaps, is avoided by) creatives who engage with the condition in one form or another. I have still never seen a cultural representation of autism which in any way accurately reflects Jenny. The impulse to write a novel about her has been with me for a long time. She is three years older than me, the eldest of three siblings, and she is autistic with learning difficulties. The main autistic character is based on Jenny. Even if the statement wasn’t a joke, her response has helped her to at least get a hand on the tiller.Īs part of my PhD in Creative Writing, I am writing a fantastical novel about autism and ghosts. Whenever Jenny misunderstands something, or an instruction threatens the established order, her question “are you just joking?” helps to paper over the crack. Jokes, puns and silliness easily arise in our family unit and have persisted thanks, perhaps, to the presence of Jenny’s autism at our core. She has learned that jokes are gentle disruptions to the order of things, which are usually intended to provoke positive feelings. This is one of my autistic sister’s most common phrases which acts as a kind of verbal buffer to misunderstandings and miscommunication between our different neurotypes. The Fantastic Autistic: Creating Narrative from the “Anti-Narrative” Poetics of Neurodivergence

Authoring Autism by Melanie Yergeau