Description

To the outside world, Emily looks like a typical girl, with a normal family, living an ordinary life. But inside, Emily does not feel typical, and the older she gets, the more she realises that she is different.
As she finally discovers when she is 16, Emily is autistic. Girl Unmasked is the extraordinary story of how she got there – and how she very nearly didn’t.

Still only 21, Emily writes with startling candour about the years leading up to her diagnosis. How books and imagination became her refuge as she sought to escape the increasing anxiety and unbearable stresses of school life; how her OCD almost destroyed her; how a system which did not understand autism let her down; and how she came so close to the edge that she and her family thought she would never survive.

In this simple but powerful memoir, we see how family and friends became her lifeline and how, post-diagnosis, Emily came to understand her authentic self and begin to turn her life around, eventually becoming a mental health nurse with a desire to help others where she herself had once been failed.

Ultimately uplifting, Girl Unmasked is a remarkable insight into what it can be like to be autistic – and shows us that through understanding and embracing difference we can all find ways to thrive.

My Review

This is a memoir by a fairly well-known-online Autistic person. I follow Emily on Twitter, so I recognised her name when the email about this book arrived. Since advocacy is part of my job, and I run a creative writing group for autistic adults, it made sense for me to review this book. I have reviewed a fair number of memoirs by or about Autistic people. They generally have a similar structure, the differences being in the age and gender of the writer and when they were diagnosed, their social class and national origins. Fern Brady is a working class Scot who was diagnosed as an adult, for example, while Chloe Hayden is an Australian young adult diagnosed as a child. ‘Stephen’ in Stephen from the Inside Out, by Susie Stead was a very mentally ill man who lived in various institutions before being released into the community without adequate support. Sarah Kurchak is Canadian and her memoir is hilarious, and Odd Girl Out by Laura James made me cry like a baby.

Emily Katy is a middle class English woman, with lots of social and cultural privilege (which she openly and repeatedly acknowledges), who was diagnosed at 16 by a private organisation (because she is privileged enough to have a financially well-off family and can by-pass the NHS waiting times) and her social media following has given her opportunities with the Autistic Girls Network and the National Autism Society. She’s also a mental health nurse. The memoir covers her life from early school days to starting university. She talks about her struggles with anxiety, depression, self-harm, suicide attempts, time in an inpatient psychiatric ward, and the struggle to find answers and survive school. In each chapter are a few lists of various things about mental illness and being autistic. They are quite helpful for non-autistic readers and possibly-autistic readers alike to get something of an idea of what it’s like to be autistic.

I very much relate to her descriptions of anxiety and depression, the feelings of being left out and bullied at school, the misdiagnosis, and that gut wrenching ‘what happens now’ when all the plans you made come to an end. In her case it was finishing sixth form (she didn’t expect to live that long), in my case, it was finishing university. Her explanations are logical and resonate with me. Lots of her experiences resonate with me. I cried a bit, because I could see where things were heading. I’d been there myself. I also lost myself in books and it sounds like we liked a lot of the same stuff (except there’s no way in Hel I’d read Harry Potter. It’s derivative drivel and the author is a suppurating haemorrhoid of a bigot).

I was never locked up, but I know people who were. I never had OCD, although my need for my environment to be ‘just so’ was misdiagnosed as OCD by a mental health nurse, and I know at least one person with OCD. I know people misdiagnosed with EUPD. Any of us could have written a similar memoir; some of us might in future. Some of the people I know actively want to train staff at inpatient facilities because of the trauma of their experiences. The organisation I work for trains local mental healthcare teams because so may of us have had terrible experiences, and quite frankly, our training course is better than the Oliver McGowan training the NHS has rolled out.

I liked the candid writing, the lists, the honesty and openness, and that she didn’t detail her suicide attempts. I don’t need the details, my hyper empathy is hurting enough, thanks. I enjoyed the footnotes and sources. I liked that she acknowledged how privileged she is and how lucky she was to access diagnosis as such a young age. Yes, 16 years and 10 months is young to get a diagnosis. I was twice her age, although we got diagnosed around the same time. Most people I know were diagnosed anywhere between their late 20s up to their 70s. You’re lucky if you get a diagnosis as a child. CAHMS is over-stretched and under-resourced, parents have to fight to get an assessment for their child and support after diagnosis. Then there’s the lack of transition services for those going from children’s services to adults services, adults services are a bit lacking and non-statutory organisations are struggling for funding every year.

Anyway, you’re most likely to get an early diagnosis if you have a co-occurring learning disability or other condition, like Down’s Syndrome, although only about 18% of Autistic people have a learning disability. You’re more like to get an early diagnosis if you’re a cis white boy, than if you’re a girl, gender variant or transgender, or a person of colour. This is because of outdated stereotypes and people using old research that only focused on little white boys who like trains and maths.

Unmasking is the processes of accepting yourself and your autistic traits, and not hiding those bits of yourself away because of what other people might say. Not everyone can mask and for some people it is dangerous to unmask. This is covered briefly but with telling and hard-hitting examples of murder and unlawful imprisonment. People need to know these things, because they only see media representations of autistic people and believe stereotypes.

I’m glad she mentioned, briefly, the history of the diagnosis and brought up the problems with both Kanner and Asperger. They were both shit heads, who stole from Weiss, Frankl and Sukhareva.

Honestly, I was worried about reading this book, as well as very interested, because we don’t exactly need more autism narratives by middle-class white people, most of the research is done on middle-class, educated white people, but Emily Katy has a large following and her profession as a mental health nurse gives her a legitimacy that, frankly, the rest of us are denied by most people, especially ‘autism professionals’ (see Stenning. A, Narrating the Many Autisms, Routledge, 2024, and Bertilsdottir Rosqvist, H., Botha, M., Hens, K., et al, ‘Cutting our own keys: New possibilities of neurodivergent storying in research’ Autism 2022). She writes well and has a strong grasp of current autism knowledge and understanding of the Autistic community. Her goals for the future – for autistic people – are loving and empowering. I agree with them all.

I am forced to agree with the blurbers of this book that this is a message of hope (Sara Gibbs), delivered with clarity (Pete Wharmby – buy his books!), that will help empower newly unmasking Autistics to accept themselves (Dr Devon Price – buy his books, too). Go on, you know you want to buy a copy.

I’m going to be letting various family members read my copy and then donate it to the Faraway Little Neurodivergent Library at work.